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Humor Me: How Laughing More Can Make You Present, Creative, Connected, and Happy
From a comedian and host of hit TED podcast, How to Be a Better Human, a hilarious and enlightening guide to laughing your way into a fuller life
“ this book may cause repeated smiling. It’s a delightful read about how we can bring more levity into our lives.”
—Adam Grant, author of Hidden Potential and Think Again
In his days as an exhausted fifth grade teacher, Chris Duffy taught the funniest person he’s ever eleven-year-old Gary. Gary was the school newspaper’s official food critic, blasting cafeteria pizza for looking like cardboard and opining that the baked beans weren’t “beany” enough. These days, Duffy is a professional comedy writer and the host of a podcast with millions of listeners, but he’s never forgotten the transformative joy of laughing with Gary during a bleak Boston winter. In Humor Me, he shares a road map for how to cultivate and strengthen a sense of humor in a challenging world.
Duffy embarks on a journey that takes him from comedy clubs to emergency rooms to a helicopter full of Navy SEALs and back to his own keyboard to reveal how—and why—a good laugh can bring us closer to the good life. Drawing on personal stories, insights from the social sciences, and the wisdom of comedians, Duffy offers practical strategies, to hone the art of noticing, finding humor in the most unlikely placesWhy you should take social risks (to build connection through humor!)How to apply the comedy secret that laughs come in threes.
Humor Me promises to deepen your friendships, enhance your creativity, and lighten life’s burdens, and is a genuinely funny read along the way.
“ this book may cause repeated smiling. It’s a delightful read about how we can bring more levity into our lives.”
—Adam Grant, author of Hidden Potential and Think Again
In his days as an exhausted fifth grade teacher, Chris Duffy taught the funniest person he’s ever eleven-year-old Gary. Gary was the school newspaper’s official food critic, blasting cafeteria pizza for looking like cardboard and opining that the baked beans weren’t “beany” enough. These days, Duffy is a professional comedy writer and the host of a podcast with millions of listeners, but he’s never forgotten the transformative joy of laughing with Gary during a bleak Boston winter. In Humor Me, he shares a road map for how to cultivate and strengthen a sense of humor in a challenging world.
Duffy embarks on a journey that takes him from comedy clubs to emergency rooms to a helicopter full of Navy SEALs and back to his own keyboard to reveal how—and why—a good laugh can bring us closer to the good life. Drawing on personal stories, insights from the social sciences, and the wisdom of comedians, Duffy offers practical strategies, to hone the art of noticing, finding humor in the most unlikely placesWhy you should take social risks (to build connection through humor!)How to apply the comedy secret that laughs come in threes.
Humor Me promises to deepen your friendships, enhance your creativity, and lighten life’s burdens, and is a genuinely funny read along the way.
261 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 6, 2026
112 people are currently reading
8148 people want to read
About the author
Christopher Duffy
48 books36 followersChristopher Duffy (born 1936) is a British military historian. Duffy read history at Balliol College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1961 with the PhD. Afterwards, he taught military history at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and the college of the British General Staff. He was secretary-general of the British Commission for Military History and vice-president of the History Society of Ireland. From 1996 to 2001, he was research professor at the De Montfort University, Leicester. Today he lives and works as a freelance author.
Duffy's special interest is the military history of the European modern age, in particular the history of the German, Prussian and Austrian armed forces. He is most famous for his writings about the Seven Years' War and especially Frederick the Great, which he called self-ironically "a product of the centuries-old British obsession with that most un-British of creatures". Duffy is fluent in six languages and has published some twenty books about military history topics, whereof several were translated into German.
Duffy's special interest is the military history of the European modern age, in particular the history of the German, Prussian and Austrian armed forces. He is most famous for his writings about the Seven Years' War and especially Frederick the Great, which he called self-ironically "a product of the centuries-old British obsession with that most un-British of creatures". Duffy is fluent in six languages and has published some twenty books about military history topics, whereof several were translated into German.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 52 reviews
January 18, 2026
Chris Duffy has offered an antidote to the anxiety and isolation so many of us are feeling. This book outlines simple and practical strategies for adding more laughter to your life. A fun and insightful read, strongly recommend.
January 6, 2026
Chris Duffy’s "Humor Me: How Laughing More Can Make You Present, Creative, Connected, and Fun" arrives in a moment when laughter has become both ubiquitous and oddly scarce. We live inside a constant churn of jokes – clipped, captioned, algorithm-fed – yet many people report, quietly and without drama, that they feel less at ease with one another than they did before. The social muscles have softened; attention splinters; sincerity is often treated as a kind of aesthetic error. Duffy’s book does not pretend it can solve these conditions. It does something more modest and, in its way, more radical: it argues that humor is not primarily a performance skill but a form of human attention, one that can be practiced, shared, and ethically refined. It is a gentle book with a serious spine, and its seriousness is not the humorless kind.
Duffy is a comedian by trade, yet he writes less like a comic chasing laughs than like a person trying to locate the moral center of levity. The best self-help books are often rebranded philosophy; the best humor books are often disguised ethics. "Humor Me" belongs to that intersection. It has the accessible scaffolding of a practical guide – its three foundational “pillars” are laid out plainly, and the later chapters move into applied territory – but it is also, quietly, an argument about how to live among other people without turning yourself to stone.
The three pillars are straightforward enough to sound obvious until you realize how rarely they are treated as humor’s true ingredients. First: presence. Humor begins, Duffy insists, not with wit but with noticing. Most of life’s comedy is not invented so much as perceived. The world, in its daily absurdity, offers more material than we can absorb; what goes missing is not the supply but our attention. Duffy gives this idea a memorable framing: he describes the heightened awareness people have when encountering a new bathroom – the stranger’s toothpaste, the ominous bath mat, the weirdly aggressive hand soap – compared with the blur of one’s own familiar surroundings. Humor thrives on that “new bathroom” consciousness, that willingness to see the ordinary as newly strange.
Second: laughing at yourself. Duffy is careful here, and the care matters. Self-deprecation can be a doorway to humility or a long-term lease on shame. The line between the two is thin, and he treats it as such. Healthy self-directed humor is not self-hatred in costume; it is a kind of self-acceptance that doesn’t require constant dignity. To laugh at yourself is to admit imperfection without surrendering respect. It is, in the best cases, an expression of emotional flexibility – the ability to loosen the tight grip that embarrassment and fear have on the nervous system.
Third: taking social risks. This is the chapter that feels most addressed to our present, not because it references headlines but because it recognizes an ambient hesitancy in contemporary social life. Duffy’s claim is simple: humor is inherently social, and social connection requires vulnerability. A joke that lands feels effortless only because the risk it required has been successfully disguised. To be funny, in a human setting, is to offer a small piece of yourself without knowing what will come back. That is a muscle worth rebuilding.
So far, so familiar – yet what distinguishes Duffy is his refusal to treat humor as a dominance strategy. Some social-skills books, and even some comedy manuals, carry an unspoken premise: that the point is to win the room. Duffy’s premise is the opposite. The point is to make the room safer. In that sense, his book sits in the neighborhood of "Humor, Seriously," Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas’s research-forward argument that levity improves belonging and leadership. But Duffy is less corporate, less diagrammatic, more emotionally supple. He reads at times like a cousin to Brené Brown – less sermon and more shrug – and at other moments like the better kind of improv teacher, the kind who understands that “yes, and” is not a trick but an ethic.
After the three pillars, the book shifts into what one might call application. Duffy explores the “math” of comedy – not to turn the reader into a joke technician, but to demystify the process and lower the stakes of trying. He leans on familiar theories (surprise, benign violation, pattern recognition) and frames failure as information rather than identity. This may sound small, but it addresses a quiet problem: many people are not afraid of humor, exactly; they are afraid of failing publicly. Duffy’s antidote is a kind of compassionate empiricism: a joke doesn’t land, you adjust, you try again, you learn. The point is not to become a person who always succeeds; it is to become a person who is willing to attempt connection.
There are chapters on magnetism and inside jokes, and in these Duffy’s sensibility is at its most persuasive. The book argues that charisma is less about sparkle than about attention. Magnetic people, in this account, are not those who dominate conversation but those who make others feel seen. Humor, practiced well, becomes less a display of cleverness than a form of hospitality. The inside joke – a phrase that means nothing to outsiders and everything to the people who share it – is treated as a kind of relational archive. It compresses memory into shorthand, turning shared experience into a portable token. In an era of thin ties and constant churn, this emphasis on accumulation, on the slow building of shared language, feels quietly countercultural.
The book’s most affecting passages arrive when Duffy approaches the darker edges of humor – its proximity to pain, its entanglement with grief, its capacity to comfort without denying reality. He dismantles the cliché that “laughter is the best medicine” by insisting on the dignity of actual medicine, actual care, actual grief. Humor is not a cure. But it can be, as he suggests, the second best medicine: a way to reclaim agency in moments when agency is scarce, a way to reduce isolation by making room for shared breath, shared absurdity, shared humanity. The chapter on laughing and crying belongs to that tradition of writing that understands emotional life as complex rather than binary. Laughter and tears are not enemies; they are neighboring expressions of overwhelm. The book’s insistence that humor can coexist with sorrow – without erasing it – is one of its most modern virtues, especially in a culture that oscillates between manic brightness and cynical detachment.
Then comes the ethical turn. Duffy’s chapter on “punching up” is not revolutionary, but it is necessary. We are living through a time when many people feel anxious about humor – not because they want to be cruel, but because the social ground has shifted and the costs of misreading a room can feel high. Duffy’s approach is neither permissive nor punitive. He argues, in essence, that humor is never neutral: it moves in a direction. If it moves toward the vulnerable, it tends to corrode trust; if it moves toward power, hypocrisy, and authority, it can function as a kind of accountability. The distinction is familiar, but he treats it as a practical compass rather than an ideological slogan.
The final chapter deepens this caution by examining humor’s shadows: irony used as emotional armor, jokes deployed to dodge accountability, cleverness mistaken for connection. The book’s title might suggest an easy devotion to levity, but Duffy ends with a warning that is, in its way, sobering: weaponized humor is worse than no humor at all. A person without humor may be rigid; a person who uses humor to belittle, evade, or dominate is something else entirely. It is a sharp ending for a gentle book, and it feels earned.
What, then, holds "Humor Me" back from unambiguous excellence? The answer is not a lack of intelligence or feeling – Duffy has both – but a certain softness of edge. At times the book seems determined not to offend anyone, and this restraint occasionally flattens its more provocative claims. The research is smoothly integrated, yet it sometimes functions as reinforcement rather than discovery. The narrative voice is warm and trustworthy, but it can also feel careful in a way that limits surprise. A book about humor need not be a laugh riot; still, one occasionally wishes for a sharper stylistic risk – a more daring leap, a more unsettling insight, a moment of genuine strangeness that would match the book’s argument about noticing the world anew. The prose is clean, the tone consistently humane, but it rarely tilts into the kind of linguistic or conceptual unpredictability that makes a nonfiction book feel singular rather than exemplary.
And yet, exemplary may be enough. In a time when attention is fragmented, when social confidence has been shaken, when many people feel uncertain about how to be together without either walking on eggshells or turning to cynicism, Duffy’s project feels not merely pleasant but relevant. He is not arguing for more jokes; he is arguing for more aliveness. Humor, in his telling, is a way of returning to the room – to the people in it and to oneself. It is a discipline of noticing, a practice of self-compassion, a willingness to risk small moments of connection. The book’s ambitions are not grandiose, but they are quietly moral. It asks the reader to become less defended.
In the end, "Humor Me" is a book that understands laughter as a form of care. It belongs to a growing shelf of contemporary nonfiction that tries to rebuild the interpersonal fabric without offering false certainty – books that recognize that modern life is not just busy but alienating, not just stressful but socially disorienting. If Aaker and Bagdonas provide a research-forward case for humor’s utility, and if the broader vulnerability literature provides a language for risk and shame, Duffy supplies something rarer: a warm, workable vision of humor as a daily practice, one that can accommodate grief, ethics, and the awkward beauty of trying. For that, it earns its 81 out of 100 – not perfect, but deeply worth keeping close, like a friend who doesn’t always have the best joke, yet always knows when you need to laugh.
Duffy is a comedian by trade, yet he writes less like a comic chasing laughs than like a person trying to locate the moral center of levity. The best self-help books are often rebranded philosophy; the best humor books are often disguised ethics. "Humor Me" belongs to that intersection. It has the accessible scaffolding of a practical guide – its three foundational “pillars” are laid out plainly, and the later chapters move into applied territory – but it is also, quietly, an argument about how to live among other people without turning yourself to stone.
The three pillars are straightforward enough to sound obvious until you realize how rarely they are treated as humor’s true ingredients. First: presence. Humor begins, Duffy insists, not with wit but with noticing. Most of life’s comedy is not invented so much as perceived. The world, in its daily absurdity, offers more material than we can absorb; what goes missing is not the supply but our attention. Duffy gives this idea a memorable framing: he describes the heightened awareness people have when encountering a new bathroom – the stranger’s toothpaste, the ominous bath mat, the weirdly aggressive hand soap – compared with the blur of one’s own familiar surroundings. Humor thrives on that “new bathroom” consciousness, that willingness to see the ordinary as newly strange.
Second: laughing at yourself. Duffy is careful here, and the care matters. Self-deprecation can be a doorway to humility or a long-term lease on shame. The line between the two is thin, and he treats it as such. Healthy self-directed humor is not self-hatred in costume; it is a kind of self-acceptance that doesn’t require constant dignity. To laugh at yourself is to admit imperfection without surrendering respect. It is, in the best cases, an expression of emotional flexibility – the ability to loosen the tight grip that embarrassment and fear have on the nervous system.
Third: taking social risks. This is the chapter that feels most addressed to our present, not because it references headlines but because it recognizes an ambient hesitancy in contemporary social life. Duffy’s claim is simple: humor is inherently social, and social connection requires vulnerability. A joke that lands feels effortless only because the risk it required has been successfully disguised. To be funny, in a human setting, is to offer a small piece of yourself without knowing what will come back. That is a muscle worth rebuilding.
So far, so familiar – yet what distinguishes Duffy is his refusal to treat humor as a dominance strategy. Some social-skills books, and even some comedy manuals, carry an unspoken premise: that the point is to win the room. Duffy’s premise is the opposite. The point is to make the room safer. In that sense, his book sits in the neighborhood of "Humor, Seriously," Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas’s research-forward argument that levity improves belonging and leadership. But Duffy is less corporate, less diagrammatic, more emotionally supple. He reads at times like a cousin to Brené Brown – less sermon and more shrug – and at other moments like the better kind of improv teacher, the kind who understands that “yes, and” is not a trick but an ethic.
After the three pillars, the book shifts into what one might call application. Duffy explores the “math” of comedy – not to turn the reader into a joke technician, but to demystify the process and lower the stakes of trying. He leans on familiar theories (surprise, benign violation, pattern recognition) and frames failure as information rather than identity. This may sound small, but it addresses a quiet problem: many people are not afraid of humor, exactly; they are afraid of failing publicly. Duffy’s antidote is a kind of compassionate empiricism: a joke doesn’t land, you adjust, you try again, you learn. The point is not to become a person who always succeeds; it is to become a person who is willing to attempt connection.
There are chapters on magnetism and inside jokes, and in these Duffy’s sensibility is at its most persuasive. The book argues that charisma is less about sparkle than about attention. Magnetic people, in this account, are not those who dominate conversation but those who make others feel seen. Humor, practiced well, becomes less a display of cleverness than a form of hospitality. The inside joke – a phrase that means nothing to outsiders and everything to the people who share it – is treated as a kind of relational archive. It compresses memory into shorthand, turning shared experience into a portable token. In an era of thin ties and constant churn, this emphasis on accumulation, on the slow building of shared language, feels quietly countercultural.
The book’s most affecting passages arrive when Duffy approaches the darker edges of humor – its proximity to pain, its entanglement with grief, its capacity to comfort without denying reality. He dismantles the cliché that “laughter is the best medicine” by insisting on the dignity of actual medicine, actual care, actual grief. Humor is not a cure. But it can be, as he suggests, the second best medicine: a way to reclaim agency in moments when agency is scarce, a way to reduce isolation by making room for shared breath, shared absurdity, shared humanity. The chapter on laughing and crying belongs to that tradition of writing that understands emotional life as complex rather than binary. Laughter and tears are not enemies; they are neighboring expressions of overwhelm. The book’s insistence that humor can coexist with sorrow – without erasing it – is one of its most modern virtues, especially in a culture that oscillates between manic brightness and cynical detachment.
Then comes the ethical turn. Duffy’s chapter on “punching up” is not revolutionary, but it is necessary. We are living through a time when many people feel anxious about humor – not because they want to be cruel, but because the social ground has shifted and the costs of misreading a room can feel high. Duffy’s approach is neither permissive nor punitive. He argues, in essence, that humor is never neutral: it moves in a direction. If it moves toward the vulnerable, it tends to corrode trust; if it moves toward power, hypocrisy, and authority, it can function as a kind of accountability. The distinction is familiar, but he treats it as a practical compass rather than an ideological slogan.
The final chapter deepens this caution by examining humor’s shadows: irony used as emotional armor, jokes deployed to dodge accountability, cleverness mistaken for connection. The book’s title might suggest an easy devotion to levity, but Duffy ends with a warning that is, in its way, sobering: weaponized humor is worse than no humor at all. A person without humor may be rigid; a person who uses humor to belittle, evade, or dominate is something else entirely. It is a sharp ending for a gentle book, and it feels earned.
What, then, holds "Humor Me" back from unambiguous excellence? The answer is not a lack of intelligence or feeling – Duffy has both – but a certain softness of edge. At times the book seems determined not to offend anyone, and this restraint occasionally flattens its more provocative claims. The research is smoothly integrated, yet it sometimes functions as reinforcement rather than discovery. The narrative voice is warm and trustworthy, but it can also feel careful in a way that limits surprise. A book about humor need not be a laugh riot; still, one occasionally wishes for a sharper stylistic risk – a more daring leap, a more unsettling insight, a moment of genuine strangeness that would match the book’s argument about noticing the world anew. The prose is clean, the tone consistently humane, but it rarely tilts into the kind of linguistic or conceptual unpredictability that makes a nonfiction book feel singular rather than exemplary.
And yet, exemplary may be enough. In a time when attention is fragmented, when social confidence has been shaken, when many people feel uncertain about how to be together without either walking on eggshells or turning to cynicism, Duffy’s project feels not merely pleasant but relevant. He is not arguing for more jokes; he is arguing for more aliveness. Humor, in his telling, is a way of returning to the room – to the people in it and to oneself. It is a discipline of noticing, a practice of self-compassion, a willingness to risk small moments of connection. The book’s ambitions are not grandiose, but they are quietly moral. It asks the reader to become less defended.
In the end, "Humor Me" is a book that understands laughter as a form of care. It belongs to a growing shelf of contemporary nonfiction that tries to rebuild the interpersonal fabric without offering false certainty – books that recognize that modern life is not just busy but alienating, not just stressful but socially disorienting. If Aaker and Bagdonas provide a research-forward case for humor’s utility, and if the broader vulnerability literature provides a language for risk and shame, Duffy supplies something rarer: a warm, workable vision of humor as a daily practice, one that can accommodate grief, ethics, and the awkward beauty of trying. For that, it earns its 81 out of 100 – not perfect, but deeply worth keeping close, like a friend who doesn’t always have the best joke, yet always knows when you need to laugh.
February 16, 2026
I picked this book because I liked the title and the cover. I am so glad I read it and have recommended it to many people I know. As a retired Class Clown and current annoying Library Clown, I appreciate all the research!
January 14, 2026
I love Chris Duffy’s podcast and this book is like treating yourself to an extended version. I listened to it while winding down in the evenings. He will make you laugh while also making you think deeply about a topic — in this case humor itself. I enjoyed it!
January 18, 2026
This guy has done it again. I’ve seen him do stand up and got his newsletter so thought I’d read his book. I’ve always thought there was some misunderstood power to humor and joyful curiosity (which is hard to actually maintain and sounds super cheesy) and I think this guy gives one of the better explanations for it all. To me, this is why some of the funniest people are actually the most insightful - I can’t even count the number of times I laughed out loud listening to John Stewart or Dave Chappelle all those years ago and thought ‘whew they’re onto something’. Chris Duffy is on to something
January 20, 2026
Humor is like a muscle, the more you do it the easier and stronger it becomes. Humor also is a fine line and staying in the moment realizing, people around you, context, and not forcing it. This audio was an interesting listen and how laughing can be a medicine in a bleak, sad, and sometimes hopeless world we live in.
January 29, 2026
I didn’t know what this book was about before I started reading it. It was fun.
January 16, 2026
Encourage everyone to read this book. I both laughed out loud and learned to appreciate the value of humor in our current world. It’s a quick read. Don’t miss it!
February 14, 2026
I throughly enjoyed this book. It is a good blend of research and anecdotes which kept my interest. I wish we all can learn to laugh a little bit more.
January 11, 2026
Message is good, execution wasn’t my favorite.
January 9, 2026
A wonderful insights on how to better connect with people through laughter and joy!
January 10, 2026
OMG this was like listening to my son in law, Sean, for 6 hrs 22 min. Funny, smart and very energetic!😊
January 13, 2026
An absolute delight. Chris Duffy blends humor (surprise!), personal experience, and comprehensive research in a unique and entertaining way. Highly recommend!
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Funny, interesting, and excellent lessons on the power of humor.
January 15, 2026
Full disclosure, I won this book from a Publisher giveaway and received a Bound Gallery copy. When it arrived in the mail, you would have thought I won the lottery!
I have never heard or Chris Duffy nor listened to any podcasts featuring him — but I might give one a try! That being said, this book was a miss for me. It started out great… I loved the story about Gary, his student who wrote the school lunch reviews - and really want to know where Gary is today. Does he write for a newspaper? Is he a comedian? Has laughter made his life better?
Anyways, I made it through the second pillar and then dropped off. I forced myself to read, then skimmed, then skipped a couple chapters and I was at the end.
This book is GREAT for someone who wants to be a comedian but doesn’t know where to start, or someone who doesn’t quite get humor and wants to understand the science behind it. There was a ton of research that went into this and I applaud the author for putting in the work — it just wasn’t a book for me. (And I LOVE SELF HELP BOOKS) but then again, I’m told by strangers, friends and especially my husband (at least 20 times an hour…jk more like 5 — but who is counting) that I’m hilarious. And honestly, it somehow comes naturally to me. If I’ve had made one person smile each day, then I have fulfilled my purpose.
So while I did not learn much that was new to me, I do appreciate the work that went into this book to educate others and truly believe that humor and laughter will help you to be more “present, creative, connected and happy”.
I have never heard or Chris Duffy nor listened to any podcasts featuring him — but I might give one a try! That being said, this book was a miss for me. It started out great… I loved the story about Gary, his student who wrote the school lunch reviews - and really want to know where Gary is today. Does he write for a newspaper? Is he a comedian? Has laughter made his life better?
Anyways, I made it through the second pillar and then dropped off. I forced myself to read, then skimmed, then skipped a couple chapters and I was at the end.
This book is GREAT for someone who wants to be a comedian but doesn’t know where to start, or someone who doesn’t quite get humor and wants to understand the science behind it. There was a ton of research that went into this and I applaud the author for putting in the work — it just wasn’t a book for me. (And I LOVE SELF HELP BOOKS) but then again, I’m told by strangers, friends and especially my husband (at least 20 times an hour…jk more like 5 — but who is counting) that I’m hilarious. And honestly, it somehow comes naturally to me. If I’ve had made one person smile each day, then I have fulfilled my purpose.
So while I did not learn much that was new to me, I do appreciate the work that went into this book to educate others and truly believe that humor and laughter will help you to be more “present, creative, connected and happy”.
January 14, 2026
I won this book through a Goodreads giveaway in exchange for an honest review. Thanks to Doubleday Books for choosing me.
I read and also listened to the audiobook, it was definitely a great few hours. Chris Duffy does an amazing job of reminding his readers that we need to stop taking ourselves so seriously. I have always believed that books find us when we need them. When I made my 2026 list of goals/resolutions one of them was to find ways to live more rather just to survive the moment/day. This book fell into my lap at just the right moment, I will now be implementing some of the things I learned from Chris and his book into my daily routine.
I truly believe anyone who spends some time with this book will gain something from it.
I read and also listened to the audiobook, it was definitely a great few hours. Chris Duffy does an amazing job of reminding his readers that we need to stop taking ourselves so seriously. I have always believed that books find us when we need them. When I made my 2026 list of goals/resolutions one of them was to find ways to live more rather just to survive the moment/day. This book fell into my lap at just the right moment, I will now be implementing some of the things I learned from Chris and his book into my daily routine.
I truly believe anyone who spends some time with this book will gain something from it.
January 9, 2026
Did I discover new ways to infuse humor into my life? No. If I infused any more humor, I would be living an infinite loop of Mary Richards at Chuckles the Clown’s funeral. There are a couple of funny stories that made it worth the read, though. The elementary school student who wrote reviews of the cafeteria food for the school paper was notable. My favorite tale was the tour of the Celestial Seasonings plant-- beware the Mint Room.
If you would genuinely like to include more humor in your life, you will find some good ideas here.
January 19, 2026
I’m glad that Ingrid Fetell Lee chose this as the next book club pick as it wouldn’t have been on my radar otherwise. I liked how he wrote about humor in various contexts such as how and when to laugh at yourself (and when that goes too far), how to use humor for social connection, in a political sense, and even to acknowledge grief and resilience. It was also interesting for me to read this as I started a new job and am thinking a lot about establishing new relationships in the workplace. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.
January 27, 2026
Humor Me is a book about becoming more present in our daily lives so we can truly acknowledge and become more engaged in the silliness that life brings. If you've read The Upright Citizens Brigade Comedy Improvisation Manual or Comic Insights: The Art of Stand-Up Comedy, this book will expand on a few concepts seen in these texts. I'd recommend this book to everyone inside and outside the comedy world because I truly believe we need to be more engaged with the side of ourselves that is lighter and sparks connections with each other.
January 14, 2026
This book was a delight to read. Chris Duffy offers sage and fun advice to people who want to bring more joy and laughter into their lives. From the first chapter to the last he shares how humor transformed his relationships and helped him navigate difficult situations. He has a refreshing perspective on why and how humor is so important for all of us. There were passages where I laughed out loud, but mostly I couldn’t help but smile more after reading this book.
January 25, 2026
"Humor Me" was great! It's really engaging, it offers so many good examples and real-life applications of the topics it covers, and it's brimming with jokes - which means that it's a book about how laughing makes you happier THAT ITSELF MAKES YOU LAUGH! The author's personality shines through, he doesn't shy away from some more substantive topics, and, in keeping with brevity being the soul of wit, it's a quick, breezy read. Strong rec!
February 5, 2026
This title caught my eye because if focuses on the relationship between humor and our mental health and how we socialize. It offers a lot of great insight into humor itself, and a lot of humor is dependent on situations, cultures and contexts. Some of my favorite sections were chapter 7 which discussed laughter's role in healing and medicine and the last chapter which discussed how to avoid bad jokes.
February 16, 2026
Chris Duffy has written this book very well but he didn’t end up making me any funnier… and I’m not that funny to begin with, sadly.
He did, though, give me a lot to think about in terms of finding humor in everyday life - which in itself makes his book worth reading.
PS - he also made me laugh out loud at times, which also got me strange looks from people around me, which sometimes led to unexpected and friendly interactions.
He did, though, give me a lot to think about in terms of finding humor in everyday life - which in itself makes his book worth reading.
PS - he also made me laugh out loud at times, which also got me strange looks from people around me, which sometimes led to unexpected and friendly interactions.
January 18, 2026
Humor, Me was a great read—and an easy one. It’s a solid reminder to look for things every day that make us laugh. Laughter isn’t a distraction from serious moments; it often belongs in them. It’s essential for connection, and yes, there’s actual science to back that up. If you’re looking for something lighthearted, thoughtful, and genuinely funny, this book is worth your time.
February 9, 2026
DNF. Didn’t last long. I didn’t think his student was the comedic genius the author thinks, and he doubles down and won’t stop talking (audiobook) bout how funny the kid is. So, stopped listening cuz if those are the high/most funny points….
Disclosure: didn’t and still don’t know who the author is, and how he got a book deal.
Disclosure: didn’t and still don’t know who the author is, and how he got a book deal.
February 18, 2026
The book was hilarious and genuine - it felt like a warm humorous written version of the podcast “How to Be a Better Human.” Another great example of using footnotes. My favorite parts were the footnotes and acknowledgements. (Perhaps because they are the literary vehicles that invite the reader into inside jokes ;))
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Review of advance copy
If you want to book that will make you laugh, and force you to realize that while you’re laughing a spark went off in your head to learn something new, then this is the book for you. Unintentionally learning life‘s lessons through humour and experiences.
January 12, 2026
This book was a lesson in expectations. Once I grasped it was not a humor book to make me laugh out loud, I discovered it to be a touching and almost academic deep dive into modern humor in the USA. The author comes across as kind and insightful. The best moments are the painful ones.
January 14, 2026
12/31 I want to live like Mo! I won’t say this book is making me funnier, it is explicitly not the point of this book mentioned multiple times throughout. However I do think the appreciation of keeping track of what makes me laugh and making a game of monotonous tasks/drives to seek out the unseen will be good things to take into 2026 that I look forward to.
January 15, 2026
Great book! This was genuinely funny and truly helpful. Chris Duffy is an awesome writer and what he shares in this book is so much fun and also really meaningful. I've already passed the book along to family and friends and I'm recommending it to colleagues. Love!
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