The Relationship of Humor to Intelligence, Creativity, and Intentional and Incidental Learning

Eighty elementary school children completed an intentional and an incidental associative learning task. Each of three groups stratified on intelligence and creativity made either humorous, unusual, or usual associations among common objects. Intentional learning, only, differentiated IQ groups (p<.05); incidental did not. Ss who made unusual associations recalled more information in both incidental and intentional learning than those making usual associations (p<.05) . Humor facilitated retention resulting from incidental learning (p<.05) but not intentional. Intelligence, creativity, and humor were correlated. The independence of creativity and intelligence was verified by a low correlation (r = .29); however, sense of humor correlated highly with both creativity (r = .89) and intelligence (r = .91) .