[originaltext] In today’s personality stakes, nothing is more highly valued

In today’s personality stakes, nothing is more highly valued than the sense of humor. We seek it out in others and are proud to claim it in ourselves, perhaps even more than good looks or intelligence. If someone has a great sense of humor, we reason, it means that they are happy, socially confident and have a healthy perspective on life. This attitude would have surprised the ancient Greeks, who believed humor to be essentially aggressive. And in fact our admiration for the comically gifted is relatively new and not very well-founded, says Rod Martin, a psychologist at the University of Western Ontario. "Being funny isn’t necessarily an indicator of good social skills and well-being," his research has shown, "it may just exactly be a sign of personality flaws." He has found that humor is a double-edged sword. It can forge better relationships and help you cope with life, or it can be corrosive, eating away your self-esteem and irritating others. "It’s a form of communication like speech, and we all use it differently." says Martin. We use bonding humor to enhance our social connections, but we also may employ it as a way of excluding or rejecting an outsider. Though humor is essentially social, how you use it says a lot about your sense of self. Those who use self-defeating humor, making fun of themselves, of the enjoyment of others, tend to maintain that hostility toward themselves even when alone. Similarly, those who are able to view the world with amused tolerance are often equally forgiving of their own shortcomings.
23. How do people today view humor according to the speaker?
24. What did ancient Greeks think of humor?
25. What has psychologist Rod Martin found about humor?