I recently had a colleague who liked to joke about inappropriate topics in executive meetings, often in ways that made the room tense, or at least made me uneasy. The comments were always framed as humor, and my boss seemed to really, really enjoy them, but her humor never quite landed for me. Over time, it became clear that these jokes were not harmless asides. They revealed something real about how she viewed her colleagues, the work, and the institution itself. When she was eventually let go, I was not surprised. The issue for me was not that the humor was edgy, but that it was cringeworthy precisely because it carried an unfiltered truth about her assumptions and values about the community.

People often say things they later retreat from by adding a laugh. “I’m kidding,” they say, or “I’m only half serious.” Yet most of us recognize that those moments are rarely empty. Jokes have a way of carrying truths that feel too risky, too vulnerable, or too socially charged to deliver directly. While no peer-reviewed study assigns an exact percentage to sincerity in humor, decades of research in psychology and communication point to a consistent conclusion: when people joke, they are often saying something they mean, I usually say people are being 70% serious.

Psychologists have long understood humor as a vehicle for meaning rather than mere entertainment. Sigmund Freud’s 1905 work, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, argued that jokes allow people to express thoughts and desires that would otherwise be censored by social norms or internal restraint. Humor, in this sense, is not a distraction from seriousness but a workaround. It permits people to say what they mean without fully owning the consequences of saying it outright.

Modern psychology echoes this idea in less psychoanalytic language. Research in social and communication psychology shows that people routinely use humor to surface frustration, resentment, attraction, or fear while maintaining plausible deniability. Humor creates emotional distance, allowing speakers to test how a message will land without fully committing to it. If the response is negative, they can retreat; if it resonates, the truth has already been spoken. Popular summaries of this research, including work discussed in Psychology Today, highlight how joking functions as a low-risk way to communicate high-risk meanings.

Humor also plays a significant role in coping with stress and adversity, which further explains why jokes often feel serious underneath. Psychological research on coping mechanisms shows that humor helps individuals reframe painful or threatening experiences in ways that make them manageable. When someone jokes about hardship, insecurity, or conflict, the humor is doing emotional labor. It is helping the speaker regulate distress while signaling to others that something meaningful is being processed.

Cognitive theories of humor reinforce this duality. Linguist Victor Raskin’s semantic theory of humor explains that jokes work by forcing listeners to hold two interpretations at once: the literal meaning and the playful reinterpretation. Humor exists precisely because the serious interpretation is still present. Without it, there is no joke to subvert. The listener’s brain toggles between seriousness and play, which is why humor often lands with insight rather than emptiness.

This dynamic becomes especially important in social and political contexts. Research on persuasion shows that humor does not eliminate seriousness; it changes how audiences process information. Studies on humorous messaging demonstrate that people often engage more deeply with ideas presented jokingly, even while underestimating how much those ideas influence them. Humor lowers defenses, but the message still gets through.

Humor also carries real social risk, which undermines the idea that it is trivial. Research published in journals such as the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that humor can shape how others perceive confidence, warmth, and social competence when it lands well. When it fails, however, the consequences can be reputational, signaling poor judgment or lack of social awareness. That risk exists because humor is not neutral. It reveals values, assumptions, timing, and emotional intelligence all at once, often more clearly than direct statements do.

Seen through this lens, my proposed idea that joking is “70 percent serious” makes sense, not as a statistic, but as a heuristic. Humor routinely contains truth, emotion, and intent, even when it wears the mask of play. People joke about what they care about. They joke about what they fear. They joke about what they want others to notice but are not ready to defend openly.

So when someone says, “I was just joking,” it is often worth pausing before taking the escape hatch they have offered. The science suggests that jokes are rarely accidental. They are meaningful communications delivered in a safer key. Humor is not the absence of seriousness. It is seriousness with a laugh track, and often, with just enough distance to make the truth speakable.

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Julian Vasquez Heilig is a nationally recognized policy scholar, public intellectual, and civil rights advocate whose work focuses on education equity, leadership, and accountability. A former college dean and provost, he has testified before state legislatures, the U.S. Congress, the United Nations, and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and his scholarship and commentary have appeared in outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. He writes about leadership, power, and the moments when people say what they really mean—sometimes disguised as humor. He also appreciates a good joke, even a terrible one. Like this one from Good Humor:

Q: What do you call cheese that isn’t yours?
A: Nacho cheese.