Kane and his colleagues noted that we are continuously exploring their social environment to determine the values, attitudes, knowledge, emotional States, motives and intentions of others. Such information is necessary to achieve our goals in interactions with others: establishing closer relationships, achieve desired benefits and rewards or to influence others. Because of the potential threat to the reputation of the unspoken rules of propriety often prevented from asking questions on such topics. There is a risk that our motives will be misconstrued, that we will be offended for intruding or that we or others will in any way embarrassed. Humor can often be a more acceptable and indirect way of obtaining such information. Making a humorous remark about any attitudes, feelings or opinions, we can communicate something about ourselves so, in order to deny this information, if it does not meet with good reception. Besides, watching you react if others laugh or respond in this humorous review, we can determine whether they share a similar view.

information about the attitudes and motives regarding sex, particularly associated with the risk of misunderstanding and failure, and to solve these problems often used humor. Probably why there are so many words with extra sexual value that allows people to use a humorous ambiguity and innuendo in order to safely discuss sexual matters . In the study, according to observations of conversations between clients and staff during night diner in upstate new York, sociologist Alf wall described the use of humor by men and women to Express interest in a possible love connection. If participants were to use in this context, a serious method of communication, they would risk to hurt the other person and to be personally insulted by the refusal. However, using sexual jokes and making humorous comments, sexual innuendo, they could explore the degree of interest of the other person in a way that allowed them to save their reputation, if they are not reciprocated.

This role of humor as a means of self-discovery and social research in romantic relationships has also been illustrated in an early experiment, the social psychologists Jay Davis and Amerigo Farina. Attractive or unattractive a female experimenter asked male College students to assess the aggressive or sexy fun pictures. Evaluation of the experimenter was given either verbally or with the use of scales of the type "pencil-paper". The results showed that the participants-men is most appreciated fun when they verbally gave sexual drawings of an attractive woman. The researchers suggested that such a reaction to the humor allowed the participants into a socially acceptable form to inform the experimenter that they're sexually interested in her.

Besides the sexual humor can be used to self-disclosure and exploration of beliefs and attitudes regarding a wide range of issues such as political and religious point of view and attitude towards different ethnic groups and people of different nationalities, professions or gender. Making racist or sexist comments in a humorous manner, people could examine the extent to which other people make or share this attitude. Humor can also be used to explore the emotional responses of people to situations. For example, in cases of stress or danger (for example, in a situation of hard work or before a battle during the war), when the demonstration of discomfort or fear may be seen as a weakness, you can use "gallows humor" to determine how strong can be a negative emotion . Thus, humor can be a useful tool for social comparison, way of finding information about others to assess their own feelings and performance.