Here I’ll share a summary of what I learned teaching therapeutic humor courses in the prisons of Greater Buenos Aires, and ask for help with my next project: stimulating probabilistic rationality in these groups. Would they become more ethical, or just gain better tools to evolve as bandits, and maybe even become politicians.

Definition of humor

I was in prison applying my thesis (or maybe it’s closer to a hypothesis) that humor functions as a cognitive reward for rapid perspective-shifting
 Who has a better chance of survival: a group of men rewarded for understanding, or one that isn’t?
 So basically the only way I managed to define humor is: the pleasure of gaining perspectives quickly. The faster I understand, the higher my chance of survival and pleasure. Or am I just talking nonsense?

Therapeutic humor in prison

So, where did I apply this? At the largest universities in Latin America? No, prison.
 The idea was to stimulate perspective-gaining through humor, so we had a course where I invited them to practice applied humor in different scenarios, from the most common to the most specific and difficult:

1. In casual conversations among themselves, highlighting when something funny came up and asking why it was funny.
   
    
2. In improvisations, theater-style, again noticing when something funny emerged.
   
    
3. In jokes they told, following the structure.
   
    
4. In more staged theatrical exercises, same principle.
   
    
5. In stand-up, presenting something real from their own lives and inviting funny perspectives.
   
    
6. The final challenge: finding perspectives on their hardest moments, stimulating them to laugh at their problems and see them as less heavy.
   
    

Pretty crazy that I, as a comedian, had never exposed my own hardest moment, yet I asked them to do it.
 And they told me things like:

“Well teacher, when I was 8 my mom died, my dad left me on the street, I was abused in several ways… until I ended up here. So how do I make a joke about that?”

“Hehe… you got me, champ.”

Of course, my point wasn’t to joke about their lives, but to help them see their past in a lighter way, giving them a better chance to handle it and focus on future goals.

At the end of a course of weekly 3-hour classes, their “final project” was to tell me:

1. An example of something in their life that was funny (as a reference).
   
    
2. Their hardest moment.
   
    
3. Their most glorious or happiest moment.
   
    
4. A new way of seeing their hardest moment, some detail beyond the pain.
   
    

I can’t expose their names, but here are some anonymized examples [link]. Truth is, they helped me with some of my own biases.

Results and lessons learned.

By the end I was sad to finish the course. I built incredible connections I never expected. I mean, I was prepared for risk, but not for the amount of affection I’d feel. [link to my emotional report at the end]. My mistakes, my biases.

Sure, they could have been deceiving me the whole time, though they had no advantage to gain: I couldn’t help with their sentence or defense, and I couldn’t expose anything specific about the course. The only promise I made was that their life could be at least 1% happier if they attended.

Of course, genetics suggest my chances of improving their lives were low, so I didn’t expect much. But in the final interviews, their difficult moments and pleasures touched me. They weren’t that different from me: their deepest pain and joy were social, losing friends and family. I thought that, as criminals, their worst moment would be being caught. But before being criminals, they had much more humanity than I had imagined.

Of course, there were some exceptions, maybe 4 out of 100, who said their worst moment was being caught, and even told me they could use humor to trick people while stealing when released.

So I kept thinking how I could help them more, not only emotionally with humor, but by questioning deeper human problems, social, intellectual, and physical factors that generate motivation and happiness. How could they have a better chance at being happy?

Conclusions

Humor gave us a first tool: every joke required a perspective shift, a small Bayesian update disguised as laughter. But I realized humor was not enough. It helped lighten their past, but it didn’t always provide a framework for their future choices.

If laughter rewards perspective-shifting, rationality should reward model-building. Humor showed them how to see their story differently for a moment; probabilistic reasoning could help them see decisions differently in a sustainable way. Humor teaches “there is always another angle,” but probability teaches “some angles are more likely to bring better outcomes.”

That is why I am now exploring how to complement therapeutic humor with methods from information theory and probabilistic thinking, so the same cognitive flexibility that laughter sparks can become a structured tool for life decisions.