Why does a question as simple as “how are you actually doing” so often get answered with a joke instead of an answer? Not a dodge exactly, more a reflex: a quick line, a laugh, a subject change that everyone in the room quietly agrees to go along with. The question was sincere. The answer, if there was one, arrived wearing a costume. It happens after a diagnosis, after a layoff, after a breakup that clearly still stings: someone asks how he’s actually holding up, and what comes back is a punchline sturdy enough to end the conversation right there.
What “no words for it” actually means
There’s a clinical term for a milder version of this pattern, and it comes from research on how many men were raised to relate to their own inner lives. Ronald Levant, a former president of the American Psychological Association, has spent much of his career studying what he calls normative male alexithymia. “‘Alexithymia’ means no words for emotions,” he explains. “My hypothesis is that socialization guided by traditional masculinity ideology, and in particular the norm of restrictive emotionality, produces a mild form of alexithymia in men, who cannot give a good account of their inner lives.”
That’s a specific, narrower claim than “men don’t have feelings,” and it matters that it’s narrower. The feelings are there. What’s missing, in Levant’s account, is the internal vocabulary for locating and naming them in the moment someone asks. A joke doesn’t require that vocabulary. It only requires timing.
Where the gap starts
Levant traces the pattern back further than most people would guess. “Boys start out life more emotionally expressive than girls as neonates and retain this advantage over the first year of life,” he notes, “but from ages two to six, due to the childhood socialization of emotions, in which boys are made to feel ashamed of themselves for expressing vulnerable and caring emotions, many lose this expressive ability.”
If that’s roughly accurate, the skill in question was never really absent. It was discouraged early enough, and consistently enough, that it stopped getting built out. A toddler who gets a raised eyebrow every time he cries eventually stops reaching for crying as a tool, but the underlying feeling that would have produced the tears doesn’t go anywhere. It just shows up later without a name attached, at exactly the moment someone asks a direct question about it.
This is also where a lot of miscommunication starts on the other side of the conversation. A partner or friend who asks a caring question and gets a joke back can reasonably read that as a lack of trust or a lack of caring. Levant’s framing points somewhere else entirely: the joke often shows up precisely because the feeling underneath it is large and unfamiliar. Humour can be a coping strategy or a conversational habit, but a joke by itself cannot reveal whether someone lacks words, is avoiding a topic, is protecting privacy, or is simply trying to lighten the moment. A review of gender-differentiated socialisation and men’s mental health supports the broader role of norms around emotional expression, while a review of gender and humour treats humour as a context-dependent social strategy rather than a diagnostic signal.
The joke is a substitute vocabulary
This is where the joke earns more credit than it usually gets. Clinical psychologist Steven Sultanoff, who teaches at Pepperdine, studies humor as an active way of processing distress rather than a way of avoiding it. “When you’re experiencing humor, you cannot experience [distressing emotions],” he says. “These emotions dissolve.”
Read plainly, that’s a description of real relief happening in real time, produced on purpose. For someone who was never handed the vocabulary to say “I’m overwhelmed” or “that scared me” out loud, a joke can do something a blank stare can’t: it acknowledges that something happened, gets a laugh from whoever is listening, and moves the moment forward without requiring a sentence that was never practiced. It’s a real tool, even when it’s being used to answer a question it was never quite built to fully answer.
It also helps explain why the habit is so sticky. A joke lands fast, gets an immediate, visible reward in the form of a laugh or a shift in mood around the room, and asks nothing of the audience in return. A sentence like “I’ve been having a hard time since the diagnosis” or “losing that job scared me more than I want to admit” asks for something back: attention, maybe a follow-up question, possibly a silence that has to be sat in rather than filled. One of those options is a great deal easier to reach for under pressure, whatever is actually going on underneath it.
What this isn’t
All this is not a blanket explanation for every man who changes the subject when things get real. Some people are, in fact, avoiding the question on purpose, and a joke can absolutely be used as a wall rather than a bridge. The pattern Levant describes is a tendency shaped by socialization, the kind of thing that can shift with practice and a receptive audience. This also isn’t written by a psychologist, so none of it should be read as a diagnostic checklist for anyone in particular.
What it does offer is a slightly more useful question than “why won’t he just answer me.” The more useful version is closer to: what would make it safer, or easier, to answer that question in something other than a punchline. Sometimes the honest answer is simply letting the joke stand for a beat, then asking a smaller, more specific follow-up instead of the big open one, since a specific question is easier to answer without a script than a vague one is.
Building a wider emotional vocabulary later in life is entirely possible, and it tends to happen the same way any other skill gets built: slowly, with repetition, usually alongside someone patient enough not to flinch at an answer that comes out clumsy the first several times. For anyone who wants structured help with it, a therapist is a far more reliable source of practice than a friend’s patience, however generous that patience might be, and reaching out for that kind of support is a reasonable step rather than a last resort.
