Why is humor a bad thing?

I have had a couple of the More Serious Responders on the Yahoo Answers venue tell me that humor should not be allowed here. There are also those who say that "this site is about serious answers." Those people HAVE NOT read the Community Guidelines to which they frequently refer, which in the very beginning says that "Yahoo Answers is an online community in which participants ask and answer questions on a wide range of topics, from the serious to the delightfully trivial."

"Delightfully" is a word associated with HUMOR. But the More Serious Responders cannot seem to grasp that concept. The best answers to many questions are often NOT the most serious. Sometimes they are the most pithy, the most ironic, the most poetic, the most insouciant, the most poignant, the most contemplative, the most unexpected...and yep, sometimes also the most humorous.

Let the Asker decide what is the best answer. More than once I've seen someone ask serious life-or-death types of questions and award BA to a totally funny answer...and include a comment to the effect that this unanticipated dose of humor was the best thing for them.

Humor is fine, but an answer must attempt to answer the question that was asked. If you can do so humorously, all the better, if it's appropriate to do so.

Humor cannot substitute for a valid answer. You can't give a 'jokey' response in place of an actual answer -- you risk being reported if you do. 'Funny', and particularly SARCASM, does not play particularly well here. In many cases the user who gave the answer 'gets it', but if the question is serious, the asker (and others) may not.

Humor is OK as long as it actually answers the question. Consider an example question and answer:

Question: How can I best deal with missing data when running a regression analysis in SPSS?

Answer: I have a joke: What do you call an alligator wearing a vest?

In this case, the humeruous answer is a "non-answer" because it is completely irrelevant to the question being asked.

If you can use humor with the skill of a Nobel prize winner, it usually does not get reported. Crude humor makes answers.yahoo look like a joke, instead of a source of good answers.

I would say that unless it's in the jokes & riddles section people probably aren't looking for a laugh, they're looking for actual help and because people are looking for serious answers to a problem humorous/smart-*** remarks are generally seen as useless and so they usually don't go over to well....especially if they don't even try to address the question/problem.

Humour is based on pain, and/or humiliation, .

One of the two is always present.

The people who laugh are happy because they were not the target or victim.