Why do I make fun of myself in front of others?
You show up late and say you're hopeless with time. Before passing around a photo, you laugh at your own face. When someone praises your work, you call it luck. People laugh, and the moment feels light.
Later it looks different. You wonder why you were the one who brought those flaws up.
A maxim about small faults
François de La Rochefoucauld wrote short, sharp observations about how people behave in company. One of them is about exactly this habit:
"We own to small faults to persuade others that we have not great ones."
— La Rochefoucauld, Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims, maxim 327, tr. J. W. Willis Bund and J. Hain Friswell
The lateness or the clumsiness is usually real. What interests La Rochefoucauld is where the admission points. When you confess, you decide what the room looks at.
What the joke covers
Self-mockery reveals a flaw, and it also picks which flaw gets seen. Once people have laughed at your lateness, they stop looking. The joke answers a question nobody has asked yet.
You put something minor in the foreground. Something else stays behind it, maybe hidden even from you.
Pretending to understand when you're lost works in a similar way, and it has its own page. This one is about the laugh you start yourself.
What the maxim leaves
La Rochefoucauld never says what the great faults are. He leaves that to the reader. Which one is your joke covering?
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This page is about a school of psychotherapy. It is not medical advice and not emergency help. If you are in danger right now, contact your local emergency number, or find a helpline in your country at findahelpline.com.