My auto pilot smile

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During my social struggles I managed to condition myself to smile to generate some kind of reciprocity in the conversations I had. I had a different sense of humour compared to people in my environments so I had to find a way to cope with it so I wouldn't be seen as weird. But it was very robotic and many people could tell I was faking. (Nowadays I realised)

The problem is, after starting my studies on facial expressions I realised why people said my smile is awkward. A true smile has an unconscious contraction of the muscles around the mouth AND eyes, the orbicular muscles, making the crowsfeet pop out more. As my smile was fake, people could grasp the artificialness.

How can I validate someone's jokes without having to smile / laugh? Is there a way to do it or faking a smile is the best choice?

I wouldn't know of any other way to do so than by faking a smile.
I think it works well enough for me or at least I haven't been told otherwise lately.
However, I used to smile way too much and wear a too broad smile on my face that apparently looked silly when I was in my early and middle teens. People made fun of it because it was too much and too obviously fake. I just smiled to avoid looking unfriendly; apparently it made me look silly.
I'm definitely doing better at faking smiles now. Less is more in my case and I make sure to involve my eyes instead of just pulling the corners of my mouth up - whether or not I do it correctly I can't tell for sure. However, sometimes when I fake an expression it stays on my face for too long.
I guess my facial expression can still be awkward at times. It's probably best to just not care too much but keep trying.

I'll just stick with faking smiles, then.
I also used to smile too much when I was a child and adolescent, but it seemed to embarrass me if done at the wrong times.

Now that I know about the eye movement and fake it more precisely, people just DON'T stop talking. It has its pro's and con's.

Peacefully,
Dante.

There's an earlier thread about this that makes reference to "smile cops." It was one of the threads that encouraged me to join the forum.

I try to sustain real smiles for longer. I also think positive thoughts about myself or the other person, or sometimes goof on the other person in my head. It seems to work. If I do a fake smile, I wipe it off pretty quickly in case it wasn't any good.

I politely smile at people who smile at me or when im genuinely extremely happy but i dont put any thought into my facial expressions outside of that, thats WAY to much to think about,

When it comes to socializing i can only do one thing at a time, which is listening to what a person is saying and generating a response from a pre-made script. I do not even think about eye contact, facial expressions, body language, the persons appearance, whats appropriate or even how the person might be feeling or thinking about me. Im just finding it hard to create a response to a person.