Taking Laughter Seriously
Nick Roux
Humanities Department Co-Chair
If you spent any time with Jason in the weeks before his leave of absence, you probably heard him make light of his situation. In a few different communications he wrote he was “looking forward to finding humor and good stories in this.” This impulse is one we all know well: laughing at something serious so it can’t master us.
In this way joke-making and humor are largely about freedom. Freedom from ego (self-deprecation), freedom from others (teasing and mocking), freedom from power (satire), even freedom from mortality (gallows humor). I wrote about freedom as it relates to academic and artistic study on The Academy’s blog a while back for our series on “The Academy Method.” There I argued why fine arts and liberal arts are both valuable in and of themselves and how they carry equal weight in our co-curricular model.
It seems to me, given the seriousness of the past few years, humor should take an informal place in this model, too. Not as a way to shrink from difficulty, but as a way to confront it.
In my Literature and the Comedic Form course we read John Morreall’s Taking Laughter Seriously - a book that outlines the primary theories of laughter and then considers the more serious implications of humor. It’s in these later chapters where Morreall provides insight on how we might use humor to confront that which seeks to master us.
He argues joking always requires us to connect at least two incongruous elements (think: “a ______ and a ______ walk into a ______”) so it helps us develop a flexibility of mind and see things in multiple ways at once. This, Morreall says, gives us a “philosopher’s attitude” that provides “critical distance” between us and the difficulties of the world. He goes on to say this about distance: “Rather than feeling governed by the situation and obliged to look at it in only one way, we feel playful toward it and thus ourselves in control.”
Obviously we should not use humor to “laugh off” or overly distance ourselves from pressing matters. By no means. Morreall himself cautions us about humor’s “moral limitations.” We should, though, appreciate what the flexibility of mind implicit in a humorous attitude may provide, as some recent work in psychology suggests a flexible mindset might be key to building resilience (see the work of researchers George Bonanno, Susanne Schwager, and Klaus Rothermund).
These can feel like dark days. I mean that figuratively (see: the past couple of years and recent news), and also literally (winter in the midwest is so dark). So as Daylight Saving Time approaches, and we are mercifully granted additional sunlight, I hope we can find ways to make light of what tries to control us. Yes, it’s coincidental that we use “light” to describe both the levity humor can bring and to describe an illuminated understanding, but there is something poetic about this homonymy. Good humor makes us feel light and can light the way to feeling a bit freer.
Let’s all hope Jason is finding the levity he needs right now. If you need a dose for yourself, I encourage you to watch this sketch - it’s one I use in class to demonstrate various theories of laughter and it just so happens to make light of brain surgery!