the things we do, say, think and repress are seeds of healing as much as anything else
In the brilliant comedy Modern Family, the talented actress Julie Bowen plays the eternally anxious and highly-driven woman, mother and sometime CEO, Claire Dunphy. As a memorable scene in the episode ‘The Last Walt’ sees her trying not to laugh, she informs people about the death of an elderly next-door neighbour. Soon enough, the horrified mailman and home-help are swiftly recoiling from a devilish grin as her appalled, yet unsurprised son confirms the shame.
Going one way and then another is just one of the bases of comedy in this humorous guise of sociopathy, and we’re slowly drawn in through the pathos of life before facing the switch, to release an angst. Meanwhile, that sound of our laughter is ironic relief in not being swallowed by the wealth of our sorrows and maybe that’s why it’s okay to create humour, around mental health. It lets us process what may otherwise be a weight and a way, to the bottom of a pool.
‘Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.’
Peter Ustinov
Our media and the public, for example, are quick to latch on to whatever ails the mind, and OCD is a reflection of how it can work. So, in the television comedy, Friends, Monica Geller’s engaging fixation with perfection rippled through hearts as she stressed about having fun, in exactly 15-minutes. As she relished a cleaning party and numbered coffee mugs, people wanted to send her their love but had she been fighting the condition’s difficult side and economic chaos: the laughter would have tapered into something else. Well, these old tropes often align mental health with images of ‘the’ psycho, too, which Phoebe mimics twice in one funny episode.
It’s a double-edged sword and a coin with two sides and yes, a life full of pain but with elements of fun. So, balancing a need to tread carefully with the mind juxtaposes the essence of keeping things light, which the original comedy of Frasier did with aplomb. Ruby Wax, too, who has long been dealing with her own mental health has found comedy in her suffering, which she shares with us all. So, it’s in the small print where our truth emerges, to lay out a path towards gradual healing.
It’s true and the ground-breaking comedy, Seinfeld, really made our small things matter. As it reflected the idiosyncrasies of day-to-day living, it shone a light on so-called ‘first-world’ problems and our obsessions alongside the universals, making us all human. From the fine details of somebody’s name to sexual negotiations, the characters remind us of who we are as we brace in survival each day. In fact, laughing at ourselves is the best way through and when we get to the other side of what may be nothingness, the echoes of laughter may carry on, too.
‘According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two! Now, this means to the average person, if you have to go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.’
Jerry Seinfeld, ‘Sein Language’, 2008
To illustrate, in the 1980s, a television programme hit British homes with the force of a falling elephant. As people talked about it in offices, pubs and at supermarket checkouts, children relayed new and unexpected levels of knowledge about British politics and culture, in general. Suddenly, parents and offspring were bonding over tears of joy while colleagues you’d never spoken to, shared bits of comedy as you washed your hands in the toilets. Without a doubt, if you were anywhere but sitting in front of a T.V set at 10pm on a Sunday evening, you risked being out of the loop for the entire week.
Whether it was a brilliantly satirised Margaret Thatcher scolding a gloriously caricatured Cabinet or a wonderfully lampooned Royal family being made to look transparently human: Spitting Image broke the mould of what it meant to laugh at yourself which in turn, raised an interesting question. Is self-mockery a measure of self-esteem in being able to fundamentally reject yourself, for just a moment? A personal dismissal that’s existential in nature where feelings of social rejection have been found, to mirror physical pain.
In philosophical terms, laughter has echoed through the ages as one sage after another had more or less to say about it. Plato’s approach to humour, for instance, was strictly serious where he rejected humanised portraits of the gods in their embrace of the laughter found, in Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey. On the other hand, Nietzshe saw something else in our desire to giggle, as John Lippett: a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame Australia, saw. In a 1996 paper called ‘Existential Laughter’, he wrote:
‘It is the redemptive potential of laughter as an attitude towards ourselves and our world that leads Nietzsche to condemn those who forbid us to laugh at ourselves, them, and human existence.’
Well, chortling, cackling or chuckling at ourselves is surely one of the healthier things in this world but in returning to rejection and a paper called ‘Laughter’ by the contemporary philosopher, Roger Scruton, he notes: ‘If people dislike being laughed at, it is surely because laughter devalues its object in the subject’s eyes’. This is often true, of course, and it’s based on one the theories of humour that turns on an idea of superiority, dating back to Plato. So, alongside ‘The Relief Theory’ and ‘The Incongruity Theory’ – the superiority model has helped to place mirth in a particular context, allowing us to understand and adjust an eternal tension in the act of living.
Again, it relies entirely on your relationship with rejection, meaning if the jeers are coming from another: a response may go either way. So, in a sense, laughing at ourselves is part of the superiority format, too, because in doing so we’ll mock some aspect of who we are after behaving in a way that’s inferior, to our own standards. It’s all to play for and so, on the 40th anniversary of Spitting Images’ arrival to mock the hell out of our public eye, you could try a little jig as you clap: but if you trip remember to style it out as you laugh at yourself, quite hard.
The cost-benefit ratio of laughter to our health is undeniable, so why not pack as much of it in as you can?
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Images:
Laughing Couple, by Sollie Jordan, Pixabay – Main Image
Happy Friends, by Stocksnap, Pixabay
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