HUMOR PALLIATIVE TO DEPRESSION!

HUMOR PALLIATIVE TO DEPRESSION!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 19, 2009

“There’s man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet.”

Irish playwright Samuel Beckett (1906 – 1989)

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REFERENCE:

This is a piece taken from the last chapter of CONFIDENT THINKING, which is titled, “Palliatives In An Anxious Age.”

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It would seem there is a emptiness to today's humor. It is obsessed with repetitive sexual innuendo, deprecating sarcasm and veiled schadenfreude, that is, to love a joke that pats us on the back and kicks the other guy down the stairs.

Often, professional comedians, who see themselves as carrying the mantle of humor, resort to self-deprecation to make connection. Rodney Dangerfield comes to mind. There are television programs in which viewers send in videos of unintended pratfalls, which show them in the most embarrassing light. Again, this is not humor. It is rather a monstrous conceit.

Humor lies under the umbrella of reason requiring the direction of subtle judgment as an expression of boundless freedom. Nineteenth century clergyman Henry Giles (1809 – 1882) has it about right:

“Wit may be a thing of pure imagination, but humor involves sentiment and character. Humor is of a genial quality; it dwells in the same character with pathos, and is always mingled with sensibility.”

We are a cognitive society proud of our rationality but too often reveal our toxic side in our humor. We forget that humor is the test of our significance, and our significance of humor. It issues not in baldy laughter but in still smiles, and rises from deep within us in shared understanding of our common vulnerability.

Humor gives us a sense of proportion. It restores balance during the most trying of times and can provide an important coping mechanism with infirmities, ill health, and other evils of life that catch us when we are least prepared for them. Humor laughs with people, not at them. A smile makes life more bearable, a hearty laugh adds a certain fragrance to the joy. English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray (1811 – 1863) saw humor as our best article of dress in public.

It should come as no surprise that true humor springs from the heart not the head. It is not contempt for one’s situation or one’s enemies, but the essence of love. There is certainly no defense against adversity save the humor of putting life into perspective. We cannot all have large bank accounts, live in the best of neighborhoods, or dress in designer clothes, but we can be the best society has to offer with a sense of humor.

We live in a world of perpetual posturing, a world of constant conflict and blatant contradiction. Affectation has become a norm. Nothing is what it seems, and no one is who he pretends to be. We are constantly reminded of this as we see the movers and shakers of society fall from grace.

Life has been reduced to caricature. We are all exaggerated forms of this disguise. There is the social coercion to be something different than what we are. So, inexplicably, we wax highly dignified for the attention. Humor penetrates this façade and restores a certain authenticity. Spanish philosopher George Santayana (1863 – 1952) writes:

“A world of masks is superimposed on reality, and passes in every sphere of human interest for the reality itself. Humor is the perception of this illusion, whilst the convention continues to be maintained, as if we had not observed its absurdity.”

With change constantly threatening to overwhelm us, we resort to all manner of checks and balances to give the impression we are in control when clearly we are not. This makes us stick figures on stage of a humorless production, and we would be well to realize it. The more we attempt to cover up the absurdity of our existence the more we fall prey to reinforcing it. The conventional world has been reduced to masks superimposed on reality. It is humor that penetrates this absurdity to provide us with a perception of the illusion.

Irish playwright Samuel Beckett (1906 – 1989) filled our emptiness with the comedy of the absurd. In “Waiting for Godot” (1956), Estragon and Vladimir, two music-hall-clown-like protagonists, claim there is “Nothing to be done” to change their plight. They haven’t abandon hope, however, as they wait for the always-deferred arrival of the mysterious Godot.

These two characters have an unfailing commitment to actionless action, but we cannot help but recognize how we share the same absurdity. We are constantly looking past the present to some nebulous future as a panacea. Some of us yearn for a new job, a perfect mate, a winning lottery ticket, or a savior in a political leader to turn our crumbling world around.

Meanwhile, we remain passive, reactive and miserable waiting for Godot, the embodiment of Hope to rescue us. Beckett’s point, and this is the healthiness of his humor, is to remind us all that we are trapped in the pathos and pointlessness of the waiting game as much as Vladimir and Estragon.

Alas, there is not much authentic humor; there is not much uninhibited joy; there is not much radiant patience; there is not much spirited camaraderie; there is not much mutual understanding; there is not much uncompetitive collegiality; there is not much level-headed reasoning; there is not much original scholarship; there is not much daring creativity; and there is little evidence of naked enthusiasm for the “god within,” which is humor’s complement.

A sense of humor entertains the sublime and ridiculous as they dance merrily together while being equally fathomed without stepping on each other’s toes or losing perspective. It is the acceptance of contradiction that allows one to function efficiently. The sublime and the ridiculous are the extreme coordinates of the rational that gives measure to humor to see things as they are, not as they are supposed to be.

There is no point in purging our soul of our biases. They are as much a part of our chemistry as every other aspect. Biases constitute our fragile filtering system of early conditioning, and then are refined by our culture. Acknowledged and accepted with humor, they are no longer impossible barriers to seeing the world as it is. Our biases remind us that a flea accidentally landing on an elephant would view the whole animal in that narrow perspective. We are not too far removed from fleas in that respect.

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