what does humour teach us about life?
my Grandad was cremated and buried to the song “burning ring of fire” (I went down down down in a burning ring of fire etc..) which, depending on your culture, is either quite shocking or hilarious.
humour, as we all know, is a coping mechanism, but it’s also a universal archetype appearing in myths and folktales around the world and throughout time. It clearly has something to teach us.
humour exposes illusion; it’s the cosmic black-hole between love + despair; it holds duality in the only way we know how; it stands for unpredictability; it dissipates dogma, and it helps us (if desperately) to create balance.
humour is an eternal, universal truth. Though, we don’t always agree on what’s funny, we do agree things can be funny. Biologically, it doesn’t make immediate sense? What’s the point in laughing at arbitrary or slapstick events until we ache and hurt and lose control?
the clue to its evolutionary purpose is hidden in the even odder fact that humour is inseparable from pain.
The Trickster
the trickster archetype represents humour, but it’s also often the protagonist or harbinger of death, deceit and delusion in mythologies and cosmologies. It’s the epitome of the inescapable duality of life.
Ancient Greek : Pan, the mischievous God of the wilderness, depicted as a shapeshifting faun, jolly in the tricks he pulled.
Norse : Loki, a cunning, shapeshifting trickster
Nigerian : Eshu, a prank-playing messenger between the Gods and humans.
Brazilian : Saci, a folklore boy riding hurricanes, and playing tricks in the night and promising you anything you can wish for ,should you catch him.
Native American : Coyote, a dynamic figure appearing in shifting forms, for different reasons in many native american myths. Common themes of both benevolence and malevolence to humans - destroyer and creator, always reverred.
Hopi : Pueblo clowns are real people who take on the identity of a clown through body paint and masks that give them anonymity. Pueblo clowns are a great example of general ‘clown society’ found across cultures. Anthropologists believe ‘clowns’ in any society function for their ability to comment on ‘what is wrong with the ordinary’ and ‘how to do the ordinary, wrong’. In this way, clowns are a universal function of order. They can also serve to disperse ego.
the trickster archetypes go beyond mere humour; trickster stories are often (darkly) humorous stories designed to make us laugh, but they are also inextricable from the art of tragedy; designed to make us hurt. The trickster isn’t funny by default, rather it represents intellect, secrecy and breaking boundaries. But the trickster and comedy share these elements.
most of these cultural trickster stories feature theft, illusion, trickery, deceit, and the pain of being fooled and being the fool. the stories often remind us that life is absolutely not what we think it is, and that there’s nothing we can do about it.
is this the purpose of humour? existential angst? not entirely, there is a much more obvious fact, but illusion is certainly at the core.
the nature of the Trickster archetype is duality; the wise-fool, the depressed comedian, the beloved shapeshifter, all the culture in questions personification of illusion.
how else do we make sense of the times we were wrong about something we so thought we were right about? Or the times we saw a full picture from a new angle and realised we had only ever seen half? All of the times we have realised we have less control over life than we ever thought? tricksters, clowns, comedians help us make sense of life’s inevitable illusion. They help us to organise chaos.
the trickster archetype often wears a mask -like the court jester- for this exact reason; humour is unpredictable. Unpredictability is anonymous like the wind. (Depending on the situation, the mask may also allow the joker to comment objectively on taboo subjects without facing repercussions. Yes, of course people know his true identity, but under the mask an actor seems to slip into a not-society, a lawless, free land.)
now, why is this funny? why are the dark, uncontrollable, unknowable forces of life .. humourous?
one, most commonly accepted theory posits that humour is a release of tension. Viscerally, it makes sense; the belly laughs, shaking muscles, scrunched up face, repeated expulsion of air, of course it’s a release of tension.
where does the tension come from?
well, this theory has evolved over the centuries according to our understanding of the human condition…
in 1709, Lord Shaftesbury explained his ‘relief theory’ - that laughter is a pressure release, from pent-up ‘animal spirits’ in the nervous system.
by 1911 the biology had changed, but the idea was the same. Spencer decreed that laughter was releasing nervous energy. Like “a sigh of relief”.
then, Freud continued this train of thought by referring to laughter as an expression of, no longer animal spirits, but repressed emotions - emotions we daren’t express in any other way, such as the the belief against a certain taboo.
go back a century again to the 18th century and we see that there was another idea of humour, that it was an expression of ‘incongruity’ - i.e. it’s a release of something that’s jarred our minds, something unexpected - which isn’t far from the strategies professional comedians use to make jokes today. Any comedian will tell you that a good joke comes from the unexpected, which is why dark humour can be so funny and yet so unacceptable. It takes a free-thinker to embrace this kind of boundary-tredding humour.
Immanuel kant proposed that humour was satisfactory. it provided a cathartic gap between what was supposed to happen and what did, resemblant of the often disappointing and somewhat anti-climatic experience of life itself.
today, we have built up the idea that humour is to wit as sleep is to life - a relief, a rest, and, a break between to knowns.
all in all, though the theories have morphed, all of the point to the basic underlying truth : humour helps us to cope with the tension between polarity.
Søren Kierkegaard said “Humor is the last stage of existential awareness before faith”. He meAnt that the person with a religious view of life is likely to cultivate humor. He even says that Christianity is the most humorous view of life in world history”.
he’s not saying that religion is joke, rather he’s commenting on humour being a form of faith, a form of knowing life, a deep, philosophical awareness.
that’s interesting, though not objective, it speaks to this idea of humour being a medium to explore ultimate truth.
Ted Cohen 1999 - .” Engaging in humor can foster a tolerance for ambiguity and diversity, and promote creative problem-solving.” Ironically, as well as humour being a religious experience, humour transcends dogma. In-fact, in the case of satire, it actively tears it down. Ever-true to its illusory, unpredictable nature, humour both comments on truth, and helps us to transcend binary thinking.
(some) of the Ancient Greeks understood this well, they ritualised comedy inside of the art of tragedy.
Aristotle said the ‘The tragic and the comic are the same, in so far as both are based on contradiction; but the tragic is the suffering contradiction, the comical, the painless contradiction…”
not all Ancient Greeks shared the same sentiment, however. Plato (and plato-era philosophers) considered laughing a possessive, negatively passionate force, that reflected loss of self-control.
the stoics spoke poorly of humour (including descartes) - they felt you could never have humour that wasn’t at the expense of others or another life. Humour was a misery to them. The stoics weren’t necessarily the people modern culture has painted them out to be.
if you allow yourself to follow that depressing vein, there’s something saving in the idea that humour isn’t good for us, that it somehow weakens our control over ourselves, brings us too close to destroying structure and order. There are some cultures that allow expression of humour more so than others. The japanese, for example, are stereotyped for their puckered seriousness (of course, stereotypes never represent complete truth).
in one study, there were four times as many occurrences of humour in random english dialogue as there were in japanese. In the English dialogue, 30% of these occurrences happened in formal conversation (like, with your colleagues or boss). In Japanese, 0% were formal, humour was entirely reserved for casual, close conversation. This might be to do with collectivist ideals; reservation of the individual, and slight taboo around expressing risque emotion. Word-play is much safer and more relatable.
the type of humour was different too, with the Japanese humour leaning into an art-form with plays of words, double entendres, and homonyms. This might be the affinity of eastern animist cultures to believing that words have a sort of spirit.
American’s on the other hand, are not embarrassed by emotion and their humour was found to majoritively open, directly laughing at themselves or others. The jokes carried a more individualistic focus.
English tended to be rhetoric, wit, and innuendo.
Canadian humour showed a hybrid of English and American style, expressed as typically satirical with comments on superiority and social structure.
Europeans tended toward taboo and slightly existential jokes, possibly reminiscient of the enlightenment and renaissance era where dark, existential philosophy merged with street humour.
interestingly, Chinese culture seemed split : people tended to devalue humour if they followed confucian philosophy and view it as harmonic if they followed taoism.
Humour is a universal truth, with a million tiny disagreements. The trickster archetype does well to express this illusory nature of humour - straddling good and evil and every other opposition in-between.
My View
personally, i think humour is wise. I think laughter really is the best medicine, and that we should all venture to be a little bit darker with our jokes, precisely because darkness is so serious and what else are we to do with that?
Just like my Grandpa’s funeral song choice, I think that deeply tragic moments of our lives can be understood and integrated better when we are able to take a meta, unattached view of them through humour. You’re not laughing at the awfulness, or laughing despite the awfulness (although sometimes that helps), rather, you’re laughing because of the awfulness; because it hurts and it’s begging to be felt, because it means something you can’t quite understand, because a smile transcends seriousness everytime, and because it’s quite unbelievable that we’re here experiencing any of this chaos anyway.
i think humour is the highest form of understanding life (higher, in my view, than religion), and the ability to make humour over something means that we’ve attained an important enough distance from it to see the nuances and biases for what they are. If we can’t joke about it a little, we’re dangerously close to believing it as utter truth.
i think that’s why people get haughty; why they don’t like to ‘make jokes about certain, sensitive matters’, because they’re sensitive to it falling apart -they need it to be seriously true.
and, i think we’d all do quite well to draw closer to the trickster archetype (though, never will we understand him), to learn about his shapes through mythology and tarot and other social commentary.
I GREW UP IN A FAMILY THAT PLACES LAUGHTER AND FUN ABOVE MOST ELSE; MY CHILDHOOD WAS Chaotic, but i look back on it with only love because it was defined by carrots in my dad’s nose, hitching a tire to the back of a landrover to make a fair ride, and 2 sisters with whoopie cushions and an endless chain of practical jokes.
"Through humor, you can soften some of the worst blows that life delivers. And once you find laughter, no matter how painful your situation might be, you can survive it." –Bill Cosby
