I'd like to buy the world a joke.
On Humor in psychiatry and life
When I was practicing psychiatry in student health at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, human resources sent me this:
“Comments/actions that may be amusing to you could be harmful/hurtful to others. In a workplace environment, err on the side of discretion.”
In short, don’t be funny.
Life is funny, and if you work on a college campus, a lot of what goes on is funny if you are paying attention. For example, who cannot appreciate the irony of a university, like the University of Wisconsin, that profits immensely from alcohol sales to its students and simultaneously makes proclamations about reducing “problem drinking.”
As Mel Brooks explains, "Humor is just another defense against the universe."
Western society in the twenty-first century, has lost its collective sense of humor. Fear of giving offense, unease with showing cracks in one’s own carefully cultivated image, lack of imagination, and pervasive pessimism have all taken their toll. Regardless of the cause, when we solve problems, we will inevitably encounter absurd, frustrating, and hilarious situations. Humor is an essential tool for a mature human being and an effective psychiatrist.
Beyond any cognitive aspects, laughter has a role as societal glue. I had a mentor who would tell me, “If you can make your patient laugh, they’re yours.” He knew, and researchers have verified, that laughter is a powerful source of social cohesion, connecting one’s personal experience with another or the group.
At its core, humor depends on a re-evaluation of one’s assumptions. Here is a hackneyed example:
“I just flew in from New York, and boy are my arms tired.”
The listener had the assumption that the speaker flew in on a jet, but the twist causes reconsideration and the potential for a laugh.
When things are rough, humor tells us we can at least laugh at a problem, giving us a sense of solace and control. Finding humor in adversity or absurdity helps us to reappraise our situation and soften the blow. By temporarily opening ourselves up to the re-evaluations, humor allows us to say, “There’s another way to look at this,” or even, “I could be wrong.” for the folks on campus, including the students, this was a novel idea.
One of the most effective treatments for anxious and depressive disorders is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). At its core, CBT asks someone to consider what they are thinking and explore alternative thoughts or actions that can lead to different feelings. When I recently suggested that an elderly couple go dancing, they smiled, chuckled, and, for a brief instant, tapped into feelings of their youth or wondered what else they could do to add a little spark to their lives. People who are struggling often feel stuck, and humor can help loosen their restraints.
People who are depressed often have cognitive distortions where they see things in unhelpful ways. Distortions include thinking in an all-or-none fashion or catastrophizing. At times, clinicians draw attention to those patterns by illustrating their absurdity. We follow the chain of catastrophic thinking to a silly and implausible outcome. The patient realizes the absurdity, takes a step back, and can try another approach.
In considering an analogy to explain the value of humor, I recall my research in X-ray crystallography. Part of X-ray crystallography involves fitting a computational model of a molecular structure with collected experimental data. Fitting happens through cycles of computationally intensive iterative refinement. Sometimes, the process gets stuck. The model of the molecule reaches a point where it isn’t able to refine further to adequately connect with the data. One technique to overcome this problem is called simulated annealing. This mimics what happens when you heat up a molecule. Simulating the heating allows the positions of the atoms in the model to vibrate and move away from their original locations. Then, the refinement is rerun to see if the new arrangement settles into a better fit to the collected data.
That is what humor does. It adds energy to our mental system loosening our bonds of preconceptions and helps us develop a model of the world that more closely approximates the experimental data of reality. Humor yields a more useful model that fits the world.
One does not have to look far to see disconnects between mental maps and reality in modern America. We need humor now more than ever to pull us together and to help us consider alternative ways of thinking and acting. This is serious, and because it is, it is absolutely, a laughing matter.