Jargogled Impressions.

We can have a sense of humor and maintain/deploy it at all times, irrespective of the various situations we may find ourselves in. This does not mean we are not serious about the actions we need to take. But it does mean that whatever decisions we take, actions that come out of it, and the results therein, can be taken with humor and with levity.

I am getting around to the fact that the vicissitudes of life can be debilitating, especially and more prominently when you spend a lot of time thinking about life in general. Much as happiness can only be achieved indirectly, so is the ability to lead a life of meaning and purpose. And to do that requires sacrificing our egoistical self at the altar of our life decisions and actions. Which, in turn, is a major step towards obtaining the humor in life I now deem essential.

Humor as an antidote to anger and to stress and to frustration. Maybe there is literature around it that I have not gotten around to reading yet. But it seems like a simple conclusion that humor can be a strategic emotional lever we can use to counter the effects of failures, rejection, doomed expectations, or dissolving goals in life.

Humor does not mean just the ability to laugh at our foibles and our failures. It also means to neutralize anger and the negative emotions by considering the futility of all our actions in the bigger cosmic nature of things. Burkeman calls this the law of cosmic insignificance.

I suppose if we couldn’t laugh at the things that don’t make sense, we couldn’t react to a lot of life.” Bill Waterson

Things that don’t make sense – who defines what these things can and cannot be? It’s very personal and we can make it or keep it personal if we chose to. And if that is so, then we can bucket a lot of things that happen to us as making no sense at all. I guess religion helped do this by ascribing it all to the supreme almighty and then drawing peace and rest doing so. In the modern world, there is no such respite. And so, we must take shelter in the spirit of irrationality and absurdness. Life is absurd and therefore a lot of things do not make sense. And therefore, we must laugh at them by developing our sense of humor that can appreciate the senselessness of it.

According to researchers, there are broadly 4 types of humor:

• Affiliative humor which are designed to strengthen social bonds; this is likely Seinfeldian humor which takes a funny, interesting angle to everyday things.
• Self-enhancing humor which asks us to take a gentler, humorous view of life in general. Zen Buddhists who smile continuously likely inculcate this.
• Aggressive humor which is mostly mocking others are crass humor types that take digs at others, at their eccentricities or their embarrassments or their transgressions. Slapstick comedy falls into this genre perhaps.
• Self-defeating humor is the self-deprecating humor that aims to target self as the underdog.

It seems trite but the first 2 humor are known to derive the most happiness in life while the last 2 tend to make us worse. I have been talking about #2 above, but affiliative humor is likely the most harmless of the lot because it also helps us associate with others.

We seem to be living in a golden age for stand-up comedies even though comic relief has been a recurring motif in arts and in literature since ages. Comics see the world through their comic eyes to derive the most comic pathos of life that illuminate the human condition in its most comical rendition. They do so by becoming a fool that brings the truth to light through their jokes and their improvisations.

‘That, of course, is the great secret of the successful fool – that he is no fool at all.’ – Isaac Asimov

The ‘wise fool’ in literature often surfaces wisdom in scenarios and situations that the elite intellectualism often fails to discern. Call it the curse of elite education when theories and psychological babble muddies the picture that a wise fool is able to break apart through their antics and their ticks.

Can humor be inculcated?

The priming effect says that our brains are wired to see what we have been set up to expect. If we wire it to observe what’s true around us, we can find moments of humor in those silly, but true things. We don’t need to find funny things; we just need to notice what’s true and make light of it. In a sense, it is not a skill that only comedians can wield, it’s a trait that we can exhibit.

Humor is a choice. We can choose to live on the verge of laughter or smile. Much like that man who is a toiler cleaner in Perfect Days going about his daily chores observing the beauty of the sun, or the silliness of the drunk, or the snootiness of the elite.

Back in college, there used to be a term for this state of being called ‘backchodi’ where friends bantered around pulling each other’s legs, making fun of the world we saw around us, and rolling on the floor laughing out loud.

There’s this viral video on YouTube, where a man watching a video in a train starts laughing uncontrollably and in turn spreads the joy of laughter all around.

Laughter is an evolutionary mechanism we have honed for thousands of years to respond to stress situations and to life’s inanities. Maintaining and inculcating and calling and improving our sense of humor isn’t really a choice between being serious and being silly. It feels to me that as we mature, we in fact mistake it to be an either/or and leave our antenna for humor at bay while we surf the serious, important waves of life. Humors’ the wetsuit offering warmth and saving us from getting wet with the vestiges of our struggles.