On Humor, Tragedy and Resilience

A few weeks ago, I was warned by a friend that he does not appreciate receiving jokes about the coronavirus pandemic. Up to that point, I had forwarded a few videos and memes reflecting a variety of perspectives on the crisis to a small group of friends.

My friend's reaction to unwelcome jokes made me think about what might constitute appropriate humor while thousands of people are dying and suffering.

• To my friend's point: on my first trip to Venice in 1985, I took a picture of one of the water marks by the Grand Canal showing the "acqua alta," the catastrophic flood levels over the years, including the worst one in 1966, which reached 6 ft and 4 inches. Other tourists were also taking the same picture, some of them were laughing and comparing their height to the water mark, which felt out of place to me.
• When I returned to Argentina, I showed the photo to a friend who’s a psychiatrist and mentioned the laughter incident. His comment was: "I saw the same situation in Venice, but an old Italian man confronted the tourists and asked: 'What about the dead?'" The markers are not just statistics, they are a memory of pain. So the question is valid: What am I laughing about in the middle of a pandemic?

Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gassett said: "I am I plus my circumstances." My circumstances are other people and situations around me. I'm mindful of being in voluntary isolation at this moment. I’m comfortable. Others don't have that luxury: they might be dying, sick, quarantined, isolated or worried - and they are all my circumstances in this pandemic. And the dead: will they be collateral damage, remain unnamed and forever unnoticed? Am I considering them my circumstances, related to me somehow in the context of a shared threat? Do I feel connected? Am I respectful of their situation and pain?

• Slapstick, TV comedy, ridicule sarcasm and jokes are lower forms for humor. They are based on pain, and we laugh because we identify with the subject's discomfort. We laugh at a joke because the hurt involved strikes a chord in our experience - even if we haven't experienced that event, we have the ability to interpret it and empathize.
• Bob Mankoff, cartoon editor of Esquire and formerly with The New Yorker, points out that we laugh at something benignly wrong, at incongruity and at surprise. They might elicit different responses but ultimately provide relief through laughter so we can bond with others, so we can cope with daily life. Humor is a social lubricant and it puts up a mirror to ourselves and our society.

I have publicly declared that "Humor is my Religion" to highlight all its benefits, so this is an important topic for me. Humor is risky and its mechanism and effects demand consideration. First, because I care about my friend and I don't want to offend him. His reaction to the crisis forces me to understand and respect his viewpoint. It also forces me to look in the mirror and question my definition of humor. There are no snowflakes in a pandemic.

Second, serendipity intervened and I bumped into this quote by Joseph Campbell: "Getting a comedic view of your situation gives you spiritual distance. Having a sense of humor saves you." Key concept: spiritual distance. What does he mean by that? It saves you from what?

Then I found another revealing quote from Campbell from "The Hero with a Thousand Faces": “The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man. The objective world remains what it was, but, because of a shift of emphasis within the subject, is beheld as though transformed. Where formerly life and death contended, now enduring being is made manifest — as indifferent to the accidents of time as water boiling in a pot is to the destiny of a bubble, or as the cosmos to the appearance and disappearance of a galaxy of stars." Key concept: where formerly life and death contended, now enduring is made manifest.

A lesson on enduring made manifest: my friend's Rabbi once told me a joke that would be otherwise inconsiderate and unacceptable if not based on this concept. The first time I met him over coffee, the Rabbi asked me: "Do you know when Hitler lost the war?" I flinched. "When the gas bill arrived." We both laughed, because the paradox is what makes the enduring manifest itself: the Jewish people have proudly survived despite Hitler’s genocidal atrocities. Death is transcended by a larger perspective, the endurance of the Jewish people, their will to forever overcome and affirm Life. I haven’t told this story to my friend, but if I did, would it help shift his perspective? Perhaps, only perhaps.

Based on this analysis, I’ve created Questions to filter humor I would consider sharing on social media during these difficult times:

• Who’s my audience?
• What’s the risk?
• How is it insightful?
• What does it reveal?
• How will I apologize if it bombs?

As the pandemic progresses, I read a lot of essays pointing to future societal and lifestyle changes. I agree it’s useful to consider scenarios and to shift the way we do forecasting to include the social health variable that was usually ignored in the past.

But one perspective that stopped me and that I find it connects with the essence of “making the enduring manifest itself” belongs to Argentine psychologist Miguel Rolon:

“There is only one way to face the fear of death and it is living, betting on desire so that, when we look forward, instead of seeing the fatality of the end, we see everything that we still have to dream about.”

It’s worth repeating in this era: There are no snowflakes in a pandemic.

There’s only the strength of the Human spirit acting through understanding, compassion and kindness.