TRANSCRIPT
I would like to talk about two different types of humor: humor that takes victims and humor that doesn’t take victims. My introduction to humor in my life was my father. My father just was naturally funny. He had a funny bone. He could make people laugh; he could make me laugh. There was just something that he understood about the subject of irony, irony being underneath humor, juxtaposing different ideas. He was just plain good at it.
The problem with my dad is that not infrequently his humor was nasty. He took victims. He could be really, really cutting and hurtful in his humor. I remember one thing that still stays with me. He played a joke on a friend of mine when I was about 10 years old. This friend of mine was poor. We lived in a poor neighborhood, but my dad was starting to have a job that made some money. I think he was very proud of having money.
Well, he played a joke on this friend of mine who really had nothing. I remember at that time in my life, I would walk around; I was lucky if I had a quarter in my pocket when my friend often didn’t even have a quarter, maybe just had a dime. Well, my dad took us out for ice cream, and I remember somehow the subject of money came up, and my friend wasn’t paying attention. And then my dad did something. He set up a little bit of a prank, and then he said to my friend, “Hey, oh, there’s something in your pocket there.” So my friend put his hand in his pocket and pulled it out. My dad had put a hundred dollar bill in my friend’s pocket, and my friend was shocked. I don’t think he’d ever even seen a hundred dollar bill. I think it was lucky if he’d ever held a five dollar bill, and here was a hundred dollars, a brand-new hundred dollar bill in his pocket.
My friend was shocked. My dad said, “Where did you find that? Where did you find that?” And my friend is like, and was kind of excited that he found it, but also kind of horrified that like, “Wait, this isn’t mine. How did that get there?” And I remember dying inside because I figured it out. My dad put that in his pocket, and he thought this was funny, and he wanted to get a reaction out of my friend. And then my dad got embarrassed because he realized I was horrified, and then my friend looked at me and realized that I was horrified and realized what my dad had done was embarrassing and didn’t know what to do. So my dad just took it out of his hand and pretended like it hadn’t happened because that’s what my dad did often when his jokes didn’t work. Oh, oh, let’s just move on, pretend I never made that joke. That one didn’t work.
But I remember it was like he shamed my friend. He shamed his poverty, made him embarrassed, made him sad, made me feel so uncomfortable, made us uncomfortable as friends. So this brings me to the other type of humor: the type of humor that doesn’t hurt people, that doesn’t take victims. It talks about irony in a whole different way, maybe just shares things that are just maybe funny or different or unexpected in a way where nobody does get harmed as the result of it.
I think about some of my early experiences with things that I found so funny. I remember one: I learned to read very early, four or five years old. I was already reading well. I remember one time we were traveling somewhere. We were going on a road trip, maybe down to New York City from where I lived in upstate New York, and we stopped at a rest area. I was just old enough to be able to go into the bathroom by myself, and I went into the restroom stall and I closed the door, and there was all these words written there. And I was a little boy who wanted to make sense of it, so I remember trying to read what was on the restroom wall, and I found a poem I thought was so funny. It was clearly written by an adult, but it was written by an infantile adult, an infantile adult that spoke to me as a five-year-old. And the poem was, “Here I sit all brokenhearted, tried to, and only farted.” And I remember thinking that was the funniest thing I had ever heard.
I came out and I told it to my parents, and they didn’t think it was that funny. They were like, “Oh God, what have we here? We’ve created a monster by teaching him to read so early.” And I remember telling lots and lots of people. My parents were like, “Well, that has bad words in it, so you probably shouldn’t say it unless you’re really careful.” But I told it to all my friends, and I remember that was a kind of poem, that was a kind of humor that didn’t take any victims. It was just funny, and I love rhyming poems that were funny.
And even now I think of using humor, and then I can analyze some of the humor that I even put on the internet and some of these videos that I make. I think of some of my anti-psychiatry videos that I’ve made, some of the songs that I’ve written. Does that take victims? I certainly know psychiatrists; many have become angry at me. “How dare you make fun of this profession?” But then again, what I think also is I don’t feel bad about making fun of psychiatry because psychiatry itself, to me, is a joke. It’s not true; it’s not honest. And I think of all the harm that they caused people, all the destruction they cause people, people whom I have loved, people whom I’ve tried to help. And I see that, wait a second, psychiatry is working against their best interest. It’s not respectful, and so often it’s simply not based on science.
And I feel that humor can be a wonderful way to point this out. Sometimes humor can bypass a lot of the intellectual arguments that sometimes I can get tired of hearing. Also, sometimes I find the humor, especially humor about psychiatry, one of my favorite areas to make fun of, can be very healing, healing to people who have been devastated by psychiatry. But is it okay that I make fun of them? Am I taking them as victims? No, I think I’m using humor to call them to task, to call them up to their responsibility to be scientific about what they are doing, not to be as unscientific as they are.
But then I want to take a step back also and think of what motivates humor: nasty humor versus healthier humor. I think a big thing is when people use humor in ways that really do cause harm to other people. The kind of humor that was so common, especially when I was in high school. I remember walking along with my books under my arm and having people knock it out, and my books and my papers went all over the ground, and everybody laughed and thought it was so funny, laughing at me, not laughing with me. I remember wanting to cry inside when I was treated that way, mistreated that way.
I remember also boys going around pulling other boys’ pants down to humiliate them in front of lots of other people. It happened to me a few times— incredibly humiliating and painful. I remember people laughing. I remember that laughter going in like torture into me, dying inside. Well, what was it? What motivated that kind of nasty humor? Also that nasty humor in my dad? I think a big part of what motivated it was people who had an incredible amount of unresolved pain buried inside of them, pain of the traumas that they had suffered, pain that they weren’t able to access and deal with, often pain coming right out of their own families of origin.
My dad himself was a tormented boy back when he was a kid. He was tormented, unloved, disrespected, not cared about, abandoned in so many different ways by his parents, and he never learned how to deal with it, never learned how to grieve it or process it. And yet it stayed inside of him, smoldering in torment. And one of the ways that he dealt with a lot of that pain—not healed it by any means, but just at least helped keep it at bay—was by using it, converting it into humor to torment other people. He thought it was funny to…
Watch other people suffer in the ways that he had suffered. He did it to me. He made humor and jokes about me that tormented me. And for me, that’s a real key.
Also, with those boys and girls sometimes who were so nasty in school, so nasty in high school, really taking victims with other people, they were acting out their unresolved traumas. They were acting out the humiliations that had been done to them by humiliating other people. And that’s a humor that no longer I find funny. It causes me to feel pain instead of laughing at the people who are suffering, laughing at the butts of their practical jokes. I feel empathy for those people because it reminds me of the things that I have gone through, the suffering that I have gone through in my life.
And yet humor can still remain. Humor can still be funny. Irony is still there. And humor, humor that doesn’t take victims, can actually be a wonderful part of the healing process.
I think that’s another thing too that I’ve seen: grieving converts all these deep painful feelings, the suffering that we have, the post-traumatic feelings that we have. Grieving converts this suffering into integration and into meaning. But I think real healthy laughter can do that also. And I think it’s one of the most wonderful parts of the healing process to be able to laugh at the ironies of life and sometimes to laugh at our own inconsistencies, laugh at our own foibles, or to just laugh at the foibles of the world.
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