′Joke′s A Part′: In defence of humour

Abstract

Byline: G. Swaminath Legend has it that shortly after Adam was created, he complained: 'O, Lord! You have given the lion fierce teeth and claws, and the elephant formidable tusks; you have given the deer swiftness of legs, and the turtle a protective shell; you have given the birds of flight wings, but you have left me altogether defenceless.' And the Lord said unto Adam: 'I shall give you an invisible weapon that will serve you and your children better than any weapons of fight or flight, a power that will save you even from yourself. I shall give you the sense of humour.' We are defenceless without humour. If we fail to see the irony in our circumstances, the situation may appear dispiriting. Laughter is a way of 'thumbing one's nose' at the inescapable and incomprehensible vagaries of existence and declaring, 'I choose to rise above this. I choose to meet life head on.' Laughter is freedom. There is a mistaken belief that since the medical profession is critical, the doctor should appear intense, sincere and solemn, but definitely not flippant. Too many people confuse seriousness with professionalism and put a lid on the sense of humour. They think joking would render the doctor's behaviour unprofessional. Physicians tend to be wary of laughing with their patients. Our training enforces the idea that healing is a serious business. Doctors do not want to appear frivolous and flippant, especially with people they do not know. Is humour therapeutic? As early as the 1300s, Henri de Mondeville, professor of surgery, propagated therapy with humour to patients after surgery 'by having someone tell him jokes'. While there are several anecdotal reports claiming humour to be therapeutic, there are no double-blind control trials. In Anatomy of an illness, Norman Cousins (1976) first called the attention of the medical community to the potential therapeutic effects of humour when he described his utilization of laughter during treatment for his ankylosing spondylitis. Believing that negative emotions had a negative impact on his health, he theorized that positive emotions would have a positive effect. He believed that the experience of laughter could open him to feelings of joy, hope, confidence and love. 'If you can laugh at it, you can survive it.' 'Even if laughter produces no specific biochemical changes,' according to Norman Cousins, 'it accomplishes one very essential purpose. It tends to block deep feelings of apprehension and even panic that all too frequently accompany serious illness. It helps free the body of the constricting effects of the negative emotions that in turn may impair the healing system.' According to Cousins, 10 minutes of laughter resulted in 2 hours of pain-free sleep. How does humour operate as therapy? Sigmund Freud had a theory about humour which was a synthesis of the three theories of humour, i.e. Incongruity, relief and conflict theories. Another theory propounded is the superiority theory, e.g. when we laugh at someone who has been duped. Freud postulated that humour works by means of two principal mechanisms, 'condensation' and 'displacement'. Condensation entails an economy in thought and expression and conserves psychic energy, and displacement transfers this psychic energy arising from conflict or incongruity to a humorous anecdote, which brings relief. Freud believed that cultivating a sense of humour could help lift repressions (i.e. unconscious conflictual material) but could also be harmful, particularly in certain forms of sarcasm and irony, directed at the self. Kahn identified five primary functions that humour serves for individuals and groups: * Coping. By using humour as a coping mechanism, people are able to bear the burden of suffering or misfortune. This is done by recognizing the incongruity of believing that one is the only person suffering, thus increasing one's sense of shared humanity. …