{"id":88302,"date":"2022-08-06T04:26:52","date_gmt":"2022-08-06T12:26:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pickthebrain.com\/blog\/?p=88302"},"modified":"2022-08-22T08:10:00","modified_gmt":"2022-08-22T16:10:00","slug":"the-ineffable-power-of-humor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pickthebrain.com\/blog\/the-ineffable-power-of-humor\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ineffable Power of Humor"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

by Shepherd Siegel, PhD<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the filmed opera Annette<\/a><\/em>, conceived and written by the perpetually-failing-and-suddenly-hip band Sparks (brothers Ronald and Russell Mael), the protagonist, Henry McHenry, is a perpetually failing comedian played by Adam Driver. He\u2019s asked over and over again by his audience \u201cWhy did you become a comedian?\u201d He eventually answers \u201cWhy? I\u2019ll tell you why. To disarm people. Make them laugh. It\u2019s the only way I know how to tell the truth without getting killed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this fraught time, when the US harbors far and away the most armed civilians,* where enough of them are willing to fire their guns on people they don\u2019t like\u2026it\u2019s no joke. And since comedian Mike Birbiglia sagely noted that you can\u2019t tell a joke without offending someone, we\u2019ve come to acknowledge the occupational riskiness of comedy. May the bullet of the crazy armed American never meet up with the comedian. Fortunately, and despite doctrinaire decisions that limit opportunities for comics to perform on college campuses, whatever truth standup humor conveys continues to get across. Still, the comedian does risk physical harm. Just ask Chris Rock.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s get to the truth of the matter. We live in a world of hierarchies. Given the spawn of those hierarchies\u2014the inequalities of the world, the problems we have the means to solve yet don\u2019t (poverty, hunger, war, -ism\u2019s of hate)\u2014we intuitively sense that this is not the best of all possible worlds, and in some abstract way, we try to imagine a better one. We get comedy\u2019s flash of hope as expressed by the comedian\u2014the court jester, the caged trickster. From the relative safety of the stage, they speak truth, they mock power and sound the call to overcome it, they touch our intuitions and plant the seed of justice wrapped in a joke that makes us laugh; and once we examine that laughter, we may discover a truth that sets us free.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take this example where Richard Pryor gets deep into Trickster magic. In Richard Pryor: Live in Concert<\/em>,[1]<\/sup><\/a>taped in 1979 at the Terrace Theater in Long Beach, California.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pryor narrates the murder of George Floyd forty years before it occurs. He states a raw, painful fact of racism decades before the general American population began its reckoning with it\u2026he states truth to power in the context of a joke and the safe space that surrounds the jester comedian. He psychologically and politically prepares Americans to come to terms with the structures that lead to the kind of brutality unarmed Black men experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pryor describes how, in drunken anger and distress over his wife leaving him, he shot his .357 Magnum at his own car. And here\u2019s the no-joke joke:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then the police came. I\u2026went in the house. \u2018Cause they got Magnums too. And they don\u2019t kill cars<\/em>. They kill n**-*ars.<\/em> [loud applause]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Police got a choke hold they use out here, though. Man, they choke n***as to death. That mean you be dead when they through. Did you know that? Wait, n***as goin\u2019 \u201cYeah, we knew.\u201d White folks, \u201cNo, I had no idea.\u201d Yeah, two grab your legs, one grab your head, and snap. [Cop voice]: \u201cOh, shit. He broke. Can you break a n***er? Is it okay? Let\u2019s check the manual. Yep, page 8. \u2018You can break a n***er.\u2019 Right there, see?\u201d [loud laughter and applause].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why does this mostly white audience laugh so? Not because the murder of Black men by cops is funny, but because it\u2019s so wrong, absurdly wrong, and that\u2019s what Pryor\u2019s signifying. Pryor\u2019s performing Trickster magic, knowing that the laughing crowd is now with him and that righting this absurd injustice is the act of love, the better world, that he\u2019s preaching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Justice feels right<\/em>. We intuitively recognize it when we see it or hear its call. Thus, it is the trickster, often in the role of comedian, who sees the disparity between reality and justice, and bridges that difference with humor. Lacking the power to make it right, tricksters have as their tools the insight and the language to craft that bridge in the form of a joke that raises awareness, and fights the fight not with guns, but on the battlefield of our psyches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reason some jokes don\u2019t work anymore, like sexist quips about wives (Take my wife . . . please!), for example\u2026is because the first ten thousand times they were told they DID work, folks laughed because they intuitively knew it was the wrong way to view their spouse, but there was enough truth there to get a laugh. It was funny until it wasn\u2019t, and it was the joke that helped to move society along and compel comedians to up their game and move to a higher plane of exposing injustice once that one wasn\u2019t funny anymore. And if the injustice wasn\u2019t undone, at least it was laid bare so as to be more effectively addressed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thus opens the portal. Through jokes, where the audience buys a lie and laughs when the lie is exposed, greater truths are revealed. The trickster\u2019s role is to bring such humor to the fore, humor that matters, that gets people thinking, that gets them talking about the way the world could be. Humor\u2019s power is elusive, slippery, ineffable. But a better society can be built out of the truths that humor reveals. And here, we\u2019re talking about the difference between humor that makes you laugh in order to forget your troubles, and humor that makes you laugh as you solve them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Dr. Shepherd Siegel, a descendant of oil barons and bootleggers, emerges from Northern California\u2019s utopian promise. A former musician, he earned his doctorate at Berkeley with studies in anthropology and special education. With over thirty publications, his 2018 book \u201cDisruptive Play\u201d garnered awards from Foreword Reviews and the CIPA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his new book, Tricking Power into Performing Acts of Love<\/a>, Dr. Shepherd Siegel, P<\/a><\/strong><\/em>hD.<\/a><\/strong>, examines the grownups who have retained the ability to be playful as they were when a child as they view and behave in the world. Such a grownup will consciously or unconsciously engage with the Trickster, and Tricking Power into Performing Acts of Love is about what could happen if society made more of that animating force (and \u201canimating\u201d can be literal, in the case of one of the original American Tricksters: Bugs Bunny!).<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

*  In the US civilian population there are 120.5 guns for every 100 people. The next highest nation is the Falkland Islands, with 62.1, https:\/\/worldpopulationreview.com\/country-rankings\/gun-ownership-by-country<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

[1]<\/sup><\/a> Richard Pryor: Live in Concert<\/em>, directed by Jeff Margolis (United States: Special Event Entertainment, 1979), film.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Through jokes, where the audience buys a lie and laughs when the lie is exposed, greater truths are revealed. 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