The Funny Bone's Connected to the Love Bone

by Juniper Lovetree

Scenario One:

Bettina: I was the worst pitcher at practice. I couldn’t even get the ball over the plate.

Mom: Oh, Bettina. That must feel awful.

Bettina: It does.

Mom: Well, how about we go out and practice after supper?

Bettina: OK.

Scenario Two:

Bettina: I was the worst pitcher at practice. I couldn’t even get the ball over the plate.

Mom: You mean, it hit the ground and just kind of rolled across home plate like an armadillo?

Bettina: Yeah!

Mom: Next practice, pack a shovel and move the pitcher’s mound closer to home plate.

Bettina: (Laughs) When the ball landed it raised these little puffs of dust. Dirt explosions. They were cool.

Our kids are under a lot of stress—the icebergs are melting, their friends have the latest from Lululemon and GAP and they don’t, and, waiting for them on a desk in some misty hall in the future, three sharpened pencils lie beside an LSAT with their name at the top. According to Leonard Sax, the author of the recent book, Girls on the Edge, about our girls’ dangerously fragile sense of self (despite their looking oh-so-confident), the average teenage girl today is more anxious than the average girl admitted to a psychiatric unit for in-patient treatment 50 years ago.

For two decades now, we parents have practiced the language of acknowledging and affirming our children’s feelings and experiences. But be careful: when we take their fears seriously, we may confirm them, suggesting that their fears are realistic, that pitching badly, for example, is a true problem.

“A joke is a very serious thing,” said Winston Churchill. Where worry is impotent, defined by limitation, a joke shifts and multiplies the ways we can perceive what happens to us. If the world is what we see and feel, then humour moves the world. Maybe Bettina failed at pitching, but man, those dust bombs were cool and—oh right—the baseball diamond is just lines drawn in the dirt. Philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote two hundred years ago that “laughter is an affection arising from a strained expectation being suddenly reduced to nothing.” Take stock. In spite of all we want for our children, from law degrees to sports scholarships, nothing fills our hearts as genuinely as the sound of their laughter.

“The ability to adopt a humorous attitude plays an important role in warding individuals against the effects of negative events and developing important social bonds with others,” responds humour researcher, Gestalt therapist, and conflict resolution expert Brian Mistler when I e-mail him in New York about the topic.

It had dawned on me that the most annoying—i.e. boorish, competitive, sycophantic, inflexible, irresponsible, incurious, self-centered—adults share one trait: they don’t laugh at themselves. It suddenly struck me that the most important skill I could teach my own children was to laugh at the absurdities of the situations they find themselves in and, indeed, at their own lovable selves.

Mistler explains that humour can be divided broadly into adaptive benevolent styles, which include “innocuous friend-making humour” and “not-taking-oneself-too-seriously humour” and the more malevolent kinds which involve putting others or oneself down in potentially hurtful ways (think sarcasm, teasing, ridicule). Negative types of humour share two common traits: a tendency to view the world in black and white and the idea that one person or thing or group is better than another.

“Individuals who practice more positive forms of humor are more likely to be able to adapt to changes in their environment, handle ambiguous situations (which is most of life), and change themselves and others in deeper, more lasting ways,” Mistler writes. “Being able to laugh at yourself in a non-harmful way has been associated with a range of healthy variables, including equality in relationships with others and tolerance for ambiguity, meaning it also helps protect against depression and increase adaptability.”

But how to go about teaching our children this skill? I posed the question to Ursula Beerman, a humour researcher at the University of Zurich. “We could teach children a kind of self-acceptance, with all the faults that one might have and peculiarities in your looks,” she suggested. She pointed to the work of Paul McGhee, who has developed a humour training program. “As McGhee puts it, ‘you are allowed to be imperfect.’”

Charles Metcalf and Roma Felible, the authors of Lighten Up: Survival Skills for People Under Pressure, propose three rules, which we could share with our children:

1. Be able to see the absurdity in difficult situations.

2. Be able to take yourself lightly while taking your work seriously, and

3. Develop your sense of joy and being alive.

Metcalf and Felible suggest that people visit a photo booth and make funny faces. Then, when a problem comes up, they take out the photos and think, “You are not just the problem you’re having, you’re this, too.” Next time your ’tween is obsessing about a lone pimple, get her to pull a face in the mirror—there’s a lot more to her than that red dot.

Mistler, though unsure that parents can teach children how to laugh at themselves, notes that parents are a child’s “number one source of external messages about humour as they model to children what’s funny and what’s not.” He is careful to point out that humour is not just about pre-fabricated jokes. Over 70 per cent of humour is the spontaneous humour of daily life, which often arises when quite separate ideas come together.

Mistler adds that parents can support our children as they develop their own sense of humour.

“As important as modeling healthy humor to our children is acting as an audience in a way that gives them an opportunity to practice being funny.”

Comedian Yakov Smirnoff said, “There is a direct correlation between love and laughter.” He also said, “Love and laughter can only happen when one person takes the time to think about what would cause the other person to feel good.”

Humour is a form of compassion and a roadmap to happiness. Laughter greases our wheels, gives us wings, wrings us of our fears and sense of helplessness. Certainly, there are things to cry about, but perhaps the biggest of all is the missed chances to laugh and laugh.

“To laugh, or to occasion laughter through humor and wit, is to invite those present to come closer.” ~Sociologist Rose Coser

Normally a lover of spiders, Juniper Lovetree recently came across one so enormous and cold looking, she felt real fear. Heart pounding, she swifty captured it and then discovered the “cold looking” spider was actually a plastic one that her son had won at last year’s Saanich Fair.