You have to laugh. Credit: OLI SCARFF/AFP via Getty Images
A year from now you will all be laughing at this virus. Well not all of you, obviously.
Too soon?
First rule of comedy: it’s never funny unless it risks something, unless there exists the possibility of disapproval, of offence. And the greater the possibility of offence, the funnier it is. To be clear: it’s not the offence itself that makes something funny. Many would-be ‘brave’ comedians make this mistake. But the presence of the possibility of causing offence is certainly a multiplier when something is funny. The greater the repression, the more explosive the release.
We laugh in the presence of Covid-19 death charts because, well, what else can we do? The darkness of the present situation is not an argument against the possibility of laughter, but exactly why it is so necessary. We laugh to transform what we fear into something that cannot psychologically overwhelm us. It is a strategy of resistance.
You may remember from Harry Potter that a boggart is a shape-shifting creature that assumes the form of the worst fears of the person who encounters it. The spell that banishes a boggart is the riddikulus spell, which converts the terrifying apparition into something that can be laughed at. And once laughed at, all power is drained from the boggart and it disappears. A scary teacher is dressed up in the clothes of a fusty old woman, a giant spider is given roller-skates and cannot stand up. What would be the point of using the riddikulus spell on something that isn’t terrifying? In other words, comedy was designed for things like Covid-19.
This is why it makes no sense to say that some things are too serious to be joked about. On the contrary, only serious things can properly be joked about. And if it’s not serious, it’s not funny.
The funniest people I know, as a profession — apart from professional comedians — are undertakers, closely followed by nurses and those who work in the emergency services. Surrounded every day by pain and death, humour becomes a way of asserting that most specifically human of all reactions to the tragedy of life: laughter. On the one hand it creates a kind of solidarity in the face of fear and danger. But it also puts the danger in its place.
In this regard it’s hard to beat Spike Milligan’s famous epitaph, written on his gravestone: “I told you I was ill”. If I am right about the purpose of humour, this is about as perfect a joke as one could imagine. For to carve a joke on your own gravestone is to poke fun at our greatest fear within its own castle, and to do so in such a way that the darkness can never have the last laugh. You can just imagine Milligan’s words driving the grim reaper mad with frustration and fury. To have someone take the piss out of him rather than quake in terror is the ultimate riddikulus spell.
Freud put it rather more seriously in his 1927 essay On Humour:
“The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.”
Something similar is going on with Ricky Gervais’s comedy series After Life — season two of which has just been released on Netflix. Gervais’s character, Tony, is depressed and nihilistic, his wife having just died of cancer. He says things like: “A good day is when I don’t go around wanting to shoot random strangers in the face and then turn the gun on myself?”
It’s not a laugh a minute show. Sometimes you even question if it’s really a comedy at all. But because it’s Gervais, and perhaps because we know there will be moments of great humour — there really are — we allow him to take us into some pretty bleak situations. “That’s what humour is for,” Gervais told Holly Willoughby on the This Morning show last Monday, “to get us through bad stuff.”
Perhaps Gervais won’t like this way of putting it — given he’s such a passionate atheist — but this sort of comedy feels like it has a fundamentally redemptive purpose. It allows us to exist within the darkest of situations without being overwhelmed by them. To misquote Nietzsche: “We have comedy so we don’t perish of the truth”. Humour is a readily available coping mechanism. It’s a strategy of resilience.
But there is a potential fly in the ointment of this argument. My wife — who is from Israel — is of the opinion that the humour I am talking about here is very specifically British humour. They wouldn’t get Covid-19 humour in Tel Aviv, she explains.
Now while I don’t altogether believe this, the argument still slightly bothers me because if I’m right about the fundamental connection between death and comedy, surely it would be a universally identifiable phenomenon.
Or maybe it’s just that the sort of comedy I am talking about is particularly acute in cultures with high degrees of emotional repression. And given that sex, death and status are hang-ups that us Brits have in considerable measure, perhaps there is something to this. Freud understood humour as a kind of release, a way for pent up, forbidden thoughts to come tumbling out. That’s why there is no such thing as ‘safe’ humour. Humour is no respecter of either political or emotional repression.
That’s why those people who think that coronavirus humour is just “a little too much” won’t ever understand those of us who find something funny not just in spite of it being a little bit inappropriate but precisely because it is. Safe, appropriate humour is never terribly funny. Which is kind of the point.
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SubscribeThe Israelis live with the reality of death every day. I have never experienced such “here and now” attitude in any other country. Their strength and resilience is admirable. I love their appreciation of life, family and friends. You live with acute awareness that you might not see them tomorrow. Never leave things on a bad note. You might not have a chance to turn it around. Hence, Covid-19 would not create the wave of realisation that tomorrow I might not be here… and jokes related to that.
I disagree that humour needs to be offensive in order to make us laugh. Offensiveness is a normal feature of human life, but few laugh at it I would say. They normally find it repressive and boring. I think Chesterton was closer when he basically split humour in two: wit and comedy. So wit is ‘intellectual’. Its aim is to give pleasure in the arttistic and virtuosic wielding of language – and it is usually aimed at equals in intellectual understanding. To use it deliberately against the less intelligent is snobbish. Then’s there’s comedy which he equated to the basic idea that we find the loss of human dignity funny because we have that dignity by virtue of our status in the cosmos (he implicitly makes dignity a matter of religious evaluation). So a man treads on a banana skin, man slips, man lands on bottom. All laugh instinctively at this (especially children). However if a penguin were to slip on a banana skin we do not necessarily find this funny (nor do penguins). If a tree falls over (another example of his) we don’t find that funny at all. In fact we have to anthropomorphise animals or plants (e.g. genital-shaped vegetables) in order to find them amusing (e.g. the penguin’s walk, which appears to lots of people as funny because a penguin looks like a failed approximation to a human when it walks – it functions as a proxy for our own occasional waddling lack of dignity cf. chimps failing to drink tea at a dinner correctly). Even satire should have at its core some recognition of human dignity, and its point would be to reform, to shame by comparison to some minimal standard of moral human bahviour. What passes for it nowadays is mostly left-wing witless oiffensiveness, and boring self-regard.
As to dignity there is an immediate way to spot a psychopath. He’s the person who, when someone ‘slips on a banana skin’, continues to laugh even when he realises the person is badly injured and can’t get up, when normal people would stop laughing. I’ve actually met one of those. He’s now a lawyer.
I’ve always liked Romain Gary’s take: “Comedy is a safe house where serious things can find refuge and survive”.
The only Jewish jokes I know are about death and the only jokes about death I know are Jewish jokes. I think your wife was just sick of you being holier than thou and decided to undermine you by othering your sense of humour.
One major problem is that this plague tends to be disproportionately culling, the Fat, the Black and the Old.
Any humour, however well meaning, cannot be directed at this triumvirate. It is completely verboten.
Therefore the macabre is the only option.
‘Take my mother-in-law. Covid-19 did’
‘I’ve signed the mother-in-law up for Kung Flu lessons’
Ba-boom! If only Bernard Manning were still with us. (Actually, C-19 would have done for him pretty quickly, I guess).
I’m puzzled why China can’t be like India and play a decent game of cricket? Then I realised, they’ve eaten all the bats!
Apologies to Bernard Manning.R.I.P.
Funny yet not funny is the fact that the Dutch have just announced that paintings featuring scenarios in which people are not social distancing will be removed from the Rijksmuseum etc. So no ‘Nightwatch’ and not much of Frans Hals or any of those old paintings of people gathering around Jesus in his crib or on the cross. Quite a few Breitners will have to go. along with various painting by de Hooch and Vermeer. There won’t be much left except for a few van Gogh haystacks and those Mondrians.
I wonder if the Chinese will be impressed? The land of William the Silent descending to such ludicrous cant!
It used to said that “life is short but Art is long”. Something is seriously amiss here.
Before UnHerd is sued for disseminating fake news, I should own up to the fact that my post is a joke, based on my close and contemporary knowledge of politics in Amsterdam. But it’s just the kind of thing that the current (progressive)* mayor would do, which is why Dutch friends believed me when I told them the story.
Funnily enough I read a biography of William the Silent last year.
*Progressive except when it comes to her kids’ schooling. She removed one or more of them from a black/Islamic primary school.
Well done! You got me hook, line, and sinker!
It seemed so eminently plausible in these ‘chaotic’ times.
Humour, as you have proved, is the best riposte.
Amen! Humour can indeed be the best medicine. But I do think Mrs. Fraser is actually joking about not joking, given how much humour and masters of humour are Jewish.
I’m more inclined to believe it’s a universal thing to laugh at offensive matters and use it as a coping mechanism although different people might find different matters offensive/funny due to cultural differences. Good job Giles!