Author : Cy Eberhart
It happens all the time: A tense, stressful situation at work, then an offhand remark,
followed by laughter and perhaps a knowing nod. The tension is reduced. Such
spontaneous humor can maintain morale or it can reinforce feelings of despair and
helplessness. It all depends.Working as a hospital chaplain, I often wondered about the spontaneous humor
generated in this stressful environment: areas like the emergency unit, intensive
care, neurosurgery, and coronary care. The flippant observations, verbal shorthand
expressions that are quickly understood by those sharing the experiences.People acquainted with such settings know that this humor has a distinct flavor.
Simply stated it's crude, so crude that it is "for staff ears only." Its conveyors are
fully aware of its offensiveness, should it be overheard by others. More often than
not the humor victimizes the patients and, when taken at face value, it conveys
insensitivity,even though this is never, never the intent of the purveyors of such
humor.Actually, my interest was more on what wasn't said than what was. I had some
understanding of the need of what I then called "negative humor." But the glaring
absence of positive humor, how come? I reasoned this way: if the humor inherent in
these settings was negative, then some essential quality was absent. What that was
or how to express it, I had no idea.Then sometime later, while examining American frontier humor, I found similar
dynamics but from a more comprehensive viewpoint. This viewpoint gave me a
systematic way to consider this negative-positive humor phenomenon.My categories now became "coping" and "hoping" humor. Here are examples of two
different humorous treatments of a single theme. This gives an "experiential" basis
for understanding the distinctions I make between these two.The theme is aging. Aging is a fact of life, one that has demoralizing possibilities.
The following examples are from contemporary birthday cards:Feeling old? Don't. We know someone your age...and on good days he can still feed
himself.Another in this same vein:
(Woman on the telephone) Your birthday today? Really? How old? No?...Have a nice
yesterday.Then this one:
Happy birthday
It's reassuring to know that, while growing older, worn out cells are being cast off
and replaced by new ones...Think of it as a giant garage sale going an all over your
body.Now the first two are examples of "coping" humor. This humor laughs at the
hopelessness in human life. The third is humor celebrating the hope in human life.It was two theories advanced to explain the creativity and vitality of the frontier
humor that suggested these distinctions. One came from Mark Twain's biographer,
Albert Bigelow Paine. He understood frontier humor to be the result of despair,
explaining it this way, "...all frontiersmen were obliged to be laughing philosophers
in order to survive the stress of its warfare. The fight was so desperate, to take it
seriously was to surrender. Women laughed that they might not weep, men laughed
when they could no longer swear." This theory has many adherents. But historians
Bernard De Voto and Max Eastman advanced another. According to it, optimism and
enthusiasm were the dynamics of frontier humor, not despair. Hope, not
hopelessness, was its underlying factor.In considering these saw no need to choose between them for the human condition
embraces both. Hopelessness and hope are both realities of human life. For
example, mortality is a fact. It is therefore hopeless to try to live forever. But there is
hope for achieving the fulfillment of life. This too is reality.Laughing at the hopeless is what I call "coping" humor. An illustration from frontier
life, a story inspired by the successive grasshopper plagues that continually
threatened the settlers. Sometimes they were so thick their weight broke trees when
they lighted on them.A settler was plowing his field. He went to his house for a drink of cold water from
his well. While pumping he saw a heavy cloud of grasshoppers drop over the spot
where he'd left his team of horses. He ran back as fast as he could. When he got
here the grasshoppers had eaten his team and his harnesses and were pitching the
horses' shoes to see which got the farmer.Coping humor, then, does not build morale. Rather it generates an energy that
allows a person to "hang in there." To become refreshed enough to have another go
at the impossible, or in our terms, at the hopeless. But to restate: it doesn't free one
from the demoralizing facts or from the awareness of the continued presence of the
hopelessness in our lives.In hoping humor we find different factors at work. Compare this next frontier story
to the one about the grasshoppers.A Texas ranger and his Indian scout were riding across the sand hills in a fierce
wind storm. To their surprise they saw lying on top of one of the sand dunes a
man's hat. They dismounted and the ranger picked it up. Underneath he found a
man's head. Frantically the ranger and the scout began scratching away the sand
from the man's eyes, ears, mouth. The man said, "Get a shovel, I'm on horseback."In this, laughter at the man's helplessness in the face of nature's overwhelming
forces is not reinforced. Rather, the humorous element is the indomitableness of the
human spirit. It is a humor of hope.Thinking in terms of mood rather than content, contrast TV's Archie Bunker in All in
the Family with the old Bill Cosby Show. Their basic treatments, premises and foci
are not the same. Audiences found a different "feel" in their laughter. All in the
Family fell into the coping variety while The Cosby Show into the hoping type. I
would also include Norman Rockwell's paintings, and Garrison Keillor's "Lake
Woebegon" stories in the hoping type.This point should be underscored: A humor that will sustain spiritual and emotional
well being require a dynamic relationship between the hoping and coping. The two
need each other.What I'm saying is that coping humor alone cannot sustain the human spirit. When it
becomes the predominate fare, this humor, in time, turns back on itself. It become
sarcastic, cynical, destructive and even vindictive for it anticipates nothing but the
hopeless.Nor can hoping humor go it alone. What's it to do with the hells of life; those times
when all that can be heard is the wailing and the gnashing of teeth? When life is just
too much for us with no end in sight, when darkness comes but the enemy will not
break off. In these times a Rockwell painting or a "Woebegon" story just won't cut it.
Surely there is sound reason for the second- most-used expression in church
liturgy, "God have mercy."
(c) 2006 Cy Eberhart
Author's note: This article is a revision of his Keynote Address at the
International Conference on Humor at Arizona State University, Tempe, ArizonaAs a hospital chaplain Cy Eberhart, (now retired) was a firsthand witness to the
entire spectrum of human emotions: personal successes and failures; the deepest
despairs and the great peaks of joy. Two questions remained foremost in his mind:
How was it that some could find inner strengths that brought courage and hope and
others could not? What was to be learned from these experiences that would have a
positive and creative effect for daily, routine living?His lectures, writings, workshops, book In the Presence of Humor and his living-history
performances of America's famed humorist
Will Rogers offers some of the
answers.* You may republish this article in it's entirety, provided you leave the author's note
and web-site hyperlinks intact.
Keyword : humor,happiness,well being,stress,self reflection,confidence,imagination,coping,insight,inspiration,
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