A recent diary was supposed to be humorous. However, the humor was reliant upon laughing at other people. It was definitely not laughing with them. In some cases it was downright mean. I mentioned my thoughts on "humor with a victim" and how it is based in a win-lose/dominance dynamic and that I wish we would consider leaving it behind. One response was that "sometimes humor is just humor." Can that be true if the humor involves another person and that person wouldn't feel good about it?
I'd like to explore this concept. Will you join me?
My daughter (Zuna, as she's known online) can tell you that I'm a very silly person. Sometimes, she thinks I'm too silly. We laugh a lot. I laugh a lot. I have always laughed. I love how it feels. I love the joy of it. The release of energy. I simply love laughing.
Yet, I have a very keen sense for the distinction between laughing with someone out of love and laughing at someone derisively.
When Zuna was about three years old, I was scolding her for something. I can't recall what now. For me to be at all stern I must have been concerned for her safety or for preventing the destruction of something valuable. You know, something minor like the house. Anyway, she began looking down at the floor as I towered over her "explaining" why she couldn't do whatever it was she was doing. I became concerned that she might be crying and I paused. In a perfect silence, her little head tilted up with deeply furrowed brows, a tightly pinched mouth, a scrunched up nose and piercing eyes. It was very dramatic and it caught me off guard. I said, "What is that?" She replied, with her little mouth still pinched and her words almost muffled, "Angry face." We both burst into laughter. She was, in a way, mocking me. An exaggerated mirror staring back at me unadulterated and the view wasn't pretty. It cut right through my strident rant and broke the tension caused when your bonds are stressed due to fear. Because of the love, this moment was full of grace. To this day, when one of us is getting upset and it feels a little overwrought, the other will make The Angry Face and the tension is diffused, allowing us to better process whatever it is we're addressing. We have several humorous tools like this in our relationship tool kit.
Zuna is funny. She's quietly tuned in and witty and she gets me laughing all the time. The thing is, she can mock me, as in the above scenario and we can both laugh and appreciate the humor because I know, without a shadow of a doubt that she has not an ounce of intention to hurt my feelings. She's simply found a very pithy tool for expressing something going on between us. We can use humor to help each other see things about ourselves. I can take the humor in and hear the message and we can accept me and my quirks and foibles and remain beautifully connected and growing together. In this relationship, where the trust and love are so persistent, so unfettered, there is never a victim in the humor.
That's not true of most of what passes for humor in our culture. We employ a lot of what I call "humor with a victim." In my childhood, the most obvious example of this were The Three Stooges. I never understood what my father thought was so funny about one person hitting another over the head with a board. Causing someone else pain is funny? I would always say to him, "Let's see if you think it's funny when I hit you over the head." I knew it was a gag and that no one was really getting hurt, but why is even the concept of hurting someone funny? To me, it's not.
While, physical humor where physical injuries are being depicted may seem obvious as "humor with a victim", but a joke at someone else's emotional expense is also victimizing. Let's look at my father's sense of humor in a non-contact context: In adolescence, I was a late bloomer. Four years older than my next sister, she needed to employ a bra before I did. I was quite athletic and slender of form. I retained a boyish figure for quite some time. Each summer, as we prepared for camping and the annual trip to my grandmother's island home in Maine, my mother would take us shopping for swimsuits. Each summer, my father would say, "Skinny," (uh, that was me. Very flattering nickname, don't you think?)"she doesn't need a swimsuit. All she needs are two bandaids and a cork."
I suppose there is a wit to that, if he originated the "joke". However, it was also a completely offensive thing to say to a very sensitive teenager who already had a poor self-image, particularly about her attractiveness to boys, as she didn't have a boyfriend like all the other girls. I mean really, beyond making him look witty, what was the point? He made himself seem big and I was relegated to a size just right for crawling under a rock. How is that funny? It's not. It's mean. If we look at the dictionary definition of victim:
vic·tim (vktm)
n.
- One who is harmed or killed by another: a victim of a mugging.
- A living creature slain and offered as a sacrifice during a religious rite.
- One who is harmed by or made to suffer from an act, circumstance, agency, or condition: victims of war.
- A person who suffers injury, loss, or death as a result of a voluntary undertaking: You are a victim of your own scheming.
- A person who is tricked, swindled, or taken advantage of: the victim of a cruel hoax.
we see that #5 includes "taken advantage of". When someone is vulnerable - whether it be because of power inequity, not being present, not having thee faculties to defend oneself, not being emotionally strong, already feeling like an outsider, whatever it is - and you make a joke at her expense you are taking advantage of that person. You are victimizing her. If a person's feelings would be hurt or her relationships harmed or her job placed in jeopardy, anything which is not constructive, then the humor has a victim. If the humor has a victim, then the humorist is a perpetrator of harm.
I don't like laughing at people. It is simply mean. There really is no redeeming quality to laughing at someone. Why do we do it? To humiliate? To feel superior? To bond around the act of belittling? To intimidate someone into conformity? Or to make her unwelcome? Whatever the motivation, if it isn't grounded in compassion for that person, it's a form of bullying. When the person isn't even present, it's an even more cowardly form of bullying. How is this funny?
Can we stop for a minute and ponder over why we do it and whether we feel its a constructive thing to do? Might we consider how it reflects upon us and whether we want our community to be defined by it?
My answer to this is obvious. I don't like humor with a victim. It seems juvenile and mean and does not build a community based in compassion. One of the things I found most upsetting about the Bush/Rove/Cheney leadership team was the ethos of bullying they generated. How they basically modeled, via their body language, their words and their policies for our entire nation how to be a bully. "Oh look, we invaded your country because we claimed you had WMDs and now that we've killed hundreds of thousands of people, the President can joke in public about looking for WMDs under his desk. Ha ha ha. Isn't that hilarious?!"
I would prefer we didn't employ this tactic. I would prefer we model something different. I would prefer that when we disagree with someone we stick to sober conversations about differing ideas. We can poke fun at ourselves for tension relief or a little looking into the mirror for growth, but to make jokes about people we are not bonded with in a positive way is more than a poke. It is a jab with a knife. It is an act of violence and I'd prefer we be an example of how different things could be. An example of how to disagree non-violently.
In fact, I'd love to see us do as Zuna does:
Recently, we took Zuna - who is a student of circus arts - to see Cirque du Soleil. She was very impressed and completely mesmerized by the whole thing, with the exception of the clowns. They had brought someone from the audience on stage, ostensibly to read the safety rules about not flashing cameras and such, but they harassed him the whole time. She was quiet during that bit. A second time, they called him up, ostensibly to help out with a stunt. With gestures and gibberish they were "instructing" him to do things and get into positions which he struggled to do. When he could do it, they mocked him by imitating, in exaggerated terms, what he looked like. By this time, I knew that the audience member was a plant and actually part of the cast. So, I was giggling a little, though it kind of fell flat, given that he wasn't Joe Off the Street. Suddenly, my daughter looked up at me and nearly shouted, "Stop laughing, Mom. It isn't funny. They're making fun of him and he probably doesn't feel good about that."
She was right to point out to me that I was enjoying a mean kind of humor. As soon as she did, I took a pause and stopped seeing it as funny. It doesn't make the world a better place to deploy this kind of humor. Clearly, I still have vestiges of this tickle bone in me. It's something I still need to gain consciousness about. I would love a world where everyone is like Zuna, with the conviction, the compassion and the courage to speak up for someone else when they are being victimized by "humor".
If I'm with a very good friend, I might use humor to say, "I see this about you and I still love. You can relax and be your imperfect self." It is full of love and compassion. Without that, the object of the humor is a victim of my joke. If the person I'm joking about would have hurt feelings, then I am using humor with a victim. I'm not being funny. I'm humiliating someone.
What kind of motivations are behind making jokes about someone when it's not done out of compassion for that person? Again, I'll list some possibilities:
- make the object look bad to others
- make the joker look superior to the object
- bond with others via the humiliation of another
- let others know that they will be subject to same if they cross the joker
- intimidate the object into conforming
- intimidate the object into leaving
All of these are about exerting power over another. Using someone else to serve your own ends. Domineering over another to gain status for oneself or to control a group. All of these dynamics are part and parcel of bullying.
In my life I have, unfortunately, seen far too much of this in social groups. It dis-empowers everyone. Who wants to be the butt of such jokes, right? So, everybody is chilled into a state of wariness. It's a way of ensuring conformity to those who do the joking. And this is among "friends". There's that saying. You know. The one about "friends like this." Yeah. I don't consider people like this to be friends. Friends lift each other up, not tear them down.
Some might call it friendly fire. Well, friendly fire kills. And it's not an honorable killing.
Is it okay, then, to use this kind of humor with people we already don't like? If we want a world of compassionate people, we have to create it ourselves. The biggest test of civility is how we treat our "enemies". (I don't like that word, as it feeds into a paradigm of seeing everything as competition/war/win-lose/us-vs-them situation. A world of peace, prosperity for all and compassion can only emerge when we let go of this way of seeing things.) I don't want to be in a world where the goal is to shoot at "enemies". I want to be in a world where the goal is to persuade others to reconsider their ideas via compassion for all mankind. If I'm unable to persuade them, I prefer to agree to disagree and to work on stopping whatever deleterious effects I believe they can have on the world via acts of peaceful force and speaking truth to power. Satyagraha, as Gandhi taught us.
Any "victories" I might gain by doing violence or harm to another isn't really a victory at all. I have simply shifted the power over another to my side of the playing field. In actuality, by having done so, I have lowered myself to becoming the very thing I am trying to eradicate. I prefer to have compassion for the person. Fight the ideas or actions, not the human being. Evoke the loving heart of the person. Coax that forward from behind the defensive walls of hate and fear.
Also, as another diarist reports the words of an 11 year old who lost his brother to suicide:
"I want people to remember that bullying isn't okay, because one word can make them have suicidal thoughts."
One hurtful joke could push a depressed person into suicide. Is that funny? Do you want that on your conscience?
Supposedly, on this site, with our particular political persuasion, we understand that there are two reasons we don't (well, shouldn't)engage in torturing our enemy prisoners: 1) you never get good info from torturing, as the victim simply says what they think you want to hear in order to get it to stop, and 2) we wouldn't want to be subjected to torture if we were ever a prisoner.
The same thinking applies to humor with a victim. You'll never convince someone that your perspective is worth considering if you're cruel to them. They might shut up, go away, or mouth words you want to hear in order to get it to stop, but in reality, you have likely entrenched them in their current frame of mind. You're likely not gaining the respect of the bystander, eitherIf I wouldn't like being the butt of the humor, I'm certainly not going to subject anyone else to it.
I'd like to see us, as a community, disavow the practice of humor with a victim. It is dishonorable. It lacks dignity. It is not constructive and it is antithetical to the compassionate world of justice which we are trying to actuate. It lacks grace. Do you agree?
UPDATE:
I want to thank everyone for some very thoughtful comment threads. I really appreciate the effort to consider what I'm bringing up. Many of you are so much pithier and more eloquent than me. Thank you for your contributions.
One question that seemed to come up often was how I viewed the humor used by the likes of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. As I see "humor with a victim" as the result of someone wielding power over another, it doesn't seem like victimizing if the object of the humor is in a position of power. Humor can, at times, be the best tool for speaking truth to power. Mehitabel9 sums up a response to the question beautifully:
This is a really good question. (1+ / 0-)
Recommended by:
UnaSpenser
And I'm not sure what the answer is, except that I don't see their humor as having 'victims' per se.
They are using humor as a way of, among other things, speaking truth to power. Sort of the same role as was once played by the King's fool. And they are using humor to expose abuses of power, abuses of privilege... in other words, I don't see TDS or TCR ridiculing people for who they are, but rather for what they do. And the targets of their ridicule are public figures and/or people in positions of power and influence over others.
I don't equate what they do with the kind of cruelty practiced in the name of 'humor' that the diarist describes. I think it's a whole different phenomenon.
Obama, 2008: "Yes We Can!"
Obama, 2010: "No, I Won't!"
by Mehitabel9 on Tue Jan 04, 2011 at 11:53:24 PM EST