Humor and Profit

Sigmund Freud considered humor to be a very useful tool to prevent nervous tensions, and that humor could be used to good effect in therapy.

In 1905, he wrote the book  “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious”. He tells us that encounters with the absurd is a source of joy, and that the purpose of the joke is to protect this joy from being by invalidated by critical sense. According to Freud, a vital property of the joke is that it is economical; it saves us from the trouble of having to always think sensibly, be paragons of virtue and humane all the time. Humor’s purpose is to make us forget the drudgery of everyday life, keep boredom at bay and ultimately give us new insights, like Freud shows that a joke can, if only it’s intelligent enough.

Freud gives this example in the book: A criminal who’s about to be executed on a Monday morning says: “Ah, this is a good start to a new week”. This is literally a gallows humorist, who knows where it will end. But despite the tragic undertones and the black humor, this type of joke retains its kinship with the innocent joke, because the aim is to bring about a release, a feeling of joy in the recipient.” ‘The point of a joke is to be of pleasure in an otherwise unpleasant culture. “In Paradise you will at best find little smiles, no humor. Angels don’t tell jokes. But Freud does,” writes Tor Ulven in the preface to the Norwegian translation of Freud’s book.

During the Blitz in London, when a huge number of buildings were bombed and badly damaged, if not completely destroyed, shopkeepers put up signs saying: “OPEN AS USUAL”. One shop had only one wall left standing and had a sign that said: “MORE OPEN THAN USUAL”. This kind of irrepressible humor helped the British to stay united and strong in the fight against Hitler.

Mentally, laughter is the opposite of stress. Both can be a reaction to things not going the way we want. But with humor, we don’t experience the discrepancy as threatening, as we do when we are stressed. These two completely different perceptions of a difficult situation lead to three other dissimilarities:

1) When we laugh at our problems, we don’t feel a loss of control as we would when we feel stressed.

2) The mental horizon does not narrow into tunnel vision with focus on the here and now as in stress; with humor we are better able to keep the problem at a distance.

3) Whereas stress controls us, humor enables clarity of thought and improves the ability to decide what’s important, so we can take decisive action and solve the problem.

We can therefore draw the conclusion that research gives reason to believe that a better sense of humor and greater use of humor will reduce the debilitating effects of prolonged stress.

Rod A. Martin and Herbert. M. Lefcourt, doctors at the University of Ontario, Canada studied the connection between humor and the ability to adjust to big and stressful challenges. The subjects did four tests designed to measure the ability to use a sense of humor in different circumstances. Three of the four tests showed that those who valued humor the highest were also best at tackling tension and personal problems. Dr Annette Goodhart, a psychologist from Santa Barbara, found that with humor you face your personal problems in a more relaxed and creative manner.