The heavier the situation, the more we need jokes
Laughter is all about tension and release. And no one wants to live in absolute tension.
One of the most surprising things about hanging out with a dying person: How much you laugh. There’s so much tension and heaviness surrounding the whole thing that it needs to be punctured. After all, laughter is all about tension and release. That’s what a setup (tension) and punchline (release) provide. When death makes the environment stale, laughs are a breath of fresh air.
Why do we tell jokes about serious stuff? Exactly because those things are deadly serious: “Human beings cannot bear all that heavy weight, they alleviate the burden by humor,” according Michael Shurtleff, author of a book about auditioning.
The heavier the situation, the more we are needful of humor to endure it.
Excerpt from Everything an Actor Needs to Know to Get the Part by Michael Shurtleff [via JZ]:
A while back, I commented on this approach when discussing the We're All Friends Here show I used to co-host that talked about the dark moments in guests’ lives.
It's the most fun I have performing and it's all about being real and tension/release. Sometimes we get laughs at that show that just feel deeper and more human than the ones you get from doing jokey jokes. It's made me want to bring that same vibe to my standup. Also, I'm amazed when a standup is offstage and being really interesting talking about their own life and then they go onstage and talk about silly pop culture shit. I don't want to be like that.
When my dad went into hospice care in March of 2020 we began what would become almost an entire year of storytelling and laughing in between the more rotten moments of family drama and pain. I played some of his favorite comedy albums while he laughed so hard I thought he was going to die from choking on his own spit. That scared me at first, but I realized it would be a hell of a way to die. We laughed until the end.
One of my brothers died earlier this year and I thought I would never laugh again. Then I found myself at the sale of my house and I had a room full of strangers laughing at some stories I was sharing--that’s when I decided I wanted to learn how to do that on purpose. It’s something I have always done naturally., but to learn to do this on purpose is something else.