Photo by Jacky Lam on Unsplash

The role of humor, laughter and how being funny can help us live better lives no matter what the challenge may be

This is an article about living near Portland, but also about living well. Yeah, that’s a cop, but stay with me here.

So yesterday I took a mental health afternoon and drove the nearly two hours to the smallish-but-growing town of Tualatin, just south of Portland. I spent the entire trip talking to my buddy Melissa. We were on speaker phone, the phone was out of my hands and on my seat. I had the directions to the TJ Maxx Home Goods on Nyberg, which is just past a sometimes confusing highway junction. I have missed the exit before.

We hung up just as I approached the Tualatin exit. TuaIatin is a feeder community just south of Portland, about fifteen minutes or so out of town. At this exit is a large selection of big box stores, with a big, busy parking lot. I put the phone to my ear to check the directions, got off the Interstate, parked. Then I realized that the cop car with the lights on was stopping for me.

Really?

Busted. Phone to ear. Since 2018, this has been a big deal in Oregon. He was nice, I was surprised. Well, crap. It’s a big fine. However, being who I am, we were talking pleasantly when I glanced at the ticket. There was a box- god help me I can’t recall the exact wording- something having to do with mental (fill in the blank). I read the words as “mental infidelity.” Not what it said, but what I read.

It absolutely skewered my funny bone.

I broke out laughing. Couldn’t help it. Cop leans in, wants to know what I find so funny about a really nasty ticket. I point to the box, helpless with laughter, and asked him,

“Mental capacity compared to WHAT?”

Okay. That cracked HIM up.

Next thing I know, he asks me when I served. Vietnam, I told him, and explained I did half my tour enlisted, half officer.

He said, “My dad served in Vietnam.”

Before I could say, “Please thank him for his service for me,” the cop rips the ticket out of my hand, folds it up, smiles at me, and says,

“Stay off the phone, okay?” Waves goodbye, gets in his cruiser and disappears.

WHAAAA?

I suspect that cops don’t often pull folks over who then make them laugh. And I would also bet that said laugh break was one of the better parts of his day, given that they probably get their fair share of abuse.

Maybe that's just Oregon courtesy. No idea, but I sure was grateful.

Why is this so important? This article explores a bit of why, but the main idea is that humor- not hurtful humor- is disarming. It breaks tension, allows people to relax, and offers an important break in sometimes unending anxiety. Humor draws joy like honey draws bees, and it has the same effect: people gather around it like a lovely fountain.

Particularly this past year with so many of us under incredible stress, the ability to find some kind of release in part can depend on our ability to find the humor in our situation. Often faced with terrible losses, and with Portland in particular a hot spot for tension involving the guys in blue, our ability to be slightly more gentle in our interactions with each other can go a long way towards making life smoother. This article explains how. Two key points from that article which really stood out:

Laughter lightens anger’s heavy load. Nothing diffuses anger and conflict faster than a shared laugh. Looking at the funny side can put problems into perspective and enable you to move on from confrontations without holding onto bitterness or resentment.

Laughter may even help you to live longer. A study in Norway found that people with a strong sense of humor outlived those who don’t laugh as much. The difference was particularly notable for those battling cancer.

While there are times that laughter can get you in serious trouble (like giggling at the size of someone’s well, you know, for example, or being Black and getting pulled over, but that’s another article and it’s not for me to write) the ability to find the funny in the poopstorms of life is the only real superpower I possess. It’s also one of the best skills you will ever develop.

Photo by Marcelo Rangel on Unsplash

People love funny. They crave funny. And while outrage gets you eyeballs, funny gets you friends.

Helping people see the absurd around them, something that my fellow Floridian-escapee-now-Canadian friend Nicole does with wicked skill, is a very highly-developed emotional quotient. Not everyone can do it, and for my part it can come and go depending on how much pain I’m in, but most of the time the humor muscle I’ve worked hard to build pays off.

The article above points out:

Humor helps you stay resilient in the face of life’s challenges. But there are times when humor is not healthy—and that’s when it is used as a cover for avoiding, rather than coping with, painful emotions. Laughter can be a disguise for feelings of hurt, fear, anger, and disappointment that you don’t want to feel or don’t know how to express.

That's not healthy humor, but rather humor as a mask for what can be genuinely damaging behaviors. If you're in the habit of snark as a way to be funny, who loses? Ultimately you do, but after how much damage to others? Funny stuff used to help us bond, break tension and allow us to think more creative is positive. Humor used to belittle just hurts everyone involved.

Back to Tualatin.

So I bought WAY too much stuff, wandered over to the Cabela's, bought WAY too much more stuff. By then the sun was starting to sink, in that late afternoon way of the Pacific Northwest. The I-5 corridor is dangerous at any time, but at night it's worse, which is is just one reason you can't hold your phone in one hand. So I didn't, but I did make another call on speaker phone. It's a long two-hour drive back home and that helps me stay alert.

I had the phone on the seat again, and was talking to another friend of mine, who is incredibly smart and savvy. I told her this story:

Ten days ago I was hanging a very heavy, tall, carved wood Buddha statue from Thailand on a high wall in my living room. I was pounding in three huge, thick screw bolts into the big plank on top of a wall at least ten feet high. You had to use a hammer to start the bolts, then slip a screwdriver through the eye to screw them in using the screwdriver as leverage. Hard work.

I was whaling away on the third bolt with everything I had- and you can see what’s coming- the hammer skewed off the curved top of the bolt and exploded the tip of my middle finger of my left hand.

The same finger that I had fractured in a car accident last year, that was just getting back to normal. The same tip of the finger that I had just gotten caught in a folding door and given myself a a blood blister an inch long.

THAT finger.

Blood everywhere.

I calmly put the hammer down, slowly backed down the step ladder, cleaned up the blood, wrapped my screaming, cursing, exploded-like-a-water-balloon finger in ice, and sat cursing at the top of my lungs until the worst of the pain wore off. Aided along by two very potent pain pills. Then I wrapped it up, climbed the step ladder, finished the job, and got that GD effing Buddha on the GD effing wall.

Where it beamed down at me, all serenity and light, while my finger shrieked

I HATE YOU.

By evening, I was done with chores. Took off the wrapping. It was bad. Two hours, five shots and six stitches later, I had the perfect response to those MAGA morons storming the Capitol:

Julia Hubbel

A middle finger with a big fat white condom. That's just funny.

Since I had last week managed to re-fracture my right pinky toe on my bike trainer, I was back to precisely where I was six months ago: one hand down, one foot down. The Black Knight from Monty Python. You cannot make this stuff up.

I had tears running down my cheeks, retelling this story. It gets funnier every time I tell it.

Silence.

My friend said,

“I can’t see what’s funny about that.”

Which made me laugh even harder, much to her consternation.

Which is why, at ten years my junior, she has much deeper frown lines than I do, and she has a harder time with online criticism than I do.

I see that kind of thing as comedy fodder. So does Nicole. And as Nicole wrote me this morning, she gets vilified by folks who may not always see what she’s doing and why she’s doing it. Which, kindly, doesn’t make them stupid. It may well mean that the investment in anger, which often is wholly justified, may be in the way of being able to see things from different angles. Those angles - which you and I can use for humor- may well be the doorways to solutions that laughter unlocks.

If you're a football fan, and I am , you might recall two very famous moments in both playoff and Super Bowl history. Two of the sport's finest quarterbacks were backed up: in one case, John Elway's Broncos against the Cleveland Browns, and Joe Montana's 49ers against the Ohio Bengals in 1989. Apparently Ohio teams weren't faring well against funny guys those years, because in both cases, leaders on both teams, both backed up more than 90 yards and in the shadows of their own goalposts, used humor to relax their teams. Both teams marched down the field won, and paraded into NFL history.

The wisest among us, as writers, friends, parents, teachers or pastors, understand the searing power of humor to peel back, often with sarcasm, the thick layers of self-righteousness and anger that so many of us wear as armor. I do it too, I suspect we all do. However this is why many on the Far Right AND Far Left despise Bill Maher. Those who are equal-opportunity mockers of our ridiculousness give us the chance to watch, with equal hilarity, how we so often miss the point, we can’t see the absurd, and because we can’t allow ourselves the great relief of laughter at said absurdity, are dragged into the depths by it. People with a few brain cells can laugh at themselves. Those missing those brain cells find offense (stay with me here, we can grow them..look, if I could, anyone can).

The Far Right and the Far Left would find offense if someone swatted a fly in outer Siberia, but I digress.

However, and this is fair to say, that when we are in great pain, it can be very hard to see the funny, but therein lies the Deep Work. Deep Work allows us to laugh at the absurd simply because we are looking at it from an oblique angle, and said new angle allows us to create different solutions. THAT is my point (finally, geez Louise). It is immensely difficult to move forward with ideas and creativity when our anger is acting as serious mental constipation.

However if you are as full of bull as I am, that is a lifetime challenge.

Photo by Brian Lundquist on Unsplash

The more serious the issue, the more important it is that we find the absurdity in it.

Why is this so critically important (FOR CRYING OUT LOUD FINALLY SHE GETS TO IT)? Because when you and I can wield humor, sarcasm and other tools to get people to burst out laughing, we also open their doors to release, greater creativity, and a badly-needed comedy moment. Mark Twain famously wrote that comedy is tragedy plus time. Much to the annoyance of many around me I can often see the funny a lot faster than they can. It is most often at my own expense, which makes it a lot safer for people who FAR too often takes themselves FAR too seriously.

As do too many of us.

While I can’t speak for anyone else, I am aware that some topics, especially around race, are indeed deadly serious. Still, the more serious, the more important, to my mind; it’s even more important to tease out the absurdity.

When I can see the absurdity, that is where I also see potent, powerful connections that weren’t obvious before. For my part that is the genius of comedy. Comedy is putting two and two together and getting a turkey turd. But the process of getting there is a teacher of facts, perspective and above all, connectivity between and among previously hidden elements. That is what makes you immensely powerful: helping people see those connections. When people laugh, they can see differently. When they see differently, they are often a lot more open.

The other great and abiding truth is that which we find funny, diminishes in its threat to us. Threats ONLY hold the power we allow them. Again, when it comes to difficult and deeply complex issues like race, I am not trying to minimize the cost. I AM saying that when we can undermine the stupidity we see with humor, we gain power over those threats, rather than the other way around.

That is precisely what Viktor Frankl wrote about in Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl wrote:

“Humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.”

I don’t doubt for one moment that one of the survival techniques that Holocaust survivors used was dark humor. Again, sometimes that is all we have left to us, and it is one mighty sword. When we teach others how to wield it, we give them great, abiding and lifelong power. It is one way that the medical community has managed to survive Covid, at least so far.

Is there a point here? Hell, I don’t know. There sure isn’t on the tip of my left middle finger; I smashed the holy crap out of it, bone and all, and have a horizontal blast zone to mark where I really did nearly take the top off. And yet, ten days later, here I am typing 140 wpm, because….

laughing heals.

If you get nothing from this other than I am really clumsy, get this:

LAUGHING HEALS.

I have laughed myself back into shape after some of the most godawful injuries you can imagine. I healed a forty-year eating disorder when I started to find the funny about it.

Had I not found my funny I’d have been dead years ago. Which might have done the local tulip crop a lot more good than my writing but I digress.

You and I can do a great deal more good in the world when we can, at least on occasion, make fun of the stupid stuff we do as humans. Hell. Look around. Please tell me you don’t see comedy material everywhere.

Mine starts as soon as I pad into my bathroom and look in the mirror.

Deposit photos. Not me but close.

That’s my god killer.

That is what makes me Wonder Woman. It sure ain’t my looks, my athletic prowess (BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHA) or my charm.

But at least I’m having fun. Laughing at my friend's over seriousness got me home alive on a dark night driving the I-5 corridor.

AND I don’t have to pay that ticket to the state of Oregon.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this story, here’s my hopefully gentle way of ushering you to click the box below to follow my stuff. When you do that, I’ll know you’re comfortable with hearing from me once in a while.

Enjoy laughing at life's silliness? Join me!

...

Follow