III. Humanizing-Higher Power
A. Humanizing.
1. Paradoxical Perspective. One way of employing “humanizing humor” is to capture the seemingly contradictory or paradoxical nature of our species. For example, consider my one “holiday” joke that distinguishes the familiar phrases, “holiday blues” and “holiday stress.” Now holiday blues is the feeling of loss or sadness you have when, over the holidays, you can’t be with those people in your life who have been or are special or significant. And holiday stress…is when you have to be with some of those people!
2. Surprising and Provocative Links in Context. A second manifestation of this humor is taking natural, emotionally charged aspects of being human and then playfully linking them in an unexpected, if not witty, fashion, a fashion that may tweak convention. Remember, you often need to be sensitive to your audience’s comfort threshold and be cognizant of cultural context, especially when wading into provocative areas, like sex or religion. For example, when I moved from "devil may care" N'Awlins to politically conscious if not correct Washington, DC I had to rethink carrying over a stress workshop closing punchline: "They say laughter is the best tension reliever and sex is second…So if you're having funny sex you're probably in good shape!" (In fact, one New Orleans conference group expressed interest in bringing me back to give a talk on "Funny Sex.")
However, politically cautious DC audience dis-ease eventually required using a different close, one that played on a familiar adage. I now stress the importance of "The Serenity Prayer": "Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know where to hide the bodies!" (Okay, so you can take the boy out of "The Big Easy" but not the irreverence from the boy.) And even with this closing, I’m conscious of context. With a military audience, I modify the last phrase: “and the wisdom to know where to hide the…money!”
3. Both Self-Effacing and Self-Affirming. Humanizing humor helps me accept my flaws…with a little attitude. For example, as I've middle-aged, I occasionally take jibes about my hair loss. I firmly remind the moprakers that, "You should have more respect for my hair. It was recently placed on the World Wildlife Federation's endangered species list!"
4. Bridging Humanity and Cultural Diversity. Little did I know that such a playful yet feisty attitude about my hair (or lack thereof) would one day morph into a truly powerful response in a highly charged social setting, i.e., with a racially divided jury. Employing humor to resolve contemporary cultural conflict is dicey. Nonetheless, by carefully exploring the face-saving power of self-effacing humor, you just may discover a small "pass in the multicultural impasse." Let me illustrate. Several years back, I was on jury duty in Washington, DC. An African-American male in his early 20s was accused of selling cocaine to an undercover African-American policeman. Our jury consisted of nine African-Americans and three Caucasians. Tension was building as we deliberated upon the case. In particular, a number of the African-American jurors questioned that the police had mishandled a piece of the evidence. (To me, this piece of evidence did not appear critical in establishing the fact of the alleged sale.)
Based on the increasingly pointed and heated discussion, it was clear that most of the African-Americans were leaning toward acquittal. Two other white jurors and I along with a black middle-aged male were swaying in the opposite direction. After an informal poll and more frustratingly fruitless attempts to influence each other's position, a middle-aged black woman next to me cries out, "Well, it seems that the white folks and this one black guy are holding us up." Suddenly, this black male juror jumps up and stares hard at his accuser, i.e., the accusation being that he's just going along with "whitey." Then, in an agitated, increasingly loud voice, he challenges back: "What are you trying to say? Just what are you trying to say?" The room crackles with tension. The African-American forewoman seems paralyzed.
Now, a young black woman, on my other side, with long, pretty braids anxiously blurts out, "This is ridiculous. All we're doing is pulling our hair out." The electricity and anguish jolt me into action. I fairly shout, both at my neighbor and the others, "Hey, that's not fair. You have a lot hair more than I do." There's a startled pause...then the room erupts with laughter. The forewoman eventually says, "Guess we needed that. Now let's get back to the facts of the case." And we did, in a respectful and more tolerant manner. While we ended as a hung jury (six to six, by the way) we didn't finish a racially hung up one.
Closing Points. Escalating tension is ripe for humor intervention. And when the tension is driven by cultural concerns, if used carefully, humanizing humor can play a powerful healing and harmonizing role as its universality transcends diversity. A self-effacing humor intervention that absurdly pokes fun of one's own flaws and foibles may just sneak under that too sensitive "political correctness" radar and allow the warring parties a stress relieving laugh. And the group can productively return to the task at hand…status quo ante bellum.
B. Higher Power.
1. We're All in the Same Ark. Unfortunately, tension continues among many diverse groupings, and not just those within the human variety. According to Walt Kelly, creator of the classic cartoon, Pogo, “civilized man” is not only a danger to his own species…but endangers many others as well, including “so-called” wild animals. And while I’m not sure that Kelly was a conservationist, his cartoon certainly has timely relevance for all manner of intra- and inter-species relations. Consider his down-to-earth “higher humor” perspective. One gloriously sunny day, Kelly’s protagonist, Pogo, a warm-hearted possum, and his cynical catfish friend, Porky, are lazily boating down the Okefenokee Swamp. Porky avers, “I must say God did all right…but he should have stopped just one day sooner.” Pogo replies: “Don’t be so misanthropic, Porky. If it wasn’t for human beans life wouldn’t have so many laughs.” Porky’s immediate retort: “It wouldn’t need as many!”
Being human, we need the laughs, especially from a "higher and humanizing humor." As quoted in Part I, according to film pioneer and humorist, Charlie Chaplin, "It is precisely the tragic which arouses the funny. We have to laugh due to our helplessness in the face of natural forces and in order not to go crazy." With a touch of prophetic irony, the Pogo cartoon encourages some knowing laughter but, more importantly, Kelly is asking the human animal, one of God's mighty, if not almighty, creatures, to engage the planet and its various inhabitants with a bit more humility.
2. Let's Get Literal. Southwest Personnel also integrate humor as part of their daily "high-in-the-sky" routine. For example, I recall a flight in which a steward was giving the standard safety orientation on seat belts, emergency exits and oxygen masks. Now I suspect many listen a bit apprehensively or try to tune out the familiar speech. However, this professional humorist got everyone's attention when he calmly noted, "As part of our trip will be over water…in the unlikely event this flight becomes a cruise your seat cushion is removable." There was a palpable pause, then a wave of laughed rolled down the aisles. This ironically playful "reframe" decidedly produced some unanticipated stress relief.
3. Encourage Disarming, Daring and Defiance. With an oppositional predisposition to question or lampoon the conventional and the self-righteous and/or armed with a “higher truth” you are often ready to embark on a path that may be grand or grandiose (or maybe both. Hopefully, yours is a non-fundamentalist or fanatical truth.) The challenge: caught in an ego entangled, thorny dilemma or steeped in honor-bound, “b.s.”(be safe) tradition, can you employ a humor that removes blinders, helps others see what they can’t or won’t see, upholds diverse sides, and appreciates life’s subtleties, absurdities or possibilities. According to creativity guru, von Oech, Sacred cows make great steaks!
Actually, the struggle involved in dismantling or surmounting that sacred wall has the potential for generating uncommon vision and vistas along with fresh pathways and processes. (Of course, some of us have been around long enough to know that at times there may well be a fine line between vision and hallucination! ;-)
To see and think anew not only means getting out of the box; sometimes the box may have to be torn down or blown up. As one of the giants of 20th century art, Pablo Picasso (a man of many, and not always endearing, paradoxical qualities), observed: Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction. (Here’s where the humorless fanatic can be quite problematic: When your goal is to create an absolutely pure or “righteous” standard or society, then anyone viewed as not being one with the in-group is quickly judged to be “unpatriotic,” perhaps an “Illegal.” Or another’s differences are not simply perplexing but are deemed threatening or sinful and must be shamed and condemned; sometimes the sinner must be eliminated not just lampooned or excommunicated.)
For me Picasso is not talking about destroying individuals but about breaking away from outmoded ways of sensing and conceptualizing. You often have to disrupt habit chains or decisively challenge “less tried and now accepted as true” assumptions in order to “see what everyone else has seen and think what no one else has thought” (Albert Szent-Gyorgi, Nobrl Prize-winning scientist). And while the tearing down, explosion or breaking apart process may be painful or scary, it paves the way for two essentials for creative exploration: 1) it clears the familiar playing field; you have a new (or mostly clean) canvas to work with and 2) it often induces a state of uncertainty and confusion which may drive you to perceive and build fresh, perhaps even fantastic, connections or relationships among the seemingly disjointed or random ideas and/or elements in your head or problem-solving field. As Mark Twain noted, “wit” loves to discover, play with and combine the unexpected: Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation. Now whether this conjunction produces any brainchildren is another matter.
4. Discovering and Designing the Truth in a Lie. In addition to the creation-destruction paradigm, Picasso also proposed another seemingly contradictory epiphany: Art is the lie that reveals a greater truth! What does he mean by these “higher” paradoxical observations? For example Picasso drew a soon to be famous portrait of the women of letters and salons, Gertrude Stein. One viewer told the master that his painting did not look like its subject. Picasso’s reply, “Give it time…it will!” So artful exaggerations may foretell the future; they may also enable you to more clearly and less solemnly perceive the past and present.
Let me illustrate these two paradoxes – “destruction as creation” and “lie yielding truth” – by sketching my signature “psychohumorist” ™ 3 “D” –Discussion, Drawing & Diversity – team building exercise. Participants are divided into small groups (4-6 people/group). They are given about ten minutes to identify sources of workplace stress and conflict. That’s the easy part. Then in the same amount of time, the group must produce a team picture that captures the individual stress perspectives. Invariably, a number of the participants experience some confusion, if not anxiety, at the prospect of transforming individual perspective into collective visualization. But once the group realizes they have to discard or replace linear and logical thinking with visual metaphor and holistic figure-ground story telling through pictures, suddenly the conceptual and operational fog lifts…And creative energy and laughter erupts.
An Out-Rage-Ous Design
Here’s one of my favorite group designs. The audience was comprised of NASA and Lockheed Martin supervisors and managers. There definitely was a preponderance of analytical, left-brained individuals who, despite some initial puzzlement, threw themselves into the exercise. There was considerable workplace anxiety; news of budget cuts and personnel reorganization was in the air. One picture (done on full-size flipchart paper with broad-tipped colored markers) was a classic. On a cliff is a devil-like figure, with pointy ears and a long tail, with a trident in one hand, a whip in the other. The executive/devil is driving this flock of sheep to the cliff’s edge and beyond. Actually, the sheep have only one option: jumping off the cliff. And the safety net below has gaping holes. While the content is an exaggeration, you can’t miss the emotional message. And did you note the oppositional pairing of the devil and the sheep? Believe me, the crowd roared their approval.
Which brings us to the Picasso Paradox: As the devil vs. sheep picture reveals art may not just illustrate but also illuminate. Art may create exaggerations and even psycho-logical or out-rage-ous depictions that help dispel illusions. After another workshop, I recall a CEO observing, “I get written reports all the time. But these drawings give me a clearer sense of what’s really going on in the trenches.” Perhaps a vivid yet playful picture that provides a wider and deeper perspective may induce a “higher truth.”
Drawing with a group of colleagues who know your pain heightens emotional support and distance by placing tension producing images-issues in an exaggeratedly familiar and/or a novel or surprising psychological and situational context, thereby evoking stress-relieving laughter. Art often removes or at least poke holes in the “Emperor’s Clothes.” (Do you recall the maxims involving fear, mastery and laughter?: What was once feared and is now mastered is laughed at. And, what was once feared and is now laughed at is no longer a master!
For some NASA managers and employees there likely was a loss of positions. One manager-in-training in response to her company’s downsizing lamented: “I once had a career path then this boulder fell from the sky and crushed it.” While such pain is surely palpable, higher humor shared with kindred spirits lightens, even if temporarily, the sense of loss and may help one to let go and rise anew. As acclaimed philosopher and author, Albert Camus, observed: Once we have accepted the fact of loss we understand the loved one obstructed a whole corner of the possible, pure now as a sky washed by rain.
