No joke: humour helps people cope during dark times

A classic Steve Martin joke goes: First the doctor told me the good news: I was going to have a disease named after me.

The joke provides some timely, if dark, levity as people cope with on-going COVID-19 measures. But, according to SFU English professor Diana Solomon, that levity is exactly how comedy helps people weather adverse situations.

“Humour can help us respond to this kind of adverse situation in a couple of ways,” says Solomon. “It allows us to temporarily escape from tragedy and also gives us a way of taking back some kind of control.”

People can feel helpless in current circumstances. But Solomon says that humour can help people reframe their perspective, which can be empowering.

Whether the source is fictional or historical, comedy can provide relief from its tension.

In Restoration-era tragedy plays, one of Solomon’s areas of expertise, the final act typically concluded with many characters dying gruesomely. But at the end of the play, a character would sometimes ‘rise from the dead’ to deliver a humourous epilogue.

“This epilogue was made all the more funny because of its incongruity with the rest of the play,” says Solomon. “Nobody expects a corpse to get up, speak and tell jokes after a tragedy.”

Comedy can also empower people to recover from past trauma and ‘reclaim’ history. Solomon points to movies such as The Producers, Life is Beautiful and The Great Dictator that frame Nazis or the Holocaust in a comic manner.

“One way to reclaim a tragic event is to inject comedy into a retelling of it,” says Solomon. “It’s one way of dealing with a horrific event.”

Similarly, Solomon says the Getty Museum challenge, a social media trend where people recreate classic works of art with household items, is an example of people using humour as a way to cope with being stuck inside.

Not everyone will find the same joke funny and comedy frequently teeters on the edge of appropriateness.

“It’s common to think, especially when you’re going through the dark times, that humour can be thought of being too soon,” says Solomon. “We’ve all told jokes that have fallen flat.

“But comedy can also bring us together and can help us in this time of isolation and loneliness.”

For sources of levity, Solomon recommends the following from her areas of study (and available for free online): anything by Jane Austen, Frances Burney’s Evelina, Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

“These are all great historical examples of good comedy that might be enjoyable during these dark times,” says Solomon.

Contemporary book recommendations include writer Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation.

Other stand-out mentions go to stand-up comedy specials by Wanda Sykes and Hannah Gadsby. Solomon also recommends Canadian comedy acts such as the Baroness Von Sketch Show and Vancouver-based The Lady Show.

SFU students, faculty and staff can access numerous comedy movies (and other genres) through the SFU Library’s Criterion On Demand service.