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Amid a global pandemic and declining living standards, there seems little to cause for laughter. Infection and hospitalization rates are climbing, businesses are slumping or shutting down completely, and schools and houses of worship are providing diminishing opportunities for personal connection. We are sicker, poorer, and more isolated—so what do we have to laugh about?
Yet we dismiss laughter at our peril. There is evidence that laughter can decrease stress levels, increase pain tolerance and sense of well-being, and open up opportunities for deeper personal relationships. It can help put things in perspective, improving mood and fostering hope. And in the workplace, it can boost engagement and collaboration.
So why don’t we laugh more? One study has suggested that babies laugh on average about 400 times per day, while in people over 35 years of age, the number is only 15. There is even evidence that a decreased tendency to laugh can be an early sign of dementia, perhaps signifying a loss of the ability to look at situations from multiple points of view. But humorlessness also has characterological causes.
Vanity
One such cause is vanity, a widely distributed vice. Studies have suggested that 80 percent of drivers think they are better than average, 87 percent of MBA students rank their academic performance above the median, and 94 percent of US professors rate themselves as superior to their colleagues.
Vanity, however, raises this better-than-thou attitude to a new level. Vain people can laugh at others but not themselves, becoming so enamored of their own perspective that they fail to get the joke. Our culture’s emphasis on self-esteem may be part of the problem—focusing on the quality of our self-regard to the point that we fail to consider whether we really deserve it.
Displays of vanity have become so routine that we often fail to notice them – posing for a selfie, jealously curating a social media image, and in general trying to appear smarter, more successful, or happier than we really are. But all too often, the joke is on us, because we are not so exceptional as we tend to suppose.
A woman explained to a confessor that she was troubled by an accusing conscience, bemoaning the fact that she often yielded to vanity. In fact, she admitted, that very day she had gazed into the mirror and reveled in her own beauty. “Is that all?” asked the priest. “Yes, father,” she replied. “Then go in peace,” he said, “for to error is not to sin.”
Those who can laugh at themselves—genuinely taking delight in their own slip-ups—display the all-important excellence of humility. Despite whatever virtue and worldly success they may enjoy, they recognize their humanity, which is to say their own fallibility. Everyone makes mistakes, but only the humble can laugh at them, and in so doing learn from them.
Priggishness
Priggishness is another source of humorlessness. A cousin of vanity, a prig demands an exaggerated degree of conformity to standards, real or imagined, that others rightly regard as trivial or unimportant. What such a person cannot compromise on as a matter of principle appears to others a trifle, hardly worth troubling anyone over.
Priggish humorlessness derives from a lack of any sense of proportion, caring more about a set of criteria or metrics than the quality of what someone has done or who they are. And it is from conforming to whatever standards of conduct that the priggish have adopted that they derive their sense of moral superiority.
Bureaucracy is an inherently priggish organizational form. The occupiers of its desks often see others only as functionaries or parts of a machine, of whom they demand an account and to whom they feel accountable only in a purely formalistic sense. The ends of the policy and procedure manual have long faded from memory, and there is nothing left to abide by but its black letters.
Consider the character of Malvolio in Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.” The dupe of an elaborate deception, he gloats that “Nothing that be can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes.” He is so wrapped up in his notion of how things ought to work that he cannot see what is actually going on around him, foolishly supposing that he is about to get far more than he could possibly deserve.
To overcome priggishness and restore a sense of humor requires a capacity to look beyond the uniform and see the human being beneath. What matters most is not whether a particular protocol has been followed but the intentions and sentiments of human beings. Here too, the antidote to self-righteousness is humility, the recognition of a shared humanity.
Perhaps the most devastating cause of humorlessness is cynicism. At least the vain believe in themselves, as the priggish believe in whatever measuring rod they have adopted. The cynic, by contrast, believes in nothing. And because the cynic rejects everything, there is no perspective from which anything could appear out of place, exaggerated, or absurd.
Cynics have no hope for humanity and regard human affairs from a profoundly pessimistic perspective. They take a perverse pleasure in seeing human pride punctured and pointing out the gaps that separate lofty ideals from mundane and even subterranean practices. To a cynic, all human actions and aspirations seem grounded in vices, such as greed.
The original cynic was Diogenes, the fourth-century Greek philosopher who was exiled for ridiculing many of his city’s conventions. He is often pictured carrying a lamp during the day, supposedly searching for an honest man. Staring at a pile of bones, he is said to have explained to Alexander that he was “searching for the bones of your father but cannot distinguish them from a slave’s.”
Like the dogs after which they are named, cynics have no sense of humor. To paraphrase Theodore Roosevelt, the cynic meets life not with a chuckle or belly laugh but with a sneer. He wrote, “There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty.”
If cynicism is to be overcome and the capacity for laughter restored, the cynic must glimpse anew the possibility of human goodness. There are more than two categories of human beings, the openly bad and the secretly bad, and the cynic must grant credence to a third. Instead of rejecting the world from a fear of rejection, the cynic is called to embrace it with hope and love.
Restoring Laughter
Regaining a sense of humor—the capacity to laugh at the world, others, and above all ourselves—is salutary. But it is more than a mere means to such ends such as physical health, mental well-being, and an enhanced fellow feeling. It is also an embrace of truth, which vanity, priggishness, and cynicism reject out of hand. Laughter need not dismiss, and in many cases, it draws us closer to the truth.
