Verified by 
Key points
- Distancing ourselves emotionally from certain events helps us cope with difficult situations.
- This is especially true when we redefine some “deficiencies” as “vulnerabilities” in order to make them amenable to humor.
- It is emotional distancing that permits us to joke about incredibly solemn and tragic moments from both our personal and collective histories.
In prior posts, I offered my take on laughter’s meaning and posited how we derive certain social benefits from its expression. I discussed how certain actions or circumstances highlight our own and others’ vulnerabilities, and why these might prompt a laugh response. Such naturally occurring or spontaneous reminders are instances one might describe as being funny. “When you spilled water on your lap, I laughed because I found it funny.” “I chuckled when you inadvertently said ‘my nude boyfriend’ instead of ‘my new boyfriend’ because I thought that was funny.” And, “When you accidentally locked yourself out of your apartment wrapped only in a bath towel, I considered that funny too.”
However, because laughter says something important about others' feelings, reveals attitudes concerning equality, friendship, and status, and makes them feel good when they do, it seems inevitable that we would occasionally try to deliberately solicit it. These purposeful attempts to bring about feelings of amusement—the emotion that, above a certain threshold, prompts one to laugh—are what we typically refer to when we speak of “humor.”
Humor’s relationship to laughter
Philosophers and scientists have long relied on humor in their attempts to understand why people laugh. After all, expressions of spontaneous laughter can be quite unpredictable. One can people-watch for hours or days and never see anyone express it. For this reason, researchers who believe laughter is a quantifiable (or at least describable) aspect of human behavior tend to conduct research where laughter shows up most reliably—in association with humor.
Unfortunately, this approach has led many into a complex maze where cause and effect become hopelessly entangled. Do we laugh because something is humorous or is something humorous because we laugh? Sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and others have searched for common themes or methodologies in various forms of humor. Humor was compared and classified, and its functions were expounded and celebrated, but a unifying theory of humor and laughter remained elusive (Apte 1985, Craik and Ware 1998, Esar 1952, Gruner 1978, Keith-Spiegel 1972).
The conclusion I reached in my investigation was that laughter cannot be fully understood if we look only at its secondary effects on our behavior. I don’t believe that laughter evolved as an appropriate response to a clown or a comic, to a joke or a pun. Spontaneous expressions of mutual vulnerability came first; intentionally inspiring those sentiments through the use of humor, I would argue, came later.
Indeed, much of what we would consider humor is nothing more than an anecdote relating unscripted events or situations we found “funny” at some prior time. More advanced incarnations of humor are intricate, complex, and often quite subtle, but at their heart there is always vulnerability, a status shift, and a desire to lift or lower others. I will be focusing on humor over the next few months but, before I delve into this highly complex topic, I must begin with a critically important concept—distancing.
Distancing as a concept
Distancing is a term that denotes a process or sense of diminished emotional attachment. It can result from either a decrease in personal interrelationship or from an increase in knowledge. Distancing is something we experience with nearly all emotion-related phenomena.
What do I mean by a “decrease in personal interrelationship”? In one sense, it refers to the diminution of my emotional response to something that is happening, or has happened, to me as compared to the same thing happening to another individual—a first-person versus second- or third-person distinction. As a general rule, how intensely one feels about any given event or circumstance depends on how directly it affects him or her. Getting caught in a downpour affects you totally; the same misfortune befalling a family member somewhat less so, to a coworker even less, and to a recent acquaintance even less than that. As such, a fall while ice skating might be considered not the least bit funny to the one who fell, slightly amusing to his or her companion, and hilarious to a stranger nearby. This is distancing by virtue of progressively reduced social interdependence.
A variation of this type of emotional detachment arises with the passage of time. Time tends to affect the way in which we reflect on both events in our own lives and our connection to others. The angst, embarrassment, concern, and even horror we feel at the moment vulnerabilities and deficiencies are first revealed typically fade over the course of days, months, and years.
Information, too, can promote a kind of distancing. With the additional knowledge of their consequences, traits or actions once considered serious deficiencies might now be understood as examples of amusing vulnerabilities. If a race car driver lost control and crashed into a wall, most emotionally mature individuals would find nothing amusing in it whatsoever. After learning that the driver wasn’t hurt, though, the same event might well become fair game for humor.
Distancing as it relates to laughter and humor
The concept of distancing is critical to a comprehensive understanding of both laughter and, especially, humor. It’s what allows us to transform, in our minds, traits and events that would otherwise be interpreted as deficiencies to that which we can now regard as vulnerabilities. It’s precisely what Mel Brooks referred to when he remarked: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” Distancing allows us to joke about the most tragic events in human history: genocides, slavery, wars, famines, pandemics, earthquakes, global extinctions—the natural and manmade disasters that have plagued our species since its dawn. But, because they happened to distant strangers or took place many years in the past, they have become, in the right context, fair game as topics for humor.
For an example of how distancing plays into humor, check out this clip.
This article was drawn from Chapter 4 of my book Why We Laugh: A New Understanding.
© John Charles Simon
References
Apte, Mahadev. (1985). Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Craik, K. H. and A P. Ware. (1998). Humor and Personality in Everyday Life. In W. Ruch (Ed.), The Sense of Humor: Explorations of a Personality Characteristic. New York: Mouton de Gruyte.
Esar, E. (1952). The Humor of Humor. New York: Horizon Press.
Gruner, C. R. (1978). Understanding Laughter: The Workings of Wit and Humor. Chicago: Nelson-Hall.
Keith-Spiegel, P. (1972). Early Conceptions of Humor: Varieties and Issues. In J. H. Goldstein and P. E. McGhee (Eds.), The Psychology of Humor: Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Issues. New York: Academic Press.
