When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Crack Wise (page 2 of 4)

What is it about humans that makes us want to laugh when logically we should cry? Well, for one thing, dark humor is a form of bravery. Katherine Russell Rich is the author of The Red Devil: To Hell with Cancer and Back, a laugh-out-loud chronicle of her battle against metastatic breast cancer. She's one of the 8 percent of people still here 20 years after the stage IV diagnosis. I guess laughing didn't hurt. For example, her first reaction to finding a lump in her breast was to stop having sex. WASP that she was, she didn't know how etiquette dictated she should respond if someone felt it. When she got over that fear, she embarked on what she called the Bataan Dating March, finally settling on a relationship with an alcoholic shrink. Why? Because he was usually so drunk that "he wouldn't have noticed if my head had fallen off," she says, let alone notice a lump. As the book progresses, one assumes it would be hard to get big yuks out of puking and bone-marrow transplants. But Rich somehow does.

"The worse things get, the funnier I think they are--that's just how I grew up, how I learned to handle things," she says. "But aside from that, I think you have to be funny so that other people don't freak out. I mean, it's fine to be going 'Oh my God, I have cancer' with your closest friends. But you can't do that with everyone; you can't ask the entire world to buoy you up."

Dark humor is also, for Rich, a thumb in the eye to pain. "With cancer, it's saying 'You can take my body, but you're not taking my mind,'" she says. "There's a form of macho defiance there I really like."

Humor also puts people at ease. Robert Reich is terrific at this. The former Clinton Labor secretary is four feet ten inches tall, born with a congenital disorder that stunted his growth. When he was running for governor of Massachusetts a few years ago, he'd start his speeches with "They told me to be short." Or, standing on a step stool, he'd announce, "I'm the only candidate with a real platform." His audience was comfortable with his height because he was comfortable. It's a sophisticated form of consideration.

A twisted sense of humor, I realized recently, is the common denominator among the most loving, considerate people I know. A few years ago, my friend Spencer's father died; this year, Spencer spent much of his time at the bedside of his mother, who was waging a long battle with heart disease. He loved her deeply, but he's not exactly a sensitive New Age guy. A theater fanatic, he said only this in the e-mail announcement when his mother died: "Well, I can finally join the chorus of Annie."

Arnie Cann is a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, who studies the role of humor in stress-specifically, how humor helps us cope. He has demonstrated what we all know instinctively: that being able to laugh after a trauma limits the awful effects of the traumatic event. But the question is, What kind of humor helps? In a study soon to be published in the International Journal of Humor Research, Cann used a psychological measure of humor styles, developed by Canadian researcher Rod Martin, to see how different kinds of funniness helped people deal with stress.

A couple of the humor styles measured, so-called aggressive and affiliative humor, had no effect one way or the other on how people perceived stress. Aggressive humor is exactly what it sounds like: attacking or teasing others for laughs. Think Polish jokes, think Lisa Lampanelli. Affiliative humor is a more general joking-around about neutral subjects: the weather, the latest Top Ten list on Letterman, etc. But two styles-so-called self-enhancing and self-defeating-did matter.

"We asked people to think about stressful experiences in the past month," says Cann. "People high in self-enhancing humor simply don't perceive as much stress in their lives as people with a self-defeating humor style."

Self-defeating humor (think Rodney Dangerfield: "When I was a kid, my parents moved a lot, but I always found them") can help make you more popular. After all, most of us like people who are funny and modest. But, says Cann, self-defeating humor "led to higher levels of stress."

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