laughing as a healing practice

can comedy be a form of therapy?

If you think that women are people, the last few weeks have been complete mayhem. But it’s during moments of darkness and chaos that I find it’s the most pivotal to remain not just hopeful, but dare I say jovial.

Yes, a bunch of men used the dumbest arguments I’ve ever heard to take away the most basic rights that women have left. It’s been appalling. I went into detail about some of the preposterous abortion pill decisions that have come out in the last month, but the TL;DR is that the bad guys lost. Nothing has changed, and you can still get abortion pills wherever it’s legal and even in states where it’s not, as I have told ad nauseum at this point! The reason why I sound like a broken record and keep yodeling about the fact that you can still get abortion pills anywhere is that I believe it’s crucial that we hammer home that abortion bans are a joke. They don’t work and women will keep getting abortions. The more anti-choicers are shameless in their attacks, the more fearless we need to be in our response. These rulings aren’t rooted in logic or science, and the laws or policies that they’re born out of don’t even work anyways. When we take abortion opponents seriously, we give them more power than they have or deserve. That’s why laughing at them doesn’t just feel good or offer momentary relief, it’s an act of political resistance.

feministabulous

A post shared by Liz Plank (@feministabulous)

If it feels natural for me to disempower anti-abortion zealots with zingers, it’s because I’ve always relied on humor to save me. Whether it’s a dreadful abortion ruling or some other disappointing event in my life, my primitive response is usually to make a joke about it. I think it comes easy to me because I grew up with a sister that was always game to turn tragedy into comedy. We recently were interviewed by Angélique Gay to celebrate the launch of my sister’s new book inspired by our grandparents journey from a refugee camp to Canada. In our conversation, my sister distilled our childhood as a steadfast commitment to silliness. “We were like Little Women when we were kids. Little Goofy Women. We wrote plays. Our brains together are like creative fusion,” my sister Emilie said. “Being creative with you made me feel better.”

little cold goofy women.

With time I’ve come to understand that comedy wasn’t just a form of escape for me and my sister, it was a way to cope and understand the chaotic world we inhabited.

Carol Burnett once said that “comedy is tragedy plus time,” but I actually find that laughter is most restorative when we’re still in the thick of it. Don’t get it twisted, I’m certainly not advocating for toxic positivity and opting for denial. But I don’t think we have to wait to be over it, to laugh at it. So many times in my life, humor wasn’t the light at the end of tunnel, it was the little flashlight that helped guide me back home.

And science agrees with me. Laughing doesn’t just provide psychological safety or escape, it has significant physical benefits that help us cope with stress. It lowers our cortisol levels by increasing our intake of oxygen, decreases our heartbeat as well as blood pressure, it even stimulates our dopamine and serotonin production, increases serum immunoglobulins A and E and even makes our immune system more resistant to diseases. Some experts even believe that we are evolutionary wired to laugh as a signal to ourselves and others that danger is low, that our needs are met and that we are safe.

If there was a free medicine that was available to anybody, without a prescription and without any side effects, that provided all these positive benefits to combating anxiety and depression, wouldn’t we all be taking it?

laughing at ron de santis, probably.

Often, I’ve felt like I needed to know if something ends well, before I can make jokes about it. I’ve come to realize that this was just an illusion of control posing as a healthy coping mechanism. We never know the outcome, and that’s actually what makes life worth living. Sometimes I’ll catch myself desperately wanting to predict exactly how a relationship, job or situation will turn out. My brain tricks me into believing that if I know what will happen, I can protect myself from it, when I know I don’t actually have that kind of authority over the universe. And besides, if we knew everything that was going to happen, would life be any fun?

As Charles W. Ferguson writes, “the essence of tragedy is to know the end.” So whether it’s the daily news cycle or anything else stressing you in your life right now, enjoy not knowing how it ends, and giggling as you patiently wait to find out.