The Humor That Hurts
Richard L. Evans
A sense of humor would seem to be one of life’s essentials – that is, a wholesome sense of humor. But there is a humor that heals, a humor that helps, and a humor that harms and hurts.
And one kind of humor that hurts is the humor that brings embarrassing attention to adverse personal attributes and physical features; the humor, for example, that ridicules what people can’t help; the “baldly,” “fatty,” “skinny,” “stand-up-shorty” kind of humor that is, at best, unkind, and is, at worst, cruel and crude and cutting.
The person who is subject to such humor half-heartedly or helplessly laughs, and others may also, but with embarrassment. And despite all laughter and supposed amusement, hurts run deep in the human heart, and the person subjected to such humor, whether he laughs or not, is often deeply wounded and pitifully defenseless.
Sometimes it almost seems, as William Hazlitt said: “We grow tired of everything but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects.” “The spirit, Sir, is one of mockery,” said Robert Louis Stevenson. Such “a joke,” said Thomas Fuller, never gains over an enemy, but often loses a friend.”
There are some kinds of humor for which everyone pays too high a price, including the humor that violates human dignity – the humor that ridicules and hurts and embarrasses and embitters, publicly or privately. From Lord Byron and Edward Young we recall these couplets:
“And that sarcastic levity of tongue,
The stinging of a heart the world hath stung.”“Who, for the poor renown of being smart,
Would leave a sting within a brother’s heart.”
Music and the Spoken Word, 9 March 1969
I wish I could get my kids to understand this. Maybe I’ll read this to them, since they don’t accept the same sentiment from me. They are really into “roasting” each other, and then, when reprimanded, insisting, “come on Mom, it was a joke, lighten up”.
Some of my most shameful memories are of when I said something which I knew would be funny, but which I didn’t realize until just after I said it would be hurtful. I have begun to feel, of late, the some– perhaps even most– of the pain of sin is knowing that you have caused someone else harm, and not feeling powerful to fix it.
I have dimmed but still painful memories of the things kids in my own Junior High used to say to me; I’m not sure if they thought it was funny, but I do know that the one time my inner mamma bear came out this school year (I work in a middle school) was when I found out that one of my boys had called one of my girls an unacceptably gruesome name. The other teachers prevented me from committing bloodshed. Also, my boy saw the look in my eye, and has been pretty meek ever since. What I actually told him is that it seemed to me that he had a lot of something, and was mocking someone who didn’t have very much of that thing, and that was just plain mean, and that he could do better, and that he should do better, and that I expect him to behave better than that. I feel like a lot of the unkind humor around is about power, and that’s part of why I’m so willing to tackle it head on like that. If we don’t teach the younglings, our civilization really IS doomed. 🙂 /end rant