Humor and Pain

“Some of the absurd situations are painful, but it is precisely because they are so painful that they have to be comic” (Ellison 155). This line in the reading for today struck me immediately. I feel like this is what all the authors of the novels, books, or articles that we have read this semester are reaching for. Whether it is Irby’s experience with depression or oppression as a black female, whether it is David Sedaris’ trauma in his family life and death of his sister, mother, and father, or Tiffany Midge’s recount of the Native American experience and abuse by America. All of these authors we have read are striving to make sense of pain through comedy. It is the only way to make sense of them as Ellison says.  

Even the article today is arguing for the importance of humor when speaking about sexual assault, and when speaking about how the storytelling of the narratives of sexual assault are controlled by others Gurba says, “Our storytelling habits matter and I’ve listened, with care and concern, as a certain pattern of storytelling has come into vogue. This style saturates stories of sexual assault and violence with piety, banishing irreverence from the narrative. Stories of this sort have formed their own canon and developed their own script” (Gurba). I think this is the importance of humor in pain through all the authors we have read telling their traumas, it allows the storyteller to rewrite it with their own choices, in their own way. They get to control the jokes and reclaim the narrative that was placed on them. 

 

I also think there is this way in which pain and laughter beautifully mix. My mom, on a literal example, constantly laughs so hard she cries, but it’s not the normal laugh that produces tears with continued laughter that most experience. Her laugh literally turns into this very real cry and near sob. After my grandma died (my mom’s mom), I retold this funny story to my family. My grandma was in a home and could not speak, move, or eat for almost a year, we would visit her, but it basically felt like she was already gone. On the last day I saw my grandma, which I did not know would be the last at the time, my little cousins were visiting and back in her prime, my grandma was constantly reprimanding my youngest cousin Julia who was visiting. We all sat with my immobile grandma’s and her blank stare as we ate milkshakes, and then my little cousin Julia spilled hers.  I started laughing, and I looked at my grandma who was shaking her head. I started laughing even harder, no one had noticed but me, it was the first time I had seen my grandma move or express any emotion in over a year, and it was the last time I did, and it was beautifully hilarious that it was to one last time reprimand Julia. When I told my mom this story shortly after my grandma’s death, she laughed so hard that she then transformed into a very real, raw sob. I think there is this way in which pain can transform through humor as we have seen through the authors of this course and this article, but I think one should also be careful to stray into the assumption that humor is a solution for pain. As seen with the beginning quote, some pain needs humor to be processed, but that does not mean humor is the end all be all. As seen with my mom, the pain was still there as I think it is for many of the authors this semester, humor just enables them to control the pain more.