Nothing Like a Good Laugh
By Dr. Shari Beecher, PhD.
Earlier in the week I had posted a meme about how future students may be writing papers on the purpose of posting memes during the pandemic. It really got me thinking about why we post them on Facebook. All of them seem to have humor attached to them, so we will investigate the role of humor.
Humor is a highly complex behavioral pattern involving personal bias, personality, and knowledge for various reasons. One reason may be to engage in personal relations. Sometimes we include humor in our conversations in order to lighten the topic or to allow cohesion with our audience. Often, people may use humor as a coping mechanism to deal with a stressful situation.
How does humor help us cope with stressful situations? In situations when we are experiencing anxiety, our minds are looking for ways to diffuse the anxiety. Humor is used as a coping mechanism to muffle and diffuse anxiety. When we are trying to function in a world that is full of insecurities, we think of different ways to reframe the way things are going in order to make since of our world. Some of the different ideas we come up with to reframe the situation are unsystematic or untidy according to social norms. Yet, the reframing helps us to see the situation from a totally different angle. This different angle gives our mind possible answers to lower our anxiety, no matter how unique the expressions are.
Humor can be expressions of wisdom. By reframing how we look at a situation, we are problem solving resourcefully. We problem solve by making use of our imagination--a combination of thought and emotion--in order to come up with a creative alternative to the situation at hand. Humor is unsystematic and allows us to not stay within society norms. Thinking “outside the box” is allowed when we use humor. It gives us unique funny ways to view situations.
Right now, it seems nothing is normal in society or life. We can use humor to lighten the moment when we are talking to others or help make a connection with others we are talking to. It is possible that the memes we post and read on Facebook are all a part of our problem -solving skills. We are trying to make since of something that currently, makes no sense. Isn’t it amazing how God made us with so many strategies to cope with the world we live in?