The year 2020 marks all the end of an era and the awareness that many things will change definitively from now on. According to Hegel, all civilizations end up with a laugh; According to the philosopher, Aristophanes marks the end of the Greek society, Cervantes the end of the feudal society, Stern and Rossini the end of their era.
We wait to see which Humor will accompany us in this new epochal passage.
A patient who followed years ago often repeated: “Whoever does not laugh is not a serious person”, a phrase that has often returned to me in recent times.
Actually Humor is a serious matter. We laugh in every culture and language and laughs all in the same way; Nobody will ever wonder: “In what language is the other laughing?”. You learn to smile even before speaking, around the tenth week of life, discovering a little at a time, during the existence, its various functions.
Fedor Dostoevsky believed humor a useful tool to get to know and get to know each other; He said: “To get to know a man it is necessary to study not his silence or his way of speaking or crying but what he laughs.”
Allows you to feed pleasure despite the adversities of life.
Contributes to the aesthetics of a person, so much so that it becomes a constitutive element of beauty; Those who have no sense of humor appears rigid, inflexible, inhibited, repressed, not very authentic and overall less attractive. The opposite of humor is not serious but seriousnessto term that refers to something not beautiful.
Humor can have a strengthening function of real statements. Karl Kraus said about the accident: “He never coincides with the truth: either it is a half truth or a truth and a half”. The Latin poet Orazio found nothing strange in being able to affirm the real laughing.
Humor as many human characteristics are not imprisoned in simple and univocal definitions. To exist it needs the activation, indispensable, of a network whose nodes are made up of linguistic, social, cognitive elements; Hence its complexity.
The method of response to humor that requires understanding is also complex (cognitive component) and the appearance of a joyful mood (emotional component) which lead to conduct final consisting of the act of laughing.
Like a bifronte Janus, it can show a benevolent, useful, adaptive or aggressive and maladactive face.
The adaptive side shows him in the affiliation function – an interpersonal dimension – useful in promoting relationships with others and the sense of belonging. Those who use this form of humor usually have a good level of self -esteem, the stretches of extroversion and a greater propensity to have friendly relationships, all aspects that protect from many psychic problems.
Humor self-rehabilitationmainly intrapsychic, it is useful for strengthening some functional attitudes towards life, allowing you to select and re -propose the most adaptive methods, useful for facing the difficulties.
Being able to smile of ourselves not only improves learning but preserves us from possible aggressive self-assessments and their load of negative emotion that would be added to that deriving from the difficult situation we are trying to face.
Humor can try to achieve a goal by taking on the form of self-evaluation. In this case L‘Autodenigration and the ridiculous aim to want to please the other in order not to be considered dangerous or threatening, thus enjoying the benefits that derive from the proximity to those who are considered useful.
It is good not to overdo it with this form that if prevalent compromises the levels of self -esteem and well -being; Paracelsus reminds us that it is the dose that makes the poison.
Humor can become an instrument aggressive through the derision of the other With the prevailing intent of making feelings of shame and humiliation experience.
It seems that at the origin this form of humor had a social function whose intent was to induce in the other changes to conduct considered incorrect.
With this end used with this end, a sort of superiority decrees, we feel better when the object of humor is the other: we feel better and the other learns something useful on being in the world.
These are the reasons why it makes us smile to see a brown, pompous gentleman, who treats others sufficiently, while he stumbles on a sidewalk and falls lying on the ground. The same state of mind is not activated in us if a fragile or vulnerable subject falls to the ground, a situation in which we put aside any smile and worried we hurry to give rescue.
As often happens, conduct born with a certain purpose forgive their initial objectives of sight and can simply become toxic, in this case an aggression aimed at itself for the taste of exercising it, of no use.
Regardless of its various forms, humor is considered to be the outcome of an inconsistency that suddenly shows itself in a certain situation, in a story, in a reasoning, in a game of words, causing an unexpected reversal of the point of view.
In seeing or feeling something we have expectations and hypotheses on how the situation will develop. The humorous event refutes our expectations and manages to surprise us. The theory of humor as an inconsistency that makes the sense of a story skipped by overturning it suddenly is one of the explanations on which many agree.
Like other forms of emotional intelligence – like resilience, empathy, listening, socialization skills – Humor can be trained And this at the cerebral level would translate into a better activity of the areas in charge of creating associations between different contents (such as the temporal lobe) and the nuclei involved in the reward system (such as the ventral striped nucleus).
This occurs both in those who “produce” humor and in those who “benefit”; The only difference is that in the former the reward system is activated first (the desire to be appreciated for the joke) and then the associative activity while in the latter the reverse would happen (first the connections are created and then the reward that consists in laughing).
But understanding the mechanisms behind humor perhaps mainly affects the technicians. The benefits of its use are much greater, welcoming it as it is without asking us “what and why”.
In allowing us to build alternative visions of events, even the stressful ones, humor helps us overcome them better. In fact, like other emotions, such as fear, it allows us to face the problems, not trying to reject them.
In this way we understand its importance and because we must consider it a serious thing, especially in this period.
Bibliography
- Henry Bergson: rice. Economic Universal Feltrinelli
- Terry Eagleton: short history of laughter. Ed. The knowledge
- Laura Salmon: the mechanisms of humor. From Pirandelian theory to Sergej Duslatov’s work. And Franco Angeli
- Marco Malvaldi: to laugh add water. Small essay on humor and language. And Rizzoli
