The thing happened. Something difficult or painful arrived in your life and arrived in a conversation with someone you care about, and for a moment, a real moment, it was about to be present between you in the full weight that it actually carries. And then you made it funny. The joke arrived in the half-breath before the full thing could land, the wry observation or the self-deprecating turn or the particular quality of comic timing that redirects the energy of a moment, and the full thing did not arrive. Something landed. Something was communicated. The other person understood, in the translated form, that something difficult had happened. The moment passed. The conversation moved. The full weight of the thing remained, very precisely, where it had been: inside you, un-met, unwitnessed, managed instead of received.
George Vaillant’s Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest-running longitudinal study of adult psychological health, documented the defense mechanisms that people use to manage difficult experience and assessed their relative maturity. Humor, in Vaillant’s taxonomy, is among the most mature of defense mechanisms, along with sublimation and altruism, the mechanisms that transform difficult experience into something that produces genuine value in the world. Vaillant is right that humor is more sophisticated than denial or projection. The person who can make something funny is relating to it more adaptively than the person who refuses to acknowledge it exists.
The difficulty with taking this classification as the final word is that it does not distinguish between humor that transforms difficult experience into something valuable and humor that prevents difficult experience from being received. Both can be sophisticated. Both can require genuine intelligence, real attunement to the social environment, genuine creative capacity. The difference is not in the quality of the humor. The difference is in what the humor is doing in the particular moment. The humor that arrives as genuine creative transformation, that takes the difficult thing and finds in it the angle from which it becomes illuminating rather than simply heavy, is something else. The humor that arrives as the reflex that prevents the difficult thing from landing in the full weight it actually carries, in the space between two people where it might be genuinely held, is the strategy. Both look identical from outside. From inside, the person who knows the difference can usually tell which one just happened.
Irvin Yalom’s existential psychotherapy identifies the encounter with the full weight of another person’s experience as among the most potent forms of healing available in the therapeutic relationship. Not the interpretation of the experience. Not the reframing of the experience into something more manageable. The encounter with it, in its actual form, the willingness to be present with someone in the full weight of what is actually true for them without flinching or redirecting or making it smaller. This encounter requires that the full weight be present. The translation that humor performs, the reduction of the difficult thing to its wry or absurd or bearable form, removes the thing that the encounter requires. The other person is encountering the translation. The self presenting the translation is protected by it. The meeting that might have happened, the genuine contact between two people in the actual weight of actual experience, does not happen.
The creative dimension of this strategy is particularly interesting because humor is, genuinely, a creative act, and the person who has developed humor as their primary mode of relating to difficult experience has developed a genuine creative capacity. The question is not whether the capacity is real. It is whether the capacity has become the only register available, whether the full emotional range of the self — the capacity for grief without translation, for anger without wryness, for longing without the ironic distance that makes it bearable — is still accessible or has been progressively colonized by the humor’s management of the territory.
Many people who have been running the humor strategy for a long time discover, when they begin to explore what is underneath it, that the thing underneath is not the catastrophic weight they had been implicitly managing against. It is grief. The real grief of having been in many rooms where the full weight of difficult experience was not safe to present, where the joke was the available currency for communicating that something hard had happened without requiring anyone to be in it with you fully. The grief is for the connections that could have gone deeper if the translation had not been deployed. For the witnesses who were never given the opportunity to witness. This grief can be mourned. And what comes after the mourning, in the people who have stayed with it, is often the first extended period in which the self that made the joke is also the self that can stay with the thing the joke was managing. Both capacities available. The humor real and not compulsive. The depth also real and no longer dangerous.