LA PETITE VACATION
In the observation that laughter accompanies the child’s capacity to pretend, to participate in alternatives to the realities referred to in sincere communication, we arrive at a hypothesis about laughter. Let’s call this hypothesis the laughter as vacation hypothesis. The name of this hypothesis honors the comedian Milton Berle, witness, it is safe to claim, to millions of laughs during his career. Summing up the mysteries of laughter, Berle proposed, “Laughter is an instant vacation.” If orgasm for the French is la petite mort (the little death), laughter is la petite vacation.
The wisdom of Berle’s hypothesis is found in the etymology of “vacation,” which yields a nuanced story. The word “vacation” traces its linguistic history back to the Latin vacare, which means to be “empty, free, or at leisure” and is defined as a formal suspension of activity or duty. The laugh, then, signals the suspension of formal, sincere meaning. It points to a layer of interaction where alternatives to assumed truths are possible, where identities are lighthearted and nonserious. When people laugh, they are taking a momentary vacation from the more sincere claims and implications of their actions.
So let’s weave our facts and speculations together into the petite vacation hypothesis. In our primate evolution, laughter begins in the open-mouth play faces of chimps and bonobos, which signal and initiate playful routines. The quality of laughter, its sound and function and feeling, is rooted in physical action, as Darwin long ago observed: It is intertwined with exhalation, and the reduction in stress-related physiology. A special realm of sound is reserved for laughs, and it is an ancient one that predates language, represented in old regions of the nervous system—the brain stem—which also regulates breathing. This acoustic space reserved for laughs triggers laughter and pleasure in others, and designates, like the confines of a circus or theater, a social realm for acts of pretense and the imagination. In the pretend play of young children, laughter enables playful routines that allow them to have alternative perspectives on the world they are facing. Laughter is a ticket to the world of pretense, it is a two-to three-second vacation from the encumbrances, burdens, and gravity of the world of literal truths and sincere commitments.
LAUGHING AT DEATH
My dear friend and colleague George Bonanno took a while to get to academics. After riding trains, picking apples in Washington State, living in communes, and painting signs in Arizona, he decided, on a whim, to take a community college creative writing course. After his first submission, he was discovered by his instructor, and quickly found himself on a fast track toward a PhD at Yale. Proponents of the conventional view of trauma may have wished that he never took that writing course.
For the past fifteen years, using intensive narrative interviews and longitudinal designs, he has studied how individuals adapt to various kinds of trauma—the death of a marital partner, the 9 /11 attacks, sexual abuse, the death of a child. He kept encountering a basic finding not anticipated in the literature on trauma. The conventional view is that after a trauma everyone suffers prolonged periods of maladjustment, anxiety, distress, and depression. George has found in every study he has conducted that a significant proportion of people suffering a trauma experience distress and upset but, in the broader scheme of things, fare quite well. Within a year, they are as happy as they were, more poignant perhaps, filled with bursts of breathless longing, but in the end, content with life, and perhaps a bit wiser.
His question: What allows people to adjust to life-altering traumas? Our answer: Laughter. Laughter provides a brief vacation from the existential impossibilities, the deep sadness, the disorienting anxieties, of losing a loved one, or losing a city or way of life.
To test this thesis, George and I undertook a study to look at the role of laughter during bereavement. To do so, we brought forty-five adults to our laboratory, individuals who six months prior had watched their spouses die. Six months into bereavement is a poignant time. The death of a spouse leaves individuals mildly depressed, disoriented, lonely, and disorganized. The daily rhythms of a marriage are gone. So too are the conversations about what happened during the day, the fragments of a dream, the funny thing a friend or loved one did or said, how work went. Bereaved adults often have trouble conducting the daily affairs of their lives—remembering to pay bills, plan dinners, go shopping, fix cars—because the other part of their collective mind is gone. Reminders of their partner—photos, clothing, scents and sounds from the past—weigh them down in yearning. So we asked: Would laughter prompt bereaved adults to find new layers of meaning in the midst of trauma, and perhaps a path to the meaningful life?
Our forty-five participants came to George’s lab in San Francisco, really an upstairs room in an old Victorian, with wood floors and paned glass. After some preliminary talk, George asked the participants the simplest of things, to “tell me about your relationship with your deceased partner.” They were then given six minutes to tell their narratives of their relationships with the deceased spouse. There were stories of meeting one another at a blues show, of wild youth, raising children, and then bleeding gums that presaged a rapid death six months later, with children at the mother’s side at the hospital bed. One man, in response to George’s question, could only sob and gasp for six minutes, uttering not a word. I remember another woman whose husband had committed suicide at the end of a manic episode that was capped off by a disturbing visit to his mother. At the end of her narrative of this freefall, one could hear doves cooing on the windowsill of the lab room.
As George planned the next stages of this longitudinal study (he has assessed the well-being of these individuals for several years), he sent me the videotapes of these conversations. For an entire summer, locked up in my laboratory video coding room in the basement of my department, I coded these six-minute conversations with Ekman and Friesen’s Facial Action Coding System. Each conversation took about six hours to code. Spending eight hours each day listening to stories of dying and coding such deep emotion left me exhausted and humbled. Almost all of our participants showed numerous displays of negative emotion, such as anger, sadness, fear, and, less frequently, disgust.
Our question was a simple one that had never been addressed before: What emotions predict healthy adjustment to the death of a spouse, as assessed with clinically sound measures of anxiety and depression, as well as measures of prolonged bereavement, which captures the individual’s continuing longing for the deceased and inability to reenter into daily living? And which emotions predict poor adjustment during bereavement?
Traditional bereavement theories offer two clear predictions. This thinking is based on Freudian notions of “working through” the emotional pain of loss and the cathartic release of anger. It predicts that recovery from bereavement depends on the increased expression of negative emotions, such as anger and sadness. A second prediction is that the expression of positive emotion is in actuality a pathological sign of denial, of an intentional turning away from the existential facts of trauma, and impedes grief resolution. Our thinking was just the opposite, that laughter would allow our bereaved participants to distance themselves momentarily from the pain of the loss, to gain perspective, to look upon their lives in a more detached way, to find a moment of peace, to take a deep breath, so to speak.