Appreciating humour

You are the audience

A much safer form of humour in the office involves allowing the patient to use humour with the doctor being the audience.

I had a patient I will call Greg. His father had died in an accident when he was very young, and his formative years were spent in a remote mining village during the Great Depression. Many would consider this to be a bleak and unpromising start in life, yet in this environment he developed a wonderful sense of humour. Perhaps it was a coping mechanism, perhaps it was an inherited gift, or maybe it was a combination of these reasons plus lots of exposure to rural humour before the advent of television and the Internet. He became a skilled wordsmith and a storyteller, and he was very adept at the quick repartee. He used these gifts in a successful career and he maintained a lifelong attachment to his inspiration: the little mining village, which remained vibrant in his memory as it continued its relentless decline.

I always looked forward to his appointments, where the business of the office visit was interspersed with an anecdote here and a bon mot there.

During his retirement he took up swimming laps. He considered swimming laps the perfect combination of exercise and solitude, but as we all know perfection is never obtained and occasionally even in a swimming lane the realities of life have a habit of intruding.

Here is Greg’s story.

“John is an acquaintance of mine. I think you might know him. He swims laps the same time I do and has the bad habit of changing lanes. You have seen the type on 3- or 4-lane highways, always flitting in and out of lanes, cutting you off, never content to cruise control to the next destination. Well, John was the swimming equivalent and he could disrupt your rhythm and burst your solitude bubble in a twinkling. It wouldn’t be wrong to say he was a jet-ski in the swimming pool. The day in question I had just completed the halfway mark of my lap goal. Everything was perfect. Then I became aware of a presence behind me. A quick glance confirmed a lot of splash and bubbles. John was on my tail. Rather than experience the disruption of letting him try to pass me, I took evasive action, slipped under the lane marker, and continued swimming in the adjacent lane.

“Later in the dressing room John came up to me, slapped me on the back, and said, ‘I hope I didn’t chase you out of your lane this morning.’

“‘Not at all,’ I said, ‘I only go into that lane to pee.’”

You never know what is going to be disclosed in the office. John never came into Greg’s lane again, and I continued to be an appreciative audience for Greg’s stellar wit.

Keep your humour

Sigmund Freud had this to say about humour: “Humor is not resigned; it is rebellious. It signifies the triumph not only of the ego, but also of the pleasure-principle, which is strong enough to assert itself ... in the face of the adverse real circumstances.”²

Nilsen’s book on humour scholarship included the following explanation: “Type B personalities tend to displace their anger, anxiety, and hostility by using humor ... [and they] also tend to have a much lower incidence of heart attack.”²

If you are worried about Escherichia coli in the swimming pool that Greg had used for swimming laps, remember what the English writer Charles Lamb once said: “The teller of a mirthful tale has latitude allowed him. We are content with less than absolute truth.”⁴