Mediators have long recognized that they can use humor to help disputants deal with conflict (though it can really backfire). What about using humor when it seems like the world is going to hell?
In her essay, Please Laugh About My Abortion With Me, comedian Alison Leiby describes experiences with her comedy show “Oh God, a Show About Abortion.” She writes:
I understand that not everyone wants to approach abortion with jokes. I understand it feeling too soon to laugh in the wake of Roe being overturned, and I understand people whose experiences were traumatic. But for those who are up for it, I think having a healthy sense of humor – one that is predicated on personal vulnerability – is an extremely valuable coping mechanism in these dark days of American culture.
I hope that the show helps destigmatize a procedure that should have no stigma. The show also has helped me on a personal level. I needed to laugh through my abortion experience because the alternative – the way my life without the abortion could have turned out – is so upsetting.
Also, it’s funny that there was a maternity wear store across the street from a Planned Parenthood.
Gettysburg College Professor Steven Gimbel, the instructor of the audio Great Courses course “Take My Course, Please! The Philosophy of Humor,” – who knew that philosophy of humor was an academic subject? – notes that humor sometimes can be “good medicine” and says that many jokes “invoke a frame shift or some other mechanism that forces a person to see the familiar in a way that is unusual.”