Tag: Jokes

Humour Therapy for Stress

Posted on by andrew

Grace Cheng (she/her/hers), Low Entropy Volunteer Writer

 

Humour has an inexplicable power. Laughter and humour enhance the quality of life. Jokes and witty conversations can help you develop a closer relationship with the people around you. The happiness that comes from laughter is comparable to the joy that comes from the rain in the desert. The key elements of jokes are that they force the audience to consider the same situation from different perspectives. 

 

Life is full of challenges but using humour and laughter to cope with stress can be a healthy and effective way to do so and can lift you from the darkest times. Indeed, we cannot always control what happens to us, but we can choose how we want to respond and react. We can use humour to effectively communicate with one another, leveling the playing field between the players on that field who may have different statuses, such as a boss and a direct report, or a child and a parent.

 

The use of humour can benefit our physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. It gives us a sense of power and superiority to be able to laugh at our situation or problem. A good sense of humour can help promote optimism and a positive outlook. When we can laugh at what is troubling us, we are less likely to experience feelings of depression or helplessness. A sense of humour provides us with a perspective on our problems. The act of laughing serves to release uncomfortable feelings that, when repressed, may create a biochemical shift that is harmful to one’s health.

 

A life without humour would be analogous to an ocean without fish. When we are babies, our mothers encourage us to smile and laugh. Since these are the earliest and most effective forms of communication, we are capable of learning at this early age.

 

Humour may also serve as an adaptive ego defense by enabling people to perceive and appreciate the absurdity of situations in which they have to confront a great deal of difficulty. A sense of humor may function as both a defense mechanism and a means of dealing with adversity.

 

Let us look at the benefits of using humour in our lives.

  • Humour Can Improve Mood

 

Once you develop a good sense of humour, you become more lighthearted. As a result, you will see everything around you from a completely different perspective, and you will be able to laugh at problems that are enormous at the time but become the easiest things you have experienced. Laughter will undoubtedly improve any problem situation that appears not to be resolvable as soon as you change your approaches, attempt to seek out laughter, and relax following your chuckle.

  • Humour Benefits Physical Health

 

Humour has the potential to benefit physical health in many ways, including endorphins and relaxation. The health benefits of laughing include lower blood pressure, improved immune system, pain relief, stimulated lungs and an increase in heart rate. This all decreases the risk of heart attacks as well as the possibility of becoming constantly ill during the colder months. It is scientifically proven that humor will help you relax and benefit your health overall if you are constantly exhausted because you are stressed out.

  • Humour Relaxes Muscles and Tensions

 

When we are stressed, we tend to become tense and uncomfortable under the weight of the overwhelming burden. Your muscles will relax once you laugh, and any tension will be dissolved immediately. In the end, this leads to relaxation, which can provide relief from stressful days and prevent further health complications.

  • Humour Acts as a Distraction

 

Humour is a good way to distract yourself. Your attention is diverted for a time to the larger joke that is occurring or to the comedy occurring to someone else. Humour can distract you from your stress and anxiety for a short time by taking your attention off what is happening to you. By using this distraction regularly, you can use this resource in your toolbox to cope during those times of stress and anxiety.

  • Humour Changes Our Perspectives on Life

 

It is through the power of humor that we can view the world differently. Humour can make use of a little of one’s self-deprecation or mixes in some biting satire to make people laugh. It is simply crass slapstick humor that is in your face and blatant. Whatever the type of our humour, it can reframe our viewpoints and allow us to view our problems with a less all or nothing approach. When you reframe, re-author, or change the way you view your challenges, stress, anxiety and frustration disappear as you realize that they are not insurmountable.

  • Humour Acts as Pharmacology

 

Humour causes a chemical reaction that has a powerful antithesis to anxiety and stress. By releasing certain feel-good chemicals within the brain, laughter activates neuropeptides, which are nature’s antidepressants. Interestingly, laughter has also been linked to a reduction in the stress hormone called cortisol. Humour therefore possesses a powerful anti-stress and anti-anxiety effect on the neuro-molecular level.

 

Are you ready to apply more humour to your life after learning their benefits?

 

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Grace has an accounting and finance background. She enjoys reading, writing, listening to music, watching movies and playing sports.

Everyday Humor

Posted on by andrew

Fatimah Aderinto, Low Entropy Volunteer Writer

 

Have you ever brewed a good joke in your head and spilled it with the slightest hope that it would tickle your audience’s funny bone? While the intent of a joke should be to express humor and interact with other people, I note that one needs not be a comedian to be funny. Everyone can be funny. 

 

While science has a myriad of content to explain why some people are funnier than others, it seems obvious that we cannot all be funny at a professional level. Our brains are wired in unique ways that create fewer comedians than audiences. interpreting everyday scenarios in ways most people may not think of is a brain feat. We cannot all be stand-up-comedy-funny. Fine. For casual humor though, the mood still needs proper lighting before the action — that is, there needs to be an event driving the comedic momentum to its maximum. Rarely thinkable jokes are the ones that usually make the cut in both renowned stand-up comedy and social media memes, and the mistakes and activities in everyday events — those that we do not read much into — are what we see portrayed in media that charge us with laughter.

 

There has been a dramatic increase in meme culture in social media. Memes are the rising emblem of funny. Writing for The Atlantic, Olga Khazan suggests that a joke must be concocted with a deliberate “wicked twist” that showcases the joke-teller’s power to control the spectators’ comedic temperature — memes incorporate this phenomenon on a large scale. People share memes quickly and with no hassle, for others to regurgitate and archive them for later use. Here we can see that if something funny comes free, cheap and ready, people tend to seek more of it, rebranding what it means to be funny in a contemporary context.

 

Everyone can be funny because comedy is an art form that can be expressed through common experiences like grocery shopping, filling up your gas tank and paying for movie tickets. One need not be a comedian to know how to use analogies to quickly turn a conversation into a humorous exchange.

 

A person’ funniness can depend on their emotional perspective. In this alarming world filled with anxiety, pressure and loneliness, it can be difficult to find humor, but difficult emotions also afford us a rich cache of situations to mould into fun for others. With skill and intentionality, someone may be able to elevate a mere utterance into a funny joke. Then people can relish challenging moments and, laughing at a joke, offload the heavy emotions that come with them.

 

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Fatimah Aderinto is a biochemistry student and poet. She weaves words and emotions such that they tackle emerging societal concerns.

Too Far Gone

Posted on by andrew

Eri Ikezawa (she/her/hers), Low Entropy Volunteer Writer

 

The sociopolitical landscape has changed rapidly in the past few decades, and it has impacted several different avenues of life as people used to know it. Representation in commercials and beauty standards is more prominent, microaggressions against people of color have become more easily recognized. Voices of dissent have gotten louder, reproachful of gender inequalities and sexist remarks, allowing women and other gender identities more freedom to express themselves. With this focus on social revolution, even the topography of humour has changed. 

 

Now, when people make jokes, they have begun to challenge and question, “What is going too far?” when making fun of someone. 

 

I think, first and foremost, it is important to understand people’s individual boundaries. Just as we have our own distinctive fingerprints and snowflakes arrange themselves into unique configurations, we are not one and the same. One person’s boundaries do not broadly reflect the collective — or, alternatively, the collective may not always reflect the opinions of a single individual. 

 

Secondly, we must recognize that we do not ultimately get to decide what someone else’s boundaries are — even if it is truly something you cannot see eye-to-eye on, you must respect and validate their feelings. We don’t have to understand why as long as, when push comes to shove, we respect the other person’s boundaries. The fact of the matter is no one person’s experiences will identically replicate the experiences of someone else.

 

For instance, some people may not mind making (or having people make) dark jokes about their convoluted family history, while others may feel distress at the mere mention of the characters involved in their traumatic past. There is no simple way to explain why one person might be more openly tolerant of grim humour while another might be hurt by it, but it inevitably comes down to a myriad of complex reasons internal to each individual. 

 

Thirdly, when we project our own personal boundaries and views on other people, there is the possibility of misjudging to the point where you appear as though you lack empathy: If it doesn’t bother me, why should it bother you? Just as how genetic expressions can occasionally produce a child with many of the recessive genes visibly intact, it does not mean that one deviation or outlier reflects the majority population. 

 

Therefore, we cannot ascertain someone else’s triggers and sore spots without knowing that person and understanding why they upset them. It is unfair to invalidate someone’s feelings simply because it’s not an experience we can personally empathize with.

 

While all these factors are relevant and important to consider in the modern landscape of acceptable humour and knowing when and how it is okay to make fun of someone, there are other significant variables at play. For example, how included are you in one’s social ingroup, whether it be race, gender or sexuality? Or how intimate is your relationship to another person?  

 

There is an interesting phenomenon in which people who are part of the same ingroup are more likely to be able to make collectively self-deprecating jokes in good fun, whereas the same jokes would not be appreciated by those who are considered to be from an “outgroup.” There is a conspicuous difference between using those jokes as a bonding mechanism of shared experiences with the members of the said ingroup, whereas it might feel disparaging or condescending from someone who has little to no personal experience with the subject matter at hand. 

 

For example, making jokes about the strict regulations I had as a child due to my Asian parentage is a common stereotype about our cultural heritage that my fellow ingroup members and I would often joke about lightly — and still continue to do to this day. It is a bonding experience, like two otters holding hands down the turbulent stream of human ordeals, latching onto companions who share common ground with us. But I cannot deny the defensiveness I felt, often accompanied by the aching sting left by the barbed quip of an outsider perspective on the same topic. 

 

They don’t get it, they don’t understand, so why is it so easy for them to make a joke about my childhood? Although I know, on a logical or rational level, it most likely wasn’t intended to be personal, for whatever unfathomable reason, it felt condescending — the edge of blade nestling into an aching sore, someone picking at a scabbing wound with dirty claws, peeling it off mindlessly and carelessly. 

 

I also think boundaries depend on the intimacy or lack thereof between two people — an inside or “dark” joke might be funny between childhood friends who have grown up together, but may be incredibly offensive coming from a stranger. 

 

Although I can’t personally relate too much to this, I have seen how my friends have been comfortable with snide remarks from people with whom they feel close kinship, whilst taking offense to people for whom they don’t have the same intimate regard. While the intentions of a joke can be deciphered easily enough by people whom you know well, the innocuousness of a wisecrack from a stranger can be lost in the sense of, Who are you to make that joke about me?

 

Having learned from my own experiences and opinions, I avoid jokes about people’s appearances (unless it can be modified in a minute, such as food in someone’s teeth, a flyaway hair, etc . . .), cultures, families or any other topics that may be sensitive — especially when I feel less closely intertwined with that person. 

 

Ultimately, the flexibility and terrain of anyone’s boundaries are dependent on each individual person’s encoded tolerance for what is labelled as acceptable or unacceptable to them. We have no right to undermine anyone else’s feelings on the matter. It is always better, in my opinion, to err on the side of caution when first meeting people and gauging their thresholds and sensitivities. 

 

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My name is Eri Ikezawa and I have an extended minor in psychology and a major in linguistics. I’m still on the path to quelling questions about myself and the direction I want to head in, but in the meantime, I have always wanted to find a way to help others and contribute to a community dedicated to personal development and self-love.