‘If the cinema is the eighth muse, humour is the ninth.’ Theodore Zeldin

Anxiety as a mainly western phenomenon, it appeared as a cohesive psychiatric concept in the beginning of the 20th Century. Sigmund Freud defined anxiety as the “the nodal point at which the most various and important questions converge, a riddle whose solution would be bound to throw a flood of light upon our whole mental existence.”

W. H. Auden coined the term of “Age of Anxiety”, it has been part of our lives since to higher or lesser degree.’ Eric J. Hobsbawm wrote the history of the Age of Anxiety in his ‘Age of Extremes’ looking at the root causes behind our deep seated fears and anxieties.

We don’t immediately make a connection between anxiety and humour. In fact it’s the very opposite. When we are anxious or going through a panic attack, your mind freezes and the last thing we think is to laugh bout it. Yet with those very anxixies a comedian will make the audience laugh. We laugh at their jokes as we recognise the truth in them. Comedians show us that their lives are no different than hours, they maybe more.anxious than the average person, though they have the courage to share their intimate lives in a public space. While a comedian may deal with their anxieties by laughing at themselves with the public, we can also chose to laugh at our ourselves and the absurdities of our lives.

Theodore Zeldin, a philosopher and one of the hundred most important thinkers in the world today according to Magazine Literaire, in his recent book ‘The Hidden Pleasures of Life’ explores how does one acquire sense of humour. Zeldin explains that:

“Humour and anxiety are not opposites, but closely related; the two words once meant almost the same thing. None of the impressive discoveries about the genetic and neurological influences on mental well-being have yet found a reliable method of exchanging anxiety for serenity, and all that is known is that whatever theories or healing techniques are used, it is the quality of relationship between the patient and the therapist that is ‘the single most important ingredient of effective psychiatric care.”

Theodore Zeldin writes that “if Nobel had been more sensitive to the spirit of his time, he might have established a prize for humour, but the Swedish Bank that endowed a Nobel prize to the unfunny science of economics, and chose the year 1968 to do so – when youth was ridiculing authority of every kind – demonstrates that the rich and powerful, though they are often able to joke as well as anyone, persisted in seeing joking as no more than piquant sauce to make dull dish eatable.”

Going back to the point made by Theodore Zeldin, humour is the single most effective tool when dealing with anxiety, including serious psychiatric and social anxiety. With humour we have one of the fundamental tools where we regulate our emotions, build strong trust and bonds with one another.

Humour becomes the catalist that diffuses the inner, emotional tension. Brings us closer as humans, transgressing the limitations imposed by our worries and anxieties. Humour shows us that we are all the same, we experience life in a similar way and we can laugh about our ills and life the same way. Laughter brings us closer to what it means to be human, fundamentally laughter is the very precursor to love.

Nat Tsolak

Please see www.theschooloflaughter.com for our next course on Improv Comedy for Anxiety