Can you give some examples from your practice of how humor allows a person to see something in themselves that they wouldn't see otherwise?

Sure. Once I was counseling a family with an extremely overprotective mother. If I had addressed this directly with her, she would probably have taken it as a criticism and become angry. I would have risked creating an empathic break in the therapeutic relationship. So instead of doing that, I told a joke about a mother who was pushing her son in a wheel chair at the local mall when they encountered a friend. The friend said, "It's nice to see you and little Freddy, but I didn't know little Freddy couldn't walk!" The mother responded, "Why of course he can walk . but thank goodness he doesn't have to!" The whole family laughed and the mom looked at me and said, "So, do you think I am doing too much for him?"

Here's another example of an "enmeshed" parent, this time the mother of a teenage girl. I had asked the daughter a question like, "How are you doing in school?" and before she could even think, the mother answered for her, "She's flunked three classes." So, here was the same problem again. I didn't want to ruin my relationship with the mother, but I wanted to help her realize what she was doing. The only way to do this was to give a humorous "spin" to her behavior. I asked the daughter in a surprised voice, "How did you do that?" She said, "How did I do what?" I said, "I heard an answer and your lips never moved!" Then the mother started laughing. This happens a lot. Typically, the next time it happens, all I have to do is say, "Again?" and the mother gets it. Another good thing about this technique is that it gives the mother and daughter a non-noxious way to deal with the problem when it happens at home.

Another interesting experience -I was seeing a woman who was severely depressed, so much so that she decided to kill herself. She got into a car, drove out of town, sealed all the windows and lay back, thinking that she would be asphyxiated while she slept. When she opened her eyes and saw black all around her, she figured she was dead. But then she noticed that she could still see the inside of the car. She realized that it was night and that she'd run out of gas! I started laughing and then she started laughing too. She said that she hadn't told the worst part: she was seven miles out of town and had to walk all the way back! Recognition of the irony and ridiculousness of her attempt made it go away-she was no longer suicidal. That moment of humor was disarming.

Have you ever tried humor on someone and it doesn't work?

Absolutely. Waleed Salameh, one of the co-editors of The Handbook of Humor and Psychotherapy , says that, in order for humor to work, people have to be in "play mode." If things are too serious, there's no way to access a laugh. Early on, when I was developing my craft, I sometimes misjudged my audience and was perceived to be disrespectful. If you're going to use humor in social interaction, you have to be able to judge whether or not your audience is "in play" and what they can tolerate. I once heard a really interesting presenter who talked about how to handle heckling in comedy clubs. He found that if the heckle was hard and his response was soft, he'd lose the audience. Or if the heckle was soft and he responded with "both barrels," he would lose the audience. You have to modulate your response to match the nature of the heckle. That seems to be a rule for life as well.

That seems to dovetail with emotional intelligence.

Yes, sensitivity, empathy, recognizing other people's emotional experience is very important. You have to be very sensitive and perceptive to use humor well. If you're very skillful and a good storyteller, you may be able to derail a person's seriousness and draw them into "play mode." When we talk about therapeutic humor, we're talking about much more than jokes, which are often culture-bound and not always told well.

In the case of the woman who was suicidal, it was laughter that changed the situation, not any joke.

Yes, it was like magic-a spontaneous revelation. It's amazing how important humor can be. One of my clients actually chose me because she had read that I respected humor.

Let me give you a couple of other examples of how laughter works in a therapeutic setting.

Once I was counseling a client who was miserable because she had to make a choice between two difficult alternatives. At one point I said to her, "You're just trying to choose between apples and oranges," and she shot back with, "No, I'm not. I'm trying to choose between onions and garlic!" We both laughed, and that lightened things up enough to allow her to choose.

When my clients and I use humor, we're often drawing on pop culture rather than jokes. For example, with a woman who was trying to face her fears, I talked about the scene in the second Star Wars movie where Luke had to go into the cave and face his father. For months after that conversation, she used the image of Darth Vader chasing her and yelling at her. It was an easy way for her to objectify her fear, and it was playful, not threatening.


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