Laughter is Our Best Medicine

ALLY MARECEK—THE SANTA CLARA

Humor as survival: regaining control amidst chaos

While screaming in my car and taking frantic, six-mile walks provide their own feelings of catharsis, watching TikToks for hours on end has become my unorthodox form of therapy for the past few weeks of quarantine. I also impulsively cut off a good five inches of my hair—we don’t need to talk about that though. 

Be it the app’s eerily effective algorithm or my desire to fill the painful void left by Vine in 2016, one thing is for certain: I’m hooked. 

Reassuringly, I’m not alone: TikTok has become the most downloaded app on Apple’s App Store. While accounts with the most followers tend to utilize the app’s musical integration to show off dance and vocal skills, I’ve been drawn to the comedic content.

This crisis seems to have generated a massive outpour of humor, and not just on TikTok. The Facebook group “Zoom Memes for Self Quaranteens,” which was created in mid-March following the mass closure of college campuses, has accumulated over 500,000 members. To no one’s surprise, clever jokes circulate on Twitter, and likewise on Reddit. Even my mom’s work group chat is sprinkled with videos poking fun at toilet paper hoarders. 

Why, when threatened by the worst global health crisis in a century, are we laughing? It seems counterintuitive. 

I find myself filled with despair when checking the news. The death toll nears 70,000; the medical community scrambles to bolster resources; Surgeon General Jerome Adams warns that this week will be “the hardest and the saddest week of most Americans’ lives.” In this sense, he compared the pandemic to Pearl Harbor and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. I am anxious, and I am terrified. I mourn the loss of normalcy, and I pray that my mourning won’t soon be over the loss of a loved one. 

But then, five minutes later—much like a toddler whose tears turn into hysterical laughter post-tantrum—I see a joke about online classes, or binge-watching Netflix or some other mostly benign byproduct of this heartbreaking disaster and I smile. You could say that it’s only a distraction, and there’s some truth to that. 

But there’s more to it. In a time of massive disruption, uncertainty and loneliness, finding common ground through humor provides us with a sense of much-needed solidarity and normalcy. There’s comfort in commiserating over postponed graduation ceremonies, campus closures and unwanted online classes. We know that we’re not alone, and this emotional connection grounds us. We laugh because we recognize the truth in every joke; we retweet, like and share because we yearn to connect. 

There is also freedom in humor. By spinning an event in a way that provides comedic relief, we regain control over how that situation makes us feel. We laugh so that we don’t cry; we refuse to let the sadness swallow us whole. Of course, it’s healthy to feel sad. But under circumstances that lend themselves to persistent despair, we laugh to survive. 

Vulnerable communities are being devastated by the coronavirus. People are dying. Millions are unemployed. None of this is funny, and none of it should be joked about. We laugh about the boss who turned herself into a potato during a Zoom meeting, and we bond over the trials and tribulations of being a college student in the midst of a global pandemic. It is through this laughter that we find solidarity and strength.