Humour, the Ageless
“There is no comic outside what is strictly human.” Henri Bergson (i)
How would we represent the dark and the foreboding? If we were novelists or essayists, masters of verse or playwrights, how would we sketch something bleak and shadowy, given over to decline and despair? The figure of the older person has fulfilled this role for centuries. The supposed darkness of old age seems perfectly suited to feeding the gloomiest pages with shadow and sorrow. Greek poets have given us old age as poison, as something that reels and darkens, as a wound from a terrible knife. And then there is the most familiar lament of all: if only youth could happen twice, and old age not at all.
But all of this amounts to nothing more than “dreadful predictions,” as Cavafy himself might say. Because in older people there takes root something brighter than the clearest young skin, more hopeful than a birth: humour, unpredictable and catching, surfaces fully alive precisely when it is needed most.
Encyclopaedias note that the word “humour” is etymologically related to “humours” — the bodily fluids. From the time of Hippocrates through the Middle Ages, medicine tended to attribute every illness to an imbalance of the body’s vital humours: blood, yellow bile, black bile, phlegm. Melancholy, for example, was simply an excess of “black bile.” Historically, when the word first appears in English literature, it describes “a joke told with a sorrowful face.” That is how Shakespeare defines it, demonstrating that from its very beginnings humour carries a quality of taming the negative.
And what is the relationship between older people and humour? In an age of productivity and performance metrics, humour is often linked to intelligence, adaptability, even “attractiveness” in relationships. But who would think to associate it with the elderly? With the old person who, in the collective imagination, represents rather the opposite: a senile fool at best, demented at worst, sterile in every sense, slow and stagnant and often off-putting. And yet older adults not only have this weapon in their arsenal but typically deploy humour where no one expects it, in the most remarkable and multifaceted ways.
Often identified entirely with illness and a body in decline, the older humorist transforms, like a skilled alchemist, suffering into laughter. Freud, who gave the subject considerable thought, proposed that “humour is a means of obtaining pleasure despite the painful affects that disturb it” (ii). In a small daily triumph, the humorist constructs a little pleasure from the raw materials of their pain. Pain that, were it not for the wit (Witz) and its ambiguities, might find no other outlet. Humour, then, at its highest: because it allows the comic to emerge within the territory of the tragic.
A particular form of humour, self-deprecation, is described as an ideal defence against the incursions of psychological pain (iii). Older people seem to have a privileged relationship with this kind. Physical weakness, pain, medications, losses of mobility and sensation all become the source of the sharpest and most generative jokes. Because when one makes fun of oneself, one is also questioning. Questioning one’s established way of existing, overturning one’s own way of thinking. And while the hardships of ageing, relentless and merciless, give the impression of an inevitable necessity over which the individual has no power, the older person who turns humour against themselves triumphs over submission and passive acceptance. In this sense, the humour of older adults is a genuine act of freedom and resistance, a taking of action by those we so often accuse of rigidity. Perhaps this is why Freud calls it “startling and magnificent.”
To joke about your pain does not mean you ignore it. The humorist knows very well what they are enduring. The recipe is a “nevertheless.” Despite a painful reality, they step over it, even while knowing how much they are under its weight. It is a remarkable invention of human mental life. It defies certainties and the most accepted truths, while simultaneously acknowledging them. That would be the great lesson of humour: to find, in despair, a knowledge nonetheless.
At the same time, the joke performs a social function. Unlike irony, which is hermetic and turns inward, humour opens outward, toward the other. Because a joke requires an audience. Generally, the greater the listener’s surprise, the more successful the joke is considered. It is the listener’s laughter that gives the joke substance and validates it. Laughter, as a visible and observable sign of another’s satisfaction, proves that humour is not always a defence against terror or a mask behind which to hide tears. It is also the beginning of joy, a moment of revelation that sticks its tongue out at every pretension to seriousness.
In a care facility, what place does humour have? Can it exist, is it permitted? We often respond to their jokes with restraint, perhaps out of fear of upsetting them, of disturbing some imagined blissful serenity. Yet older people are those whose supposed tranquility is constantly disrupted, first and foremost by disturbances within their own bodies. Their humour, vital and strange, precise and unpredictable, is a magnificent refusal of fear. So let us laugh freely. Let us give their jokes the recognition they deserve. Let us acknowledge this creative force in those we had written off as spent.
In care settings, we sometimes witness something that stops you short. A person who has survived a severe stroke and can no longer walk is being rushed down the corridor in their wheelchair. The doctor is waiting, there is no time. They turn and say: “No matter how fast you run, I’ll always be one step ahead of you.”
At Christmas, a caregiver asks a resident living with advanced dementia, with great enthusiasm: “What would you wish for the world this holiday season? Love, peace, health…?” The answer, without missing a beat: “To become even more beautiful.”
During exercise class, the instructor calls out the movements from the centre of the circle: “Push — pull. Push — pull. Push — pul…” From the side comes a voice: “What on earth is he pulling at now?” She always hits the mark.
Lacan once said that the comic goes hand in hand with knowledge (iv). It is remarkable to witness how someone we call “de-mented” — someone our language says has no mind (v) — turns out to be the one who understands most deeply what is happening to them. We study their brains, run tests, take scans and measurements: attempts to represent in images and numbers this gap in knowledge, this “deficit of mind.” If we finally give them the floor and listen to what they themselves have to say, we might learn something more.
References
i Bergson, H., Laughter (trans. Vasilis Tomanas), Exantas, pp. 10-11.
ii Freud, S., Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 1905.
iii Freud, S., Humour, 1927.
iv Lacan, J., Télévision, 1974.
v It is worth noting that the same applies in English: dementia, from the Latin de-mentis (reason, mind).
