Laughter is the Best Medicine

How comedy is the best coping mechanism for dealing with current political issues.

Kendall Dunmore
WHEN WOMEN SPEAK BACK
4 min readMar 3, 2017

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Your Tango

It’s 9:15 a.m. and I am waiting in the drive thru line at Starbucks. The line is packed with people, just as antsy as me to get their coffee.

A couple minutes pass and I am still sitting in the same spot, so i roll my window down to get some fresh air.

Another couple of minutes go by and the line inches forward. FINALLY. Then all of a sudden the line stops moving again. I can hear a man and a woman yelling at each other and honking their horns.

Being naturally curious, I roll my window down a little bit further and stick my head towards their direction.

I can hear the man yelling at the woman:
“Did your parent’s ever teach you how to take turns?”
“It’s not your turn, you dumb b*tch!”

The comments went on and on from him, and he started to call her derogatory words based on the fact that she was a female…as if being female isn’t hard enough, this guy had to bring in random sentences and words because she didn’t let him go in front of her in line.

I could hear the woman yelling back in defense and telling him to “actually do something about it!”

She stepped out of her car and went over to the man’s window. He rolled it up and as she backs away, still yelling, he rolled it back down.

The yelling continued for another couple of minutes, until the man called the woman the “n word” — as if her race had anything to do with the situation. The man intentionally brought up the word, knowing that it would trigger something close to anger within her, but she ended up doing quite the opposite. The woman laughed.

Every fiber in my body was pulsing with rage. I could not believe that this grown adult was making comments like that over something that was childish to fight about in the first place. Her race had nothing to do with her actions. He was just trying to find anything he could to piss her off by digging into her culture — that maybe if he actually took a second to look at the traditions, rituals, and other details of her culture, he would find it quite beautiful. Maybe then he would actually see the years build up of hate and discrimination of others towards the color of her skin.

When she laughed in response, I felt her sense of empowerment and relief that she was not taking the situation too seriously…as well as thinking that it was a completely irrelevant comment.

Here I tie my story with the reading of “Brownness” by Andrea Canaan. Her story is mostly about how women with dark complexion are continuously targeted and ridiculed by those that are white. The degradation of brownness has been present for decades, and Canaan had explained to her audience that the brown community has created a twisted comedy that reversed the jokes on to whiter people. Whites were now laughed at. While I do not exactly know the race of the male in the situation above, I do know that he was on the white side of the spectrum of the spectrum.

The women’s comedic response shows a light at the end of the tunnel. Sure, there is discrimination, but there is also a way to not take it as offensively. Laughter and comedy has provided relief for those who are suffering — to have another way of thinking that isn’t so damaging.

The woman’s response also reminded me of an article that I read after Trump’s election. The article was titled “How do we cope with Trump? Just laugh” and the point of the article was to override the feelings of distraught and make everyone laugh about the current political situation by asking comedians and political satirists to share their humor via video selfies. There is a video link to their responses in the link above. The fact that we can transition and channel our thoughts of hate to something more positive, even though the situation may continue to be bad, it truly incredible.

There are a couple of reasons on how comedy makes us better people, according to Mary O’Hara’s article on BBC. Laughing is a involuntary response to most of our daily activities, and some groups gather together specifically to laugh. O’Hara says that there is a magical experience that happens during her live comedy shows that makes her feel as if she is connecting to the audience. She shares what she thinks is funny, and others think it is funny as well. I’m sure that if the woman in my story above was accompanied by another woman, she would have been laughing too. Further in O’hara’s article, she explains that she thinks the best theory about comedy comes from the philosopher Thomas Hobbs, asserting that “humour is ostensibly about mocking the weak and exerting superiority.” In my story above, the woman that laughed in response was in no way the superior figure — thinking in the sense of a white-male dominated society. She was mocking the man’s sense of superiority and his dumb race comment. In a sense, it shows her maturity level in dealing with the situation, which could be the one sliver of space where she could find herself superior.

Sizzle

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