The Humour of being Human

Humor, in a definition that reflects itself, “arises from the perception of the juxtaposition of incongruity.” We find funny the placing together of things that do not belong together: the portly, top-hatted, distinguishedly pompous gentleman slipping on a banana peel, for example.

Humor and laughter may, of course, be aggressive and even cruel — especially when the other is objectified rather than identified with. But when humor’s incongruity is recognized as inherent — a reflection of the essential contradiction of being human with which one identifies — there can be no more healing, whole-ing, experience than the laughter that marks identifying acceptance of that paradoxical incongruity.

Such laughter characterizes meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, revealing much about A.A.’s healing power. The stories told at these meetings exquisitely demonstrate the essential incongruity of the human condition, the humor inherent in being human.

I’d sit up all night, just about, watching the late late late movies, tears streaming down my face, thinking “Yes, that’s how life really is, loveless and tragic”; and I’d toast each sad revelation with another warming swallow of booze. During the breaks I’d go out to the kitchen to get more ice, and passing the hall mirror I’d look soulfully at my image in it — with immense, enormous self-pity, but with no realization at all that the bleary-eyed, puffy, unshaven condition of my face and its booze-stinking breath just might have something to do with my being unloved.

Or:

When I first came around A.A., someone suggested that I get down on my knees each morning and ask for help to not take a drink that day. Well, I resented that! Me, kneel down and ask for help? No way . . . so I didn’t come back, for a while. Instead I went back to drinking, my usual pattern, until one morning it came to me.
There I was, in my accustomed morning position, kneeling on the cold tile of my bathroom floor with my arms wrapped around the toilet heaving my guts out.

The thought crossed my mind that it wasn’t the kneeling or the asking for help that bothered me — after all, that’s just what I was doing! It was that those A.A.’s wanted me to do it on a warm, carpeted floor with a serene stomach! And if that was what bothered me, maybe they were right and I was”sick,” and so I decided to give you folks another try.

Such humor and the laughter that greets it are never aimed at others as objects, but at the contradictions within self illumined by the human experience described. A.A. laughter expresses appreciation of the insights into self garnered from the experience of others with whom one identifies.

Thus, humor within Alcoholics Anonymous witnesses to A.A. members’ acceptance of the paradoxical nature of the human condition — essentially limited but inherently striving for the unlimited. In attempting and claiming to attain transcendence by their use of alcohol, alcoholics come to touch — even to wallow in — the depths of their own finitude.

Recognizing the incongruity between that endeavor and its result frees from both. Such humor is neither veiled aggression nor mere compensation; it rather manifests the central animus of A.A.’s understanding of human nature.

The human essence resides in the human condition’s conjunction of infinite thirst with essentially limited capacity. Acceptance of this reality comes easily to the alcoholic who understands her alcoholism; the phenomenon of alcoholism replicates the essence of the human condition.
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Tagged as: AA, healing, higher power, humour, laughter