The Humor That Hurts

A sense of humor would seem to be one of life’s absolute essentials _ that is, a wholesome sense of humor. But there is a humor that heals, a humor that helps, and a humor that harms and hurts. And one kind of humor that hurts is the humor that brings attention to embarrassing personal things about people _ perhaps physical features; the humor, for example, that ridicules what people can’t help: the “baldy,” “fatty,” “skinny,” “stand-up-shorty” kind of humor that is, at best, unkind, and is, at worst, cruel and crude and cutting.

The person who is subject to such humor may half-heartedly or helplessly laugh, and others may also, but despite all laughter and supposed amusement, hurts run deep in the human heart, and the person subjected to such humor, whether he laughs or not, is often deeply wounded and pitifully defenseless.

Sometimes it almost seems, as William Hazlitt said: “We grow tired of everything but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects.”  “The spirit, Sir, is one of mockery,”  said Robert Louis Stevenson. Such “a joke,” said Thomas Fuller, “never gains over an enemy, but often loses a friend.” 

There are some kinds of humor for which everyone pays too high a price, including the humor that violates human dignity _ the humor that ridicules and hurts and embarrasses and embitters, publicly or privately. From Lord Byron and Edward Young we recall these two couplets:

“And that sarcastic levity of tongue,

The stinging of a heart the world hath stung.” 

“Who, for the poor renown of being smart,

Would leave a sting within a brother’s heart?”