The instability of irrepressible laughter is an affront to our humanist sensibilities: we do not want to crack up. And we don’t want to deal with a world that is cracking up and that cracks us up—often without our consent. Fluidity ssscaares us . . . . In some sense or another we are breaking up, in every instant, whether we choose to affirm or deny it” (Davis, 2000, p. 3)

When we are laughed in this way, Davis (2000) notes, “meaning/logic exceeds itself in a burst of laughter, and the boundaries of the ego crack up” (p 18). This laughter shatters our illusion of free will and fixed identity as well, for we laugh and at the same time are laughed, seized by outside forces. Davis calls this kairotic laughter, because at this “opportune moment” (a la Gorgias) kairos seizes time and overrules human logic:

The kairotic moment names that instant when our meaning making is, in a flash, exposed as an operation inscribed in rather than opposed to play . . . . Kairos in other words, is linked to divine law (nonrational) rather than human law (rational). It operates as a “rhythm” that arises not from negation (a process of reason) but from excess (which is non- or extra-rational), from the free-play of an unmasterable physis… kairos becomes “something living, a prompting which continually by means of irrationality overcomes recurring opposites.” . . . The force of kairos swoops in at the moment reason yields to a dissoi logoi to over come the impasse by imposing its own decision . . . . this kairos possesses the subject/speaker and wills its “decision” making the speaking subject (also) the spoken subject, that is, making the subject also an object . . . . When kairos intervenes and “makes something new, irrational, Itanza notes, “ 'things' fly apart. The binaries are exploded.” (Davis, pp. 27-28)

Laughter’s Liberatory Perspective

Mindess (1971) discusses the liberatory nature of laughter. Laughter helps to free us from the cages of conformity and convention in which we have trapped ourselves into, along with the ruts of redundancy in which we have become stuck. During our lives, we become pressured to conform in many subtle ways, through different social conventions and morals, through language and logic—all of these provide structure, bringing sense and order into our lives, helping us feel secure. ∆RC[mp17]

Mindess (1971) observes that we achieve a mixed blessing when in the interest of fitting in, we abide by the fashions and habits of our society and reign in our instincts, and banish “strange fantasies and irrational ideas from our minds” for the sake of sanity. For the sake of security and peace of mind, we split from part of our authentic selves, sacrificing spontaneity and genuineness in the process. According to Mindess, what laughter offers us is a “release from our stabilizing systems, escape from our self- imposed prisons . . . liberation from our controls” (p. 23). Mindess argues that through laughter, we can escape the cages of categorization, conformity and redundancy, which the security of structure provides. The Marx Brothers in their movies exhibited the trickster quality of freely flaunting conventions. These kinds of characters and movies appeal so much because of our pressure to conform, which stifles our uniqueness through fear and habit.

While our sense of humor helps us to escape from the systems in which we may be stuck, be they perceptual, logical, moral, conventional, or linguistic, humor also helps to disillusion us “from the naïve belief that man is a reasonable trustworthy creature” (Mindess, 1971, p. 106). We are short-sighted, semi-blind in our understanding of ourselves and the world. Humor, Mindess notes, makes us laugh and see, it allows us to “grasp the grotesque absurdity and pathos of the human scene.” Humor allows us to both appreciate our admirable qualities and acknowledge our contemptible ones, showing us that normally we inhabit a narrower range of consciousness than we possess. Humor releases us from the “naïveté of single-minded views” (p. 106).

Laughter’s quintessential power, however, is to free us “from identification with our own egos” (Mindess, 1971, p. 28). Our egos require that we be taken seriously, for we need to matter. Our fear of letting go often keeps humor from working its magic. We get very attached to our selves, as well as our views. Mindess notes that:

We all feel a need to bank on [emphasis added] something or someone, to believe in something or someone, be it reason, morality, science, the church, democracy, family, friends, our own attractiveness, intelligence, strength or charm. These anchors provide our security; they keep us safely moored in the frightening swirl of being. (pp. 30-31)

Mindess’s interesting choice of words reveals yet another level of subtlety to Mary Poppins. George Banks works at a bank, as his father before him did. George’s name and his occupation coincide, but now with Mindess’s help, another important aspect comes into view. “Banking on” something, means counting on it, and so not only is George identified with his job, but the particular job itself is another level of the pattern as well, and serves to underscore the stable, secure, structural aspects that George so Saturnianly embodies, running his “home precisely on schedule.” The liberation that laughter strives toward: "a state of mind keenly aware of its contingency, its relativity, its fallibility,” while “liberating to my identity as a human being” is devastating to the ego and intellect (Mindess, 1971, pp. 82-83).

We are not only stuck in our own identities, but we are also prisoners of our patterns, obsessively repeating them in a circle of sameness. We think mostly of things we’ve ever thought, instead of things that we’ve never thought, and thus become slaves to single-mindedness: “like wound-up spring action toys, we play out our little repertoires again and again and again, for we are frightened and confused at the prospect of doing anything unlike ourselves” (Mindess, 1971, p. 109). ∆RC[mp18]

This rather “foolish consistency” keeps us in behavioral and attitudinal ruts. But why? Repetitive patterns simplify our lives, saving us from constantly making new self-assessments and decisions. “Having settled on any outlook whatsoever, we are stubbornly resistant to opposing points of view because they threaten our serenity. Having found peace of mind, we are loathe to relinquish it even if it means becoming narrow and dogmatic” (Mindess, 1971, p. 112). Redundancy is part of our makeup, which we cannot eliminate, but humor helps illuminate it, and at times humor is able to offer a helping hand to pull us out of our routine ruts.

Our sense of humor demands the opposite of conformity and redundancy, that we be flexible, restless, changeable, various and unpredictable: “It evokes the rhythm of the life process in its most elemental form. It does not tolerate redundancy in any human endeavor, for redundancy is the enemy of human vitality, and vitality—unvarnished and unpretified—is humor’s favorite protégé” (Mindess, 1971, p. 113). Ironically, we often laugh at instances of rigidity and nonthinking in others.

Mindess says that babies love when people make faces at them and when they are tossed in the air. Common to both experiences are “sudden brief distortion of his usual experience," which is what jokes are. Surprise disrupts usual order of things, and allows our minds to skip about, shifting views and coming up with surprising observations, instead of remaining locksteply logical, or precisely proper.

We laugh when we experience the unexpected. When what we believe will or should happen is inconsistent with what actually occurs. Incongruities temporarily rupture our expectations of what is to come. The sudden shift and resulting surprise often provoke laughter: “children’s humor, word play, surrealist and dadaist art, and theater of the absurd all draw on incongruity for ludic effect . . . . The incongruity between expectations and actuality, between the mechanical and the adaptive, motivates the laughter in much of comedy” (p. 20). We will look at this more during the scene-by-scene-play when we visit Uncle Albert’s house.

Morreall (1983) notes that a sense of humor allows us to see "our way" as just one of many possible ways, enabling us gain distance on ourselves and to be disengaged from action. A sense of humor allows us distance from both our successes and our failures, keeping us from becoming inflated by a sense of self-importance, and helping us to enjoy otherwise difficult situations. By gaining distance from our problems through humor, we are more apt to find solutions. We can be less egocentrically involved and thus not overvalue our own view. ∆RC[mp19]

The distancing that humor provides also allows us to see the absurdity of different aspects of our problems, and thus we can more easily begin to change things. An example of this is the scheduling of a time to be anxious which is used in “paradoxical therapy.”

Viktor Frankl found that humor was “almost a prerequisite to survival” in his experiences in concentration camps and Frankl used humor in different psychotherapeutic techniques:

Humor was another of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self preservation . . . humor more than anything else in the human make-up can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, if only for a few seconds.” (Morreall, 1983, p. 104)

In times of distress, laughter allows us a “god’s-eye view,” a semi-detached, quasi-indifferent objective perspective, what the gods would see looking down from a height. While this perspective of laughter:

may not enable us to change reality, enables us to endure it. It may not allow us to discard our egos, but it allows us to transcend them. The full development of our sense of humor results in a frame of mind so free, so flexible, and so kaleidoscopic that it rigidifies nowhere, gets hooked on nothing . . . . It is this frame of mind that can, with some conviction be called our ultimate hope, for the ability to evoke it represents an ability to take whatever comes with a shrug if not a smile. (Mindess, 1971, p. 30)

Laughter and Creativity

The structure of humor “inherently provides the constant possibility of a new unexpected beginning.” As Mindess (1971) observes, “the procedure of humor, in short, is the procedure of creativity, for in its construction as well as in its content, the ludicrous continually provides us with new compositions formed out of old raw materials” (p. 153). Do I hear bricolage?

George Banks was totally wrong when he derided Mary’s outings with the children. Mary, through her unconventional methods, was teaching the children something far more valuable than they could ever learn in any school or bank—the creative power of the imagination. Something as small as a joke can have great consequences, since it helps us escape the usual, and celebrates the unusual. Humor enhances creative possibilities, bricolagically accessing the unconventional side of our imaginations:

From pure absurdity to pointed barbs, the play of wit puts pieces of thought together to create brand new ideas. So doing, it pries us loose from encrusted ruts of thinking and invites us to skip along novel pathways of the mind. It is in this respect that humor paves the way for originality on a wider scale. Silly and childish as it often appears, irreverent and impertinent as it always is, our sense of humor has the power to unlock all of our other creative potentials. Humor, moreover is not just a key to creativity; it is itself a creative act. Like a scientific theory, a painting, or a poem, even a lowly joke deals in novelty and originality. It rejects conventional thinking, makes use of imagination and articulates the unheard-of. Conceived, like its more illustrious relatives, in a burst of inspiration, the humorous product too may be shaped and refined in painstaking dedication . . . while it may neither glorify nor explain life the better, it arises out of the same dissatisfaction with the status quo and asserts the same right to evolve new forms of thought and imagery. (Mindess, 1971, p. 154)

Laughter is not all fun and games, it also has a shadow side. While laughter can be creative and liberatory, laughter can also be destructive and be used as a weapon to ostracize others; while laughter strengthens the bonds of a group, it also encourages disaffiliation and distance from others who are felt to be inferior and are the butt of jokes. ∆RC[mp20]

Now that we are done joking around, let us move on to explore the movie Mary Poppins in the "Scene-by-scene-play."

End of section continue on to Scene-by-Sceneplay