Laughing our way to the Apocalypse

Humour is the best medicine.

Excellent news because, frankly, these days I am self-medicating very heavily. Sitcoms, memes, stupid videos, stand-up and people falling over things they absolutely should have seen. Mainline that sucker straight into my bloodstream - stat.

And there’s good reason for that.

Laughter can interrupt stress. It changes our state. It helps us connect with other people. It gives us a little psychological breathing room when things feel grim.

And things do feel a little grim. So I understand the impulse to say, for the love of God, put something funny on.

But in one of my brain’s regular octopus moments, which throws up contrasting ideas that have little suckers that stick to me, my mind landed on Neil Postman’s 1985 book. Amusing Ourselves to Death. His concern wasn’t that people were having too much fun. It was that entertainment was becoming the organising principle for everything. News, politics, ideas all have to entertain us. If something was complicated, slow, uncomfortable, or required sustained attention, it suddenly competed with something much shinier.

Forty years later, that feels uncomfortably familiar because I can now move effortlessly from footage of war, climate disaster or political chaos to a crazy little dog wearing tiny sequined trousers in approximately 0.7 seconds.

And sometimes I desperately need that crazy little dog. The question is whether I ever want to come back.

Some humour gives us enough relief to keep going, while other humour means we never have to look. One is respite. The other is anaesthetic. And the line between the two is probably not very tidy.

I’m certainly not giving up comedy. If anything, when the world feels frightening or absurd, laughing together can be one way we remain human. It reminds us that we are not just consumers of catastrophe. We are still capable of joy, connection, silliness and perspective.

But perhaps humour works best when it helps us return to the world rather than retreat from it. Laugh. Watch the stupid video. Send the meme. Go and see the comedian. Get some air back into your lungs and then, occasionally, turn back towards the thing you were trying not to see.

And while humour really is medicine - we just need to make sure it's an analgesic and not an anaesthetic.