Contributions

William F. Waters and John Andrews
Northern Michigan University, Marquette, Michigan 1999

ARE WE TOO SERIOUS? 
THE VALUE OF HUMOR IN CRIMINAL JUSTICE WORK

"We are all here for a spell. Get all the good laughs you can."

Will Rogers

Some years ago an article appeared in a newspaper about two Midwest police officers who had developed a humorous routine for responding to selected domestic dispute calls. One night they were dispatched to a marital dispute and in their rush out of the squad car grabbed each others hats. Not until they were facing the angry husband on the doorstep did they realize they had made this mistake. One had a small hat perched atop his large head while the other had a big hat covering the top half of his small head. They looked so odd that even the fuming husband managed a slight chuckle.

This fateful accident eventually became a finely tuned act which the cops use as part of their domestic dispute response repertoire. When the time is right they pull down their hats so that their ears stick out, loosen their ties, button their shirts askew and rap on the door with a "shave and a haircut" beat. Sometimes, they will even put on over-sized glasses and Grocho noses. "Is that your car down there with the lights on?" they deadpan. The serious sounding but odd looking duo often elicits smiles from the disputants. The team then knows it can continue the humor routine a bit longer and maybe bring about a successful reconciliation. For these two cops, judicious and purposeful clowning diffuses hostility and deters potential violence. And for them it is more effective in some instances that a traditional police approach, although both concede that the use of humor must be well timed and prudent.

Recently a criminal justice student at Northern Michigan University - who also works as a full-time corrections officer - kept a journal about his job for a class project. Every day he made notes about what he observed or overheard on the job. Surprisingly, many of his observations were of inmates and staff and the humorous things they said and did. Humor, he found, was pervasive. Although much of it was of a dark and personally exploitative nature it was humor nonetheless in the sense that it was intended to induce laughter or amusement. It permeated, even dominated, many of the conversations among inmates and between inmates and staff. It punctuated communication among staff in their discussion of work and of their relationships with each other and with inmates. It was omnipresent in speech, in behavior and in attitudes. The student's journal revealed a curious yet quite obvious fact: humor plays a big role and may well serve an important function in correctional facilities. Both inmates and staff use it as a way of coping with the grim circumstances of their lives and/or their work.

The role of humor in the practice of criminal justice goes beyond prisons. Pogrebin and Poole (1988), in their examination of the strategic uses of humor among police officers, suggest that humor is a well established resource serving at least three purposes.

First, it helps to expose commonly shared experiences and concerns which could not otherwise be expressed. Humor provides the means to test the attitudes, perceptions or feelings of other group members. Second, humor promotes social solidarity. Mutual ribbing and teasing allow group members to recognize that they can laugh at each other without ill intent since they have a shared communal relationship. Group solidarity and bonding is strengthened and enhanced by humor. Third, humor is a coping strategy used often to manage a variety of forces beyond one's direct and immediate control. Gallows humor, for example, can be used to transform crises and tragedy into something less threatening.

"A merry heart doeth good like a medicine"

Proverbs 17:22

In his book ANATOMY OF AN ILLNESS, Norman Cousins tells of his personal experience with the healing powers of laughter as he battled with a debilitating and potentially fatal disease. Cousins was diagnosed with a rare, neurological condition called Ankylosing spondylitis. There was no cure. His physician told him he should prepare for death. Since he was not ready to die he decided to manage his own physiological destiny. Cousins took to his bed with a cache of Marx Brothers and " Candid Camera" video tapes which he watched and literally laughed himself back to health. To make a long story short, he lived and thrived - even survived a serious coronary attack - with the help of humor and the laughter it evoked. Cousins became a living icon for those promoting and practicing humor as therapeutic and healing. 

Norman Cousins' insight into humor and health gained him an appointment as an adjunct professor at the UCLA School of medicine. There he established a "Humor Task Force" to coordinate research exploring the effect of humor and laughter on the human body. In his book HEAD FIRST: THE BIOLOGY OF HOPE, he reports on this research. His fascinating story punctuates the simple yet profound finding that humor produces more than just laughter. It elicits important biological and chemical changes in the body. It can positively effect the blood pressure, oxygenate the blood, facilitate digestion and even suppress stress-related hormones. There may even be a relation between laughter and the release of endorphines - the body's own natural pain killers. In his book, Cousins explains how the ability to laugh can dispense positive emotions like hope, joy, faith and confidence. Thanks to Cousins and others like William Frye Jr. M.D. who has done research on the physiology of laughter for over 40 years there is growing support in the medical profession for humor as therapy. Laughter is likened "to" internal jogging. LOBOTOMY: n. An operation performed to correct a sagging bottom. It seems utterly incongruous that tragedy could generate humor. Yet history illustrates that even through the worst human misery and anguish, humor survives. Take, for example, this witticism which emerged from a Nazi concentration camp: 

Hitler consulting an astrologer: 
Hitler:" When will I die, Herr Astrologer?" 
Astrologer: "On a Jewish holiday, Herr Hitler." 
Hitler: "Yes, but which Jewish holiday, Herr Astrologer?" 
Astrologer: "Herr Hitler, any day you die will be a Jewish holiday!" 

Frankl (1963:68) writes of the critical role humor played in his survival of the Nazi death camps: "Humor was another of the soul's weapons in the fight for self preservation. It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds. I practically trained a friend who worked next to me on the building site (in the concentration camp) to develop a sense of humor. I suggested to him that we should promise each other to invent at least one amusing story daily, about some incident that would happen one day after our liberation." 

Jerry Zolten, a speech professor at Pennsylvania State University, studied the jokes that circulated after the mid-air explosion of the Challenger space shuttle in 1988 (Green,1993:117) Only days after the event, while family members and the nation mourned, jokes such as the following emerged:

Question: What does NASA stand for? 
Answer: Need Another Seven Astronauts. 

"They were a way to vent socially unacceptable material," Zolten concluded. He found that while the shuttle jokes were offensive to others, they were still likely to repeat them. They were a coping or defense mechanism against the awful uncertainties and unfairness of human life that were embodied in the Challenger and other tragedies suffered collectively or individually. 

One finds a great deal of humor in the daily news about crime - the robbery that falls apart when the barrel falls off the gun the robber is pointing at the clerk; the report of the man in the phone booth being robbed by a pair of thieves armed with snapping turtles; the Easter Bunny mugging. These are just a few examples of the humor which can be found in crime and criminals. 

Jay Leno's book "POLICE BLOTTER: REAL-LIFE CRIME HEADLINES" is 160 pages of columns from newspapers around the country about criminals, police officers, courts and jails. They all have a humorous hook or twist and together they make this simple point quite clear: even something as serious as crime and the way we deal with it can often have a humorous angle or dimension if we look for it and allow ourselves to respond to it. A few more examples include: an off-duty officer at a tavern who accidentally shoots another officer in the neck when he fires a miniature gun he'd thought was a cigarette lighter; A call about a male subject throwing a turkey at a female; a woman who stabbed her daughter on Mother's Day after an argument over who was the better mother. 

Criminal behavior is often a manifestation of some of man's less desirable traits. Greed, ignorance, hate and anger are reflected in crime. Our usual inclination is to amplify, generalize and dwell upon this bleak side of human nature when working with crime and criminals. We may even take on some of it ourselves and begin to think of all this negativity as the only reality. But we can get beyond this limited perspective. We all know deep down that there is a much wider vista which includes other possibilities. Humor and the laughter which accompanies it reflects a way of life and living which denies nothing but opens to everything. It opens to the human capacity in us all - suppressed as it may be in many us - to laugh when others around us insist that laughter is not allowed; to find humor where others insist that only despair and suffering can exist; to lighten-up when everyone and everything tells us to tighten-up. 

We wonder if criminal justice practitioners do not have something to learn from medicine. That profession seems to be off and running with all that humor and laughter has to offer the healing process. Can we continue to ignore the positive, life-changing effects of humor and it's potential for good things in criminal justice? If we can move beyond the barriers - understandable but largely self-imposed emotional hang-ups to dealing with certain issues and people in anything but the serious mode - perhaps there is a professional awakening just waiting to happen! One can speculate happily about what kind of a person might come out of a jail or corrections facility which has the following phrase chiseled above it's entry rather than the more common and solemn inscriptions.

"You can't help growing older, but you can help growing old. Father time is going to keep on marching for all of us - we can't stop the hands of the clock and some hardening of the arteries. But we can stop and even reverse some hardening of the attitudes. If you stand rigidly in the face of stress, you are much more easily knocked off balance but if you are flexible mentally and can laugh at yourself you're in a much better position to role with the punch."

George Burns 

George Burns lived to be 100 years old and attributed his long life to growing up around and living with plenty of humor and laughter. 

Let's be candid with ourselves. We in criminal justice are very much committed to serious, unyielding stuff like bureaucracies, regulations and the law. We like the structure it provides in an otherwise uncertain environment. But this very structure tends to inhibit spontaneity and creativity. On that day when the Truth is finally revealed to us, much of what we do in criminal justice -especially in jails - will be shown to be as much art as science. The true professional on the jail staff is the one who can combine science and art1 seriousness and humor, spontaneity and rules in a truly harmonious blend reflecting the value of each. The art part of this blend embraces humor because it serves a holistic openness to the human condition. humor tends to invite while seriousness tends to restrict. When one is in the humor mode one is challenged to use a multitude of artful abstractions in a variety of fitting combinations all of which are compatible with a clown persona. Can one be a professional and a clown? (Can one be a clown and a cop?)

It is unfortunate that presently in criminal justice work a wondrously humorous nature with it's spontaneous, even child-like, qualities might well be interpreted as naiveté and vulnerability and therefore inconsistent with tough-minded dedication to public safety. Indeed, these are characteristics to be avoided like the plague in the serious, highly regulated work environment of the criminal justice system. But in reality a humorous nature is as much or more a reflection of a love of life and a joy of living. Are these not values important to controlling crime and changing a criminal behavior? (Not to mention making work behind bars a bit more bearable!)

As one ponders the place for humor in criminal justice work one thinks of such issues as: 

How much or how little humor and laughter was there in the lives of the emotionally desperate people who populate our jails? 

How and why did so many of these people learn to take themselves so seriously that they are unable or unwilling to take themselves less so? 

Why is so much of the humor in jails - and outside of jails for that matter - at the expense of someone else? And what does this say about the role of humor in self-identity, relationships, psychic health and society? 

How can jail administrators, policy-makers and trainers capitalize more fully and positively upon the humor already extant in jails and prisons? 

How much pain and suffering is expressed as well as covered-up by way of the socially accepted vehicle of exploitative humor? 

How much anger, hostility and aggression is reflected in dark, gallows humor and laughter at someone else's expense? 

There is so much hate, fear, anger and resentment within the inmate population (not to mention the staff). But these emotions are inimical with a well cultivated, healthy sense of humor. Could we work harder in criminal justice at fostering and developing a structured1 institutional approach to humor as a policy tool? One can only wonder what possibilities might exist by including humor in Jail training as a legitimate human relations tool. 

Hansot (1979) argues that humor has a number of important roles or - functions in organizations. It integrates, expresses skepticism, contributes to flexibility and adaptiveness, and indicates status. Humor can be used for distancing but it can also work to socialize and include. Most important, humor can illuminate and change frames of reference so as to indicate that any single definition of a situation is arbitrary. To illustrate this very important role of humor, consider this story about Marcus Foster when he was superintendent of schools in Oakland, California. A panicked high school principal called Foster to ask for help: "Twenty-five armed Black Panthers are standing outside my office!" Foster responded immediately, "Think of them as Pink Panthers," and hung up the phone. The humor in the idea of "pink panther" enabled the principal to handle the situation brilliantly.

Conclusion

Perhaps the following quote from a contemporary thinker on health, happiness and humor says it best: 

"…seriousness is equated with responsibility, when, in fact, I think we could be much more responsible if we had more joy and laughter in our lives." 

Deepak Chopra

References

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