It’s a delightful thing to feel amused, to be seized by the power of humor and brought unexpectedly into a spasm of giggles. It’s equally wonderful, however, to summon this emotional reaction in other people. Sometimes, people feel a hunger to stimulate other people’s funny bones. They’re feeling jocular, in the mood to make jokes.
To find humor in the world is at the core of the human experience. Humor arises out of the ability to perceive a situation from unconventional perspectives. This same ability enables us to come up with new solutions to life’s most pernicious problems. When we’re feeling jocular, we have a greater creative aptitude, with a curious willingness to re-examine old ideas from new angles. To be jocular is thus to challenge the status quo, observing absurdity and opportunity at the same time.
The energy of a jocular mood is similar to sanuk, the Thai emotion of playfulness throughout the day, but with a more subversive, a cutting edge. To be jocular involves an eagerness to point out the absurdity of cultural standards. It’s a rebellious emotion, as comedian Eric Idle observed when he commented, “Life doesn’t make any sense, and we all pretend it does. Comedy’s job is to point out that it doesn’t make sense.”
If we feel that life doesn’t make sense, it becomes difficult to maintain our trust in the people who occupy positions of social power. Their systems of order become laughable. There’s nothing more hilarious, after all, than a person who treats an absurdity as if it makes sense.
A free and open society accepts these ambiguities, and allows flexibility in the expression of its power, remaining open to mockery. The seriousness of dictators, on the other hand, will not allow for the idea that their missions contain even a small bit of absurdity. Idle explains, “One way of measuring the freedom of any society is the amount of comedy that is permitted, and clearly a healthy society permits more satirical comment than a repressive, so that if comedy is to function in some way as a safety release, then it must obviously deal with these taboo areas.”
Idle’s vision of comedy conceives of jocularity as an emblem for emotional freedom in general. A society that allows for jokes that challenge authority will recognize the validity of people’s feelings more broadly, regardless of whether those emotions comply with the ideology of those in power. A joke is effective only when it aligns authentically with the emotional experiences of its audience. A joke, then, is not only a challenge to the status quo, but also a test of emotional authenticity, a means of talking about our most uncomfortable feelings.
