Laughter the best medicine amid virus

CLIMATE change, debt, mental health struggles and now the coronavirus: life is no laughing matter.

But for under-30s the best way to stay sane is often to wisecrack.

“We joke that we post because none of us can afford therapy,” says Chuck Wentzell, 26, a member of Twitter group chats where gallows humor is the order of the day.

“Posting about it or making the jokes about it makes it feel somehow less real but also more manageable,” said the high school science teacher from New Haven, Connecticut. in the United States.

The tone of the humor isn’t to everyone’s taste — some may find it a little on the nail, and not exactly laugh-out-loud funny.

But for younger social media users, a gag that others could find flippant is sometimes a howl of frustration over the powerlessness of a generation unable to jam on the brakes in a world heading for the cliff edge.

These callow comics have been particularly prolific during the pandemic, which has infected 6 million people, killing 360,000 and laying waste to the global economy.

“Guys will stand 5’8” from you and call it six feet,” tweeted a woman in New York, taking a sideways look at social distancing — and men’s tendency to exaggerate their physical attributes.

Other humorists focus on the absurdity of the business-asusual approach to a worldwide crisis.

“People who are quarantining in jeans: what are you trying to prove?” tweeted New Yorkbased writer @sarafcarter.

Another meme of uncertain provenance, but widely-shared among millennials, displays the caption:

“Looking at the map for some weekend travel ideas.”

The image underneath is not of some faraway tropical paradise, but a floor plan of a three-room apartment.

The jokes, says academic Peter McGraw, are largely the product of “psychological distancing” — a mental retreat that gives the keyboard comedian the perspective to see through life’s ridiculousness.

Humor “has this interrupting feedback loop,” the behavioral economist and head of the Humor Research Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder said.

For McGraw, a joke “makes the moment more bearable, the bearable moment makes the joke more likely, and so on.”

Like meditating or stresscleaning your apartment, humor is “a way to kind of give yourself a sense of control in a world that seems uncontrollable.”

(AFP)