December Days 02025 #30: Laughter
Dec. 30th, 2025 11:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptIt's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.
30: Laughter
teres mentioned, a few entries ago, that I was better at making them laugh than they had thought. (The idea of geeks using their e-penises to fence with each other is funny, and even more so if you add the lightsaber noises while they're swinging them around.)
In the sense of writing and performing, comedy is certainly more in my strengths than drama, Perhaps because comedy is a more immediately gratifying situation, where it's considered appropriate to laugh at the funny thing right after it's been delivered, rather than waiting for a break in the action or the drama to express appreciation. And that dramatic things often end up with people not wanting to express public emotion about them, because that's considered rude. So, perhaps as a person who's always on the lookout for their next hit of good happy chemicals, I choose the medium that's more likely to provide those chemicals on the regular, and with more immediate feedback on how to make things better for the audience that you're trying to entertain.
A lot of my stories are tinged with comedy, either because what happened is funny, or because what happened to me is funny. The absurdity of life, of work, of the kinds of situations that appear, and the ways that people react to them, they're all present, and for the most part, it seems easier to laugh off many things than to be crushed by them. Even some of the really hurtful things that get thrown your way, especially from people who are doing that kind of thing because they're looking for you to get crushed by it, or to have a reaction to it, where they can dance away with a "why so serious?". There was something bandied about my social feeds for a while, a quotation about how one side of an argument, if they're engaging in bad faith, doesn't have to actually mean anything that they say, and therefore are free to say whatever will get the rise they desire out of the person they're talking to, and then, when they've gotten the rise, they can walk away from that position, and will, freely and easily, without having to worry about it. So, lots of people are looking for a reaction out of you when they post or say things that are deliberately inflammatory.
In childhood, when these things happened, the standard advice I was given was to provide no reaction to those kinds of things, because the people saying those things were jealous of your skills and successes, or were lashing out in their own insecurity about something, or otherwise deserved no response, because their motives were not pure nor genuine. This is supposed to be comforting, I think, to the person on the receiving end of the bullying or the teasing, because it allows them to position themselves as superior to their tormentors. By putting the people hurting them as inferiors and recommending that the inferiors receive no response at all, it encourages hierarchical attitudes toward other humans, which makes things like racism, sexism, and plenty of other -isms more palatable and acceptable. It's not that short of a hop between "the people who are trying to hurt me are beneath my notice" to "the people who are different than me are lesser than I am, and do not deserve help or the basics of human dignity."
It also doesn't work all that much. The people who are looking for a reaction tend to escalate when they're not getting any reaction from someone else, so that means having to endure worse things until the person tormenting decides it's not any fun any more and changes to another target (or, more likely, someone else does something that makes them the acceptable target, and the eye of Sauron moves to somewhere else.) And some people who are doing or saying things that are hurtful to us are doing so because we are also doing or saying things that are hurtful to them, and they have decided to believe that we are doing so in ignorance, and that we can change our behavior if it's brought to our attention. Ignoring everyone who says mean things about you as beneath you reinforces many of the behaviors that lead to people saying mean things about you. Discernment as to whether the mean thing is spiteful and ungrounded or an attempt at a call-in is a necessary skill, and not one that schools teach particularly well, if at all, and that people who are higher on the hierarchy tend not to teach well, either. Admitting that someone who is supposed to be beneath you has a point calls into question the entire concept of the hierarchy itself and whether that structure has legitimacy.
Perhaps most crucially, though, the "just ignore them" approach puts the responsibility on the victim to endure, rather than on the bully to change. (On the assumption that this is bullying, instead of a warranted call-in.) It is an easier pathway for other people to take, because it absolves them of the responsibility to act, to advocate, to engage with the things that are causing these mean things to be said. (And if it turns out to be a call-in, then just ignoring it also absolves the victim of having to engage with themselves and their own behavior.) To ignore the thing is to permit its continued existence, and that's detrimental to everyone involved and everyone who has to witness those acts.
[Diversion: This is not solely the responsibilities of teachers, even if we tell them to act in the stead of parents. Among other things, teachers are already overworked and have too large of classrooms to work with. And much of the bullying and calling-in happens outside of school platforms and school grounds. This is not to encourage, as some schools do, the monitoring of student social media outside of the school and to provide in-school consequences for out-of-school actions. If we want to give teachers the responsibility for stopping these kinds of actions in their classrooms and on school grounds, we have to give teachers the capacity to address those things as they happen, processes to come to socially healthy resolutions of those matters, and the authority to levy appropriate consequences for persistent actions. So many schools either refuse to acknowledge such things happen, because they refuse the responsibility of doing their part to resolve them. Other times they refuse to act because they don't have the capacity or the processes to make good social resolutions. And sometimes, they don't act because they believe that the bullies are right, and the targeted child needs to be less "weird" and more "normal" so as to ease the burden on the school of having to accommodate or work with their difference.
In all cases, there is a responsibility for the relevant grownups outside of school to pitch in and do their part to resolve the situation happening in school or out of school. Much like teachers, though, the relevant grownups need to have the capacity to resolve such things and the tools to resolve them. In a world where some families have two grownups working for wage as much as possible so as to avoid starvation or eviction, there is not nearly enough time available to develop those tools and to retain that capacity. In the States, that renders a lot of people vulnerable to messaging from politicians, grifters, and bigots that encourage specific kinds of hierarchical framing to direct their ire and unhappiness at their condition at people "underneath" them in the hierarchy, to see them as thieves, criminals, and parasites, instead of turning their ire toward the people who are stealing from them, committing crimes against them, and sucking profits away from their labor to live without contributing anything back. Anyone who believes in the value of "passive income" is someone who believes that they should not have to contribute to society, but instead is entitled to collect rents from others because they have the good fortune of having excesses of real property, or because they have been given power to pay people less in wages than the value of the work they actually do.]
What appears to be the actual best response to bullying situations, to things that are motivated not as call-ins, but as attempts to put someone in a place on the hierarchy and make them believe they are inferior, lesser, or that this place is theirs, is to respond to what's happening, but to do so orthogonally, instead of according to a specific expectation. Sometimes that means choosing violence to the degree that a bully decides that you are not worth the effort and moves on to another, less likely to fight, target, but violence is a potentially risky strategy. If the bully is encouraging or expecting violence, the amount of escalation needed to get them to back off will have to proportionately increase. At a certain point, that escalation probably means someone is going to take a trip to the doctor to get patched up, and that introduces an entirely new set of challenges to have to deal with. Violence is sometimes an effective solution, but it tends to be suboptimal and instead start a cycle of serial escalation of violence that only breaks off when one of the two parties is no longer willing or able to continue the cycle.
One of the most orthogonal ways of responding to someone trying to put you down is to turn it into a comedy routine. The person expecting you to get mad will have their script disrupted if, instead, you turn it into "yes, and" improv. Or to highlight the absurdity of the situation. Where you could, insist that the person insulting you has to come up with a better class of insult than that, and then demonstrate that you have way more good ways of insulting yourself than they have of insulting you. By turning it from a grave insult into something funny, or acknowledging the thing without responding in any kind of negative manner, it takes the sting out of the strike. (Being able to not respond negatively, but with warmth and curiosity, when you're being called-in is a great skill, and takes a lot of practice and preparation beforehand, so that in the moment, defensiveness or hierarchical thinking or dismissal don't take over as the default or the expressed response.)
So, right from the get-go in childhood, I had comedy as one of my best ways of handling situations taht would arise, and also because I found a lot of things genuinely funny, even if sometimes I had to explain why I thought it was funny, or the pun that was involved that sprang up into my brain. Lots of opportunities for benign comedy there that I took advantage of, because laughter is the very best medicine. (Remember that when your appendix bursts next week.) But also, for much less altruistic reasons than increasing the amount of laughter in the world, I would turn to comedy, and specific forms of self-deprecating comedy, because it's much easier to control how people are laughing at you when you're the one making fun of yourself. If I'm already making fun of myself for being a long being, or having a face for radio, or that I would have so much better a time in life if I had the psychic power to do things by thinking about them, because them my brain would be right when it files things away after I've thought about doing them, or any other thing that happens to me, or that I do that might provoke an unhappy, angry, disappointed, or other negative response from someone else, then for someone else to do it would seem churlish. For as much as other things might be regional or hyper-local, one of the things that seems remarkably consistent across the States is that "piling on" is a social foul. If someone is already demonstrating their understanding of the hierarchy and their appropriately low position in it, it is rude or crude to rub their face in it, or otherwise keep doing things that are meant to demonstrate to someone their position in the hierarchy and what abuse they have to accept.
It's pervasive enough that I suspect plenty of people who have bad experiences in their lives where they get bullied are very fast off the line to make jokes about themselves, or otherwise disclaim any kind of expertise, knowledge, or ability that someone might use as a weapon against them. The best defense you have against someone else's decision to go on offense is to already put yourself down. You can keep the threshers, the sickles, and the scythes away from you by ensuring that you're not trying to rise above anyone else, no sir, anything that you see that might be a virtue of mine is not actually a virtue, or it is counterbalanced, or overbalanced, by all of these vices and issues that I also have, so there's no reason for you to think that I'm better than you and act in some way to try and hurt me for it. (That was something that I got accused of a lot when I was younger, of coming off as being better and smarter than the average bear, and unapologetic about showing off. Because I had been taught and brought up to be the best person that I could be at all times, and that other people would be doing the same. It would take some time before I understood there was such a thing as an appropriate amount of expertise to show in any given situation. Otherwise, if you behave like a wiz-ard, people will start calling you a bast-ard. Or other such imprecations. Obviously, I'd prefer the other way around, where people get to be their fully authentic and awesome selves all the time, but that does not appear to be on the docket for all that many people any time soon.
This is not necessarily an invitation to people to pry into the pasts of the people they hang around and see where their traumas are so as to confirm that the humor and the self-deprecation is a defensive mechanism in addition to being attempts to make people laugh. And also, I do genuinely do things and say things that are funny, because they're funny, and because sometimes sharing a laugh with someone else is what you need to get them to be receptive to the part that follows, where I have to instruct them on doing something differently than what they are doing right now. Or because I think it's funny, and I'd like other people to laugh at it as well. It's not all defensive responses, and especially not when I'm delivering prepared remarks or writing them down into fic or essays. Earlier, I think I mentioned a hard-boiled detective-style noir pastiche, heavy on the comedy, so this is something that I've been doing for a long time. I love language, and therefore I love being able to make jokes with it, the kind that are just fun, rather then the kinds that are mean or mean-spirited.
I do like to make people laugh, and I do like the idea that I'm good at it. (I also like that I can get things across in a more serious manner, too. I like that my writing works, even though I know that I need an editor for anything that's going to be professionally published, and so I'm happy to let them help me out with that.) And laughter is something that there hasn't been all that many opportunities for outside of a very local context, so here's hoping that we all get the opportunity to make people laugh more than we have in the previous year.
30: Laughter
teres mentioned, a few entries ago, that I was better at making them laugh than they had thought. (The idea of geeks using their e-penises to fence with each other is funny, and even more so if you add the lightsaber noises while they're swinging them around.)In the sense of writing and performing, comedy is certainly more in my strengths than drama, Perhaps because comedy is a more immediately gratifying situation, where it's considered appropriate to laugh at the funny thing right after it's been delivered, rather than waiting for a break in the action or the drama to express appreciation. And that dramatic things often end up with people not wanting to express public emotion about them, because that's considered rude. So, perhaps as a person who's always on the lookout for their next hit of good happy chemicals, I choose the medium that's more likely to provide those chemicals on the regular, and with more immediate feedback on how to make things better for the audience that you're trying to entertain.
A lot of my stories are tinged with comedy, either because what happened is funny, or because what happened to me is funny. The absurdity of life, of work, of the kinds of situations that appear, and the ways that people react to them, they're all present, and for the most part, it seems easier to laugh off many things than to be crushed by them. Even some of the really hurtful things that get thrown your way, especially from people who are doing that kind of thing because they're looking for you to get crushed by it, or to have a reaction to it, where they can dance away with a "why so serious?". There was something bandied about my social feeds for a while, a quotation about how one side of an argument, if they're engaging in bad faith, doesn't have to actually mean anything that they say, and therefore are free to say whatever will get the rise they desire out of the person they're talking to, and then, when they've gotten the rise, they can walk away from that position, and will, freely and easily, without having to worry about it. So, lots of people are looking for a reaction out of you when they post or say things that are deliberately inflammatory.
In childhood, when these things happened, the standard advice I was given was to provide no reaction to those kinds of things, because the people saying those things were jealous of your skills and successes, or were lashing out in their own insecurity about something, or otherwise deserved no response, because their motives were not pure nor genuine. This is supposed to be comforting, I think, to the person on the receiving end of the bullying or the teasing, because it allows them to position themselves as superior to their tormentors. By putting the people hurting them as inferiors and recommending that the inferiors receive no response at all, it encourages hierarchical attitudes toward other humans, which makes things like racism, sexism, and plenty of other -isms more palatable and acceptable. It's not that short of a hop between "the people who are trying to hurt me are beneath my notice" to "the people who are different than me are lesser than I am, and do not deserve help or the basics of human dignity."
It also doesn't work all that much. The people who are looking for a reaction tend to escalate when they're not getting any reaction from someone else, so that means having to endure worse things until the person tormenting decides it's not any fun any more and changes to another target (or, more likely, someone else does something that makes them the acceptable target, and the eye of Sauron moves to somewhere else.) And some people who are doing or saying things that are hurtful to us are doing so because we are also doing or saying things that are hurtful to them, and they have decided to believe that we are doing so in ignorance, and that we can change our behavior if it's brought to our attention. Ignoring everyone who says mean things about you as beneath you reinforces many of the behaviors that lead to people saying mean things about you. Discernment as to whether the mean thing is spiteful and ungrounded or an attempt at a call-in is a necessary skill, and not one that schools teach particularly well, if at all, and that people who are higher on the hierarchy tend not to teach well, either. Admitting that someone who is supposed to be beneath you has a point calls into question the entire concept of the hierarchy itself and whether that structure has legitimacy.
Perhaps most crucially, though, the "just ignore them" approach puts the responsibility on the victim to endure, rather than on the bully to change. (On the assumption that this is bullying, instead of a warranted call-in.) It is an easier pathway for other people to take, because it absolves them of the responsibility to act, to advocate, to engage with the things that are causing these mean things to be said. (And if it turns out to be a call-in, then just ignoring it also absolves the victim of having to engage with themselves and their own behavior.) To ignore the thing is to permit its continued existence, and that's detrimental to everyone involved and everyone who has to witness those acts.
[Diversion: This is not solely the responsibilities of teachers, even if we tell them to act in the stead of parents. Among other things, teachers are already overworked and have too large of classrooms to work with. And much of the bullying and calling-in happens outside of school platforms and school grounds. This is not to encourage, as some schools do, the monitoring of student social media outside of the school and to provide in-school consequences for out-of-school actions. If we want to give teachers the responsibility for stopping these kinds of actions in their classrooms and on school grounds, we have to give teachers the capacity to address those things as they happen, processes to come to socially healthy resolutions of those matters, and the authority to levy appropriate consequences for persistent actions. So many schools either refuse to acknowledge such things happen, because they refuse the responsibility of doing their part to resolve them. Other times they refuse to act because they don't have the capacity or the processes to make good social resolutions. And sometimes, they don't act because they believe that the bullies are right, and the targeted child needs to be less "weird" and more "normal" so as to ease the burden on the school of having to accommodate or work with their difference.
In all cases, there is a responsibility for the relevant grownups outside of school to pitch in and do their part to resolve the situation happening in school or out of school. Much like teachers, though, the relevant grownups need to have the capacity to resolve such things and the tools to resolve them. In a world where some families have two grownups working for wage as much as possible so as to avoid starvation or eviction, there is not nearly enough time available to develop those tools and to retain that capacity. In the States, that renders a lot of people vulnerable to messaging from politicians, grifters, and bigots that encourage specific kinds of hierarchical framing to direct their ire and unhappiness at their condition at people "underneath" them in the hierarchy, to see them as thieves, criminals, and parasites, instead of turning their ire toward the people who are stealing from them, committing crimes against them, and sucking profits away from their labor to live without contributing anything back. Anyone who believes in the value of "passive income" is someone who believes that they should not have to contribute to society, but instead is entitled to collect rents from others because they have the good fortune of having excesses of real property, or because they have been given power to pay people less in wages than the value of the work they actually do.]
What appears to be the actual best response to bullying situations, to things that are motivated not as call-ins, but as attempts to put someone in a place on the hierarchy and make them believe they are inferior, lesser, or that this place is theirs, is to respond to what's happening, but to do so orthogonally, instead of according to a specific expectation. Sometimes that means choosing violence to the degree that a bully decides that you are not worth the effort and moves on to another, less likely to fight, target, but violence is a potentially risky strategy. If the bully is encouraging or expecting violence, the amount of escalation needed to get them to back off will have to proportionately increase. At a certain point, that escalation probably means someone is going to take a trip to the doctor to get patched up, and that introduces an entirely new set of challenges to have to deal with. Violence is sometimes an effective solution, but it tends to be suboptimal and instead start a cycle of serial escalation of violence that only breaks off when one of the two parties is no longer willing or able to continue the cycle.
One of the most orthogonal ways of responding to someone trying to put you down is to turn it into a comedy routine. The person expecting you to get mad will have their script disrupted if, instead, you turn it into "yes, and" improv. Or to highlight the absurdity of the situation. Where you could, insist that the person insulting you has to come up with a better class of insult than that, and then demonstrate that you have way more good ways of insulting yourself than they have of insulting you. By turning it from a grave insult into something funny, or acknowledging the thing without responding in any kind of negative manner, it takes the sting out of the strike. (Being able to not respond negatively, but with warmth and curiosity, when you're being called-in is a great skill, and takes a lot of practice and preparation beforehand, so that in the moment, defensiveness or hierarchical thinking or dismissal don't take over as the default or the expressed response.)
So, right from the get-go in childhood, I had comedy as one of my best ways of handling situations taht would arise, and also because I found a lot of things genuinely funny, even if sometimes I had to explain why I thought it was funny, or the pun that was involved that sprang up into my brain. Lots of opportunities for benign comedy there that I took advantage of, because laughter is the very best medicine. (Remember that when your appendix bursts next week.) But also, for much less altruistic reasons than increasing the amount of laughter in the world, I would turn to comedy, and specific forms of self-deprecating comedy, because it's much easier to control how people are laughing at you when you're the one making fun of yourself. If I'm already making fun of myself for being a long being, or having a face for radio, or that I would have so much better a time in life if I had the psychic power to do things by thinking about them, because them my brain would be right when it files things away after I've thought about doing them, or any other thing that happens to me, or that I do that might provoke an unhappy, angry, disappointed, or other negative response from someone else, then for someone else to do it would seem churlish. For as much as other things might be regional or hyper-local, one of the things that seems remarkably consistent across the States is that "piling on" is a social foul. If someone is already demonstrating their understanding of the hierarchy and their appropriately low position in it, it is rude or crude to rub their face in it, or otherwise keep doing things that are meant to demonstrate to someone their position in the hierarchy and what abuse they have to accept.
It's pervasive enough that I suspect plenty of people who have bad experiences in their lives where they get bullied are very fast off the line to make jokes about themselves, or otherwise disclaim any kind of expertise, knowledge, or ability that someone might use as a weapon against them. The best defense you have against someone else's decision to go on offense is to already put yourself down. You can keep the threshers, the sickles, and the scythes away from you by ensuring that you're not trying to rise above anyone else, no sir, anything that you see that might be a virtue of mine is not actually a virtue, or it is counterbalanced, or overbalanced, by all of these vices and issues that I also have, so there's no reason for you to think that I'm better than you and act in some way to try and hurt me for it. (That was something that I got accused of a lot when I was younger, of coming off as being better and smarter than the average bear, and unapologetic about showing off. Because I had been taught and brought up to be the best person that I could be at all times, and that other people would be doing the same. It would take some time before I understood there was such a thing as an appropriate amount of expertise to show in any given situation. Otherwise, if you behave like a wiz-ard, people will start calling you a bast-ard. Or other such imprecations. Obviously, I'd prefer the other way around, where people get to be their fully authentic and awesome selves all the time, but that does not appear to be on the docket for all that many people any time soon.
This is not necessarily an invitation to people to pry into the pasts of the people they hang around and see where their traumas are so as to confirm that the humor and the self-deprecation is a defensive mechanism in addition to being attempts to make people laugh. And also, I do genuinely do things and say things that are funny, because they're funny, and because sometimes sharing a laugh with someone else is what you need to get them to be receptive to the part that follows, where I have to instruct them on doing something differently than what they are doing right now. Or because I think it's funny, and I'd like other people to laugh at it as well. It's not all defensive responses, and especially not when I'm delivering prepared remarks or writing them down into fic or essays. Earlier, I think I mentioned a hard-boiled detective-style noir pastiche, heavy on the comedy, so this is something that I've been doing for a long time. I love language, and therefore I love being able to make jokes with it, the kind that are just fun, rather then the kinds that are mean or mean-spirited.
I do like to make people laugh, and I do like the idea that I'm good at it. (I also like that I can get things across in a more serious manner, too. I like that my writing works, even though I know that I need an editor for anything that's going to be professionally published, and so I'm happy to let them help me out with that.) And laughter is something that there hasn't been all that many opportunities for outside of a very local context, so here's hoping that we all get the opportunity to make people laugh more than we have in the previous year.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-31 11:34 am (UTC)Thank you for the mention! I have noticed that I'm the person who's probably provided you with the most engagement during these December Days, but I hadn't thought that you'd actually use one of my comments as a prompt, and I'm very flattered.
Yes, "just ignore them" works best when the bullies can actually be ignored, which tends to mean that they can't go very with their bullying in the first place. (It's better suited for dealing with online trolls and such, I'd say.)
meanness as an attempt to call in
I haven't encountered that myself, I think, and so I'm not really sure how I could recognise it? I suppose it would be a useful tactic for dealing with people who have proven impervious to ordinary call-outs, but if the person is willing to listen, being mean to them is probably more likely to either make them clam up or get them to fawn than to get a productive reaction. (And I'm trying not to do the same myself; if I don't like someone being mean to me, I've got no business doing it back.)
Of course, I'm not sure that I've correctly understood what you were saying, so feel free to disregard and/or correct what I have said!
As for bullying in general, I seem to recall that my schools intervened quite succesfully, presumably for a large part because the classes were a lot smaller than usual. Whatever the cause, I'm quite grateful to have missed bullying for the most part...
(Being able to not respond negatively, but with warmth and curiosity, when you're being called-in is a great skill, and takes a lot of practice and preparation beforehand, so that in the moment, defensiveness or hierarchical thinking or dismissal don't take over as the default or the expressed response.)
To boast a little, I'd say that I've improved quite a bit at that over time, mostly by treating corrections as me being part of the Lucky Ten Thousand, and actual call-outs for bad behaviour as an unfortunate accident on my part, so that the focus can lie on restoring trust with the other person rather than getting stuck in an apology loop. I'll always have to keep working on it, but I do feel confident that I can handle a majority of call-out situations, now.
It would take some time before I understood there was such a thing as an appropriate amount of expertise to show in any given situation. Otherwise, if you behave like a wiz-ard, people will start calling you a bast-ard. Or other such imprecations.
I can understand where they are coming from, since some people do like to lord their knowledge over others, but trying to hurt people who are just enthusiastic about their knowledge doesn't help, either.
Overall, this motivates me all the more to be the reasonable person in my own interactions, which is certainly a good thing.
Yep, making fun and sharing it is indeed rewarding for its own sake! (And I certainly wish you the same opportunities for laughter that I've had in my own country in the last year.)