Laughing til you cry: The perils of overly real comedy for stress relief

This has been one hell of a week in a doozy of a month in the most disrupted year of my adult life.

It hasn't been all bad... I have been making progress to reclaim my health, but it is definitely a rocky and uneven road. I have really enjoyed winter in Eastern Oregon with the sweet air, the trees, the snow, the tracks of wild animals and even the quiet, bermed streets.

But otherwise, seriously... Gods, have mercy!

I don't want to bring anyone else down and mostly it's just the same old things everyone else is dealing with--the long grind of the pandemic with all of its costs. But there are also doctor's appointments of various kinds for me or my kids at least six times a week, my daughter's ongoing crisis, my son's renewed crisis at school and at home, special education plans and meetings for both kids, my grandmother getting covid, the father of my son's best friend dying of an overdose, family conflict and scheduling... this week has just been especially rugged.

One of the things I have learned in my journey back to better health is that the severe stress I have been dealing with for the past ten or fifteen years--largely for reasons I can't control--is likely the primary contributing factor in developing my chronic health problems. And if I want to be healthy and have energy to live joyfully, I have to find ways of reducing stress.

One of the ways I do that is to exercise as soon as my son leaves for school in the mornings. These days it's about six degrees below freezing at 7:30 in the morning and my elliptical is in the unheated free-standing garage. The hardest part is gritting my teeth through the cold until I get warmed up. But I've been listening to clips of Trevor Noah on Youtube and rationing them for exercise time. He seriously helps.

I trust you've probably heard of Trevor Noah. He's one of the few celebrities I've ever loved and it isn't just because he has good politics. It's also that he really laughs at everybody--people like him, people like me, people he agrees with and disagrees with. He has a delightful way of making heavy stuff funny without belittling it.

I get out there to the garage, shivering and working out as hard as I can to get warm and I feel my muscles relax into it as I laugh. I feel the stress shedding off of me.

Image via Unsplash

Except for this morning.

This morning I clicked on Trevor Noah's compilation of videos about white people calling the cops on black people. At first they were really funny. This stuff is so ridiculous. Yes, it's hard not to feel a bit ashamed of fellow white people, but Trevor Noah is so funny that you can get over it.

Except that most of them were about incidents involving little kids. And while he kept on laughing and making jokes and making everybody except the little kids seem like complete clowns, I have two kids who aren't black but they are "of color" and in the Czech Republic, where we came from, they are "the local black." And they're both pretty traumatized by elated crap.

And when I look at those videos, I laugh at Trevor's jokes and I think about the wider social implications, but increasingly with each video what grows and grows inside me is the sense of the trauma that the kids being threatened with cursing and pointed weapons and out-of-control police officers are experiencing.

When I look at those videos, I don't just see incidents involving strangers. I can't help but imagine my kids at those ages and how incredibly fragile and vulnerable to trauma they were at that time. I think even woke white people miss this a bit when getting outraged about how the cops are chronically called on sweet-looking little black kids.

We are upset because it's wrong and unjust and racist. But there is still an "othering" going on in a lot of woke discussions on this topic. The events are presented in woke media as unjust and egregious, but I don't see much comparison to the ultra-careful way we insist our children be treated. Most white parents I know are obsessed with ensuring that no one ever even raises their voice to their child because of possible trauma.

My son is eleven. I recently had to explain to a medical professional that he had been traumatized by "interethnic conflict" in the Czech Republic. The medical professional clearly didn't get it and asked me if the symptoms of this trauma weren't "just normal pre-adolescent adjustment."

I was hesitant to elaborate because my son was present, but in the end I gave this professional a couple of snapshots--like the time my son, at age 9, was picked up by four teens and thrown onto his back while they shouted racial epithets. He had significant bruises and a teacher was watching but did nothing. Afterward. the school refused to intervene and told me I'd have to take it up with the police. And the police said it was the school's problem.

To his credit, this particular medical professional changed his tune immediately and subsequently responded appropriately to try to help. My son is hyper-sensitive to authority, criticism, being singled out and aggression because of these traumas. His response snaps to fight or flight in a split second over the tiniest rebuke. He's back to a wall with fists balled, screaming, fury snapping in his eyes over being asked to pick up his wet towel. When I imagine my son's reaction to being approached aggressively by police with guns and an inflated sense of the threat of darker skin, my blood runs cold.

I'm betting Trevor Noah knows that the incidents he's joking about are not simply unjust but also incredibly traumatizing to the little kids involved, but he doesn't mention that part, possibly because he knows a lot of little kids are watching his show and he doesn't want to retraumatize them.

But still after the sixth or seventh clip, I realize that I'm not laughing anymore. Instead I'm sobbing uncontrollably, still trying to move the exercise machine but gasping raggedly with tears streaming down my face. I don't do the common white othering of black babies that shields us from reality as well anymore.

The last clip I watched involved a four-year-old having cursing, completely freaked-outl cops pointing guns at her and threatening to "put a cap in her head" over a snatched Barbie doll. My daughter took a pack of gum from the corner store when she was about that age. This isn't somebody else. This isn't a symbol. It's a real four year old with the sensitivity, big eyes, vulnerability and lack of developed ethics of every four year old.

I couldn't keep going. This is supposed to be a standard parenting rite of passage. Your kid swipes something from the store and you take the kid back, make them return the item and apologize. For a preschooler, it's both humiliating and terrifying just enough to make a big impression. That's how they learn. Maybe not every kid does it, but a hell of a lot of kids do it around that age.

And any police officers involved are supposed to use a calm voice, squat down to the preschooler's level and give them a good lecture about right and wrong. That's their job, which I have seen them do quite well when the kid caught filching was white.

I rarely turn something off because it's too intense, but I did that time. This was no longer relieving stress. And I know that this stress is just some of the stress that black parents experience all the time. But that is why they also suffer from a very high incidence of chronic health problems a lot like mine.

I'm not going to avoid or ignore these realities. In the interests of relieving stress, writing about it is more effective than just watching and dwelling on it. I'll be back to Trevor Noah another day and I'll laugh at the hard stuff and feel the stress fall away.