Have you ever heard someone tell you to “get serious” when you weren’t perhaps focused enough? I’ve heard it. I’ve said it to my students. I’ve certainly said it to my children. There is this sense that success or the pursuit of excellence is tied to being serious, to having an unflappable, laser focus. Sporting greats like LeBron James and Kobe Bryant are reputed to have that sort of focus. Each has also been criticized for being a bad teammate. This assumed opposition of the serious and the fun is made clearer by the fact that another basketball great, Shaquille O’Neal was criticized for not working hard to sustain excellence over his career. As a player, O’Neal was well-known for being funny, and this plays into the myth that humor and laughter are the opposite of the serious, of work. But the truth is they’re not, and they never were.
Humans love dichotomies: good v. evil, Coke v. Pepsi, to-may-to v. to-mah-to. Humor and seriousness, play and work fit nicely into this either or sort of thinking. But dichotomies are useful. They help us in making sense of things. As a teacher I use dichotomies all the time as a way to get people to start thinking about things. The problem is this tool we use to help us begin thinking about the world leads us astray. It’s when that sort or either or thinking no longer becomes helpful; when the dichotomy becomes something that makes us ignore important aspects of what we’re trying to understand, that we need to be skeptical of it. And that’s where we are when it comes to laughter and the serious. We’re trapped in a dichotomous view that has become harmful and one that obscures things.
Dichotomies of all sorts have been criticized by others in different areas. It seems that when people begin to really look at these handy divisions they become less straightforwardly clear upon further review. It’s one of the reasons that academics like me have jobs. That’s what’s happened with this division between laughter and work, humor and seriousness. It’s making our lives more difficult and less enjoyable. I wrote my book.to address these things. Of course it wouldn’t be my Substack if I didn’t mention my book. (Yep, shameless self-promotion rears its head). While there is clearly something to “taking things seriously,” it seems that when we take that to mean that serious is the opposite of fun, we do so at the expense of humor. We crowd out levity and laughter and the result isn’t particularly good.
The main way I try to get people to think about how the laughter v serious dichotomy is wrong is to ask them to reflect on their own experience. Think back to a time when you were working hard, when you were focused. Was that space totally devoid of laughter and humor? My bet is that it wasn’t. One of the hardest stretches of work I ever had was just out of college. I worked countless hours to open a restaurant—I even fell asleep standing up. But the thing is, the people I worked with shared laughter and humor and lots of it. In fact, those things were crucial for us to be able to tolerate those long hours, the lack of sleep, and the never ending deadlines that could never be met. It was having people around me with whom I could joke, laugh, and share mirth that made that experience bearable and worthwhile. The space was one where work and fun coexisted and reinforced one another. Without those moments we’d never have done nearly as well or nearly as much. It wasn’t all fun and games as they say, but it wasn’t only seriousness and deliverables. Had we been a kitchen full of Kobe’s I don’t think we’d have accomplished nearly what we would have. We wouldn’t have been as cohesive a unit, we wouldn’t be able to deal with one another as well. We certainly wouldn’t have been pleasant to work with.
The contrived opposition of laughter and the serious is a helpful tool to look at the world. But when taken as indicating an actual real division in the world it’s simply false. And that falsity consistently leads us to dismissing the importance of humor and reducing the value of laughter in our lives. The effects are corrosive as we’ve seen in the high levels of disengagement in the workforce as evidenced by “quiet quitting” or the Great Resignation, and on and on. We need to see humor and laughter and integral parts of our lives and recognize how beneficial it is to have healthy doses of both in order to be engaged, to find enjoyment, and to ultimately live fuller and richer lives.