Entering The Laughing Academy
By Freddy Bosco

Two psychiatrists meet on the street. One says to the other, “You’re fine, how am I?” Another two psychiatrists meet on the street. One says to the other, “Good morning!” The other psychiatrist walks away, thinking, “I wonder what he meant by that?”

Still another two psychiatrists ride the same elevator in a professional building every work day. One who works on the tenth floor gets off the elevator but before getting off, spits in the eye of the psychiatrist who rides up to the fifteenth floor. He does this every day. Finally, the elevator operator asks the psychiatrist who is wiping his eye, “Doesn’t that bother you?” “Why should it?” he replies. “It’s his problem.”

No, but seriously, folks, I want to tell you, this mental health business is not for the faint of heart. The extremes of human behavior are enough to drive a body to drink. All the stories of heartbreak and disappointment, having to show incredible patience and persistence with patients who are not above playing deadly games make for a nerve-wrecking profession.

Some professionals have their own anxiety and depression to deal with. They in turn go to very specialized, very intense and fast-acting patch-ups. If you’re asking how I come to know something about what mental health professionals face on a daily basis, I can tell you I have been in and out of therapy for nearly forty years. I can make observations, and since we are talking about a human phenomenon, wouldn’t it be odd if I hadn’t heard professionals discuss their personal place in the process?

I once knew a psychiatrist on a social basis due to other things we were both involved in, namely writing for the same newspaper. Frequently, we went for lunch. He always had stories of unbelievable behavior on the part of his patients. What is there for an ordinary human to do when confronted with severe dysfunction but use the old sense of humor approach?

Patients, too, need humor to cope with the horrors of mental illness. Once I lived in a boarding home where another resident was being taken into psychiatric custody with nurses and cops standing all around him, putting him on the ambulance. I called out to him from the porch, saying, “The hardest part of being a mental patient is The Commitment?” Everyone got a laugh at my remark. The tension of the ordeal was thus broken.

In the face of a devastating illness such as the one that those who have a psychiatric diagnosis must cope with, humor can literally extend life. Reader’s Digest has a section called, “Laughter is the Best Medicine.” There is wisdom in this. A lady of my acquaintance told me of a man who was given a terminal diagnosis. He fed himself a steady diet of humor and comedy. Marx Brothers movies, joke books, and sitcoms combined to the point that the man actually lived years beyond the time the doctors gave him. He laughed so hard, he forgot he was sick. It works!

Once in the University of Colorado hospital, the staff thought it necessary to put me in 4-point restraints. This means being shackled hand and foot. The position I took in order to have my arms extended suggested nothing so much as crucifixion. So I said, “Hell of a way to spend Easter.” If the mental health assistant had laughed, I would have gone happily to sleep. But she said, “It’s not Easter.” Depressing.

The kind of humor that appeals to me is illustrated in a story I heard on television. Shecky Green, a comedian with a severe problem with alcohol, told of driving a rented car by accident into the fountain in front of Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. As the police were putting him in handcuffs, he said, “No spray wax.” Chicka-boom!

During my first hospitalization at Bellevue in New York, a grim old institution from which I later escaped, I met a doctor who told me, “People humor you.” Also depressing? There are light years between being humored and sharing humor in the situation mental health consumers face. Families get horrified and guilty, wondering what they did to cause this situation and what can be done to fix it. So many consumers come from families in which they are actually just the Identified Patient.

Those terrible family meetings at hospitals are a parched ground on which nothing grows but the prickly cactus-like pain of suffering and confusion. A wry observation, however small in its attempt at humor comes as a tremendously welcome event under such circumstances. Gallows humor they call it. Few are any other place where a warm joke could spread as much sunshine.

It has been my experience that at the times when I am sickest, I am most removed from my sense of humor. The professionals respond with hope when, in the course of an episode, I start making jokes. Not just any jokes. I know I am getting better when I make a crack that sums up my situation even with a touch of noir that displays my desire to comply with my treatment. There is acceptance in good humor.