Emotion Regulation of Others and Self

Who’s laughing now?

Posted on Mar 01, 2011 by Karen Niven

In case you hadn’t noticed, we are in a recession. Every media outlet reminds us that unemployment is at a record high, products and services are more expensive than ever and that life is generally tougher all round. However, aside from the many discount supermarkets seeing an increase in their share prices, there is one major winner from the recession: comedy. Not only does the recession give comedians a wealth of new material on MPs’ moat extravagances and city bankers’ Bayeux tapestry-length bar bills, comedy in general is booming. Stand-up shows in arenas have increased ten-fold in the last decade and it seems as if new comedy venues are springing up in every vacant building. This hasn’t gone unnoticed by the industry who are more than happy to meet the demand by increasing their output, including Sky’s new focus on nurturing their own homegrown comedy talent and ‘commissioning comedy that makes people laugh’ . Ingenious.  So, I hear you ask, why can’t I turn on the TV without seeing David Mitchell’s face shining out at me from behind a panel show desk? Well the answer is two-fold: 1) He’s just lovely, and 2) We have a greater need than before to cheer ourselves up. Every time we get in from another long day at work where all we’ve heard about is the number of people being made redundant and how Kate in the office thinks that it’s probably all the chocolate that we eat that means we will never find a boyfriend, we find that we need to bring ourselves out of that miserable slump by watching a few hours of something that will make us laugh. We are regulating our own emotions.

Throughout history the power of comedy to regulate our emotions and lift our spirits has been found in every area of life from simply telling a joke to cheer someone up to prisoners of war using laughter to cope during the atrocities in the Nazi Concentration camps We may not be able to change what is happening or has happened but we can certainly try and change our attitude to it by using humour as an emotion regulator and as a coping strategy. Not only does the laughter produced from comedy protect our emotional wellbeing by producing endorphins, which make us feel good, it also decreases our stress levels and helps to protect our immune system and fight infection .  There is also growing support from the medical community for the positive effect comedy can have on emotion with the NHS now giving grants for courses in stand-up comedy for those at risk of developing mental health problems . It seems that laughter really is the best medicine, as Groucho Marx put it, ‘A clown is like an aspirin, only he works twice as fast’. Comedy can work as a vehicle for increasing our positive affect in several crucial ways, firstly by simply making you enjoy what you are watching and finding humour in the various anecdotes, surprises and oddities which the performer presents. Secondly, a preserve of British comedy, by making us realise life could be a lot worse. Yes, we may be struggling at work but at least we’re not stuck in a dead end job in a paper merchant’s in Slough or running a hotel in Torquay with a battle-axe wife and an incompetent waiter from Barcelona. Finally laughter and comedy benefit both the sender and the receiver, joining them together and uniting them in a shared perspective, it has been said that the shortest distance between two people is laughter, the common unifier. So if you are getting a bit sick and tired of hearing about how the recession means that you’ll never get a real job, and if you do then the government will gobble up all you’re hard earned money on taxes, then watch one of these clips. They’ll make you feel better, I promise.

Clip1

Clip2

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