What’s So Funny About Disease, Disability, and Decrepitude?

Maybe humor about aging is ageist – or maybe it’s healthy

Photo by Curated Lifestyle for Unsplash+

You would think there are some things you just can’t laugh about. Things like a brain cancer diagnosis.

Don’t tell that to Joyce Wadler, a former New York Times columnist in her 70s who learned that an aggressive sinus cancer had entered her brain. Wadler can find the funny in anything. Chronicling her adventures in chemo and radiation, she recently wrote about losing her sense of taste in a piece entitled “Talk Dirty to Me About Bagels” (illustrated with a mock cover of a racy romantic paperback). She realizes something is afoot when she tastes a favorite chicken and avocado sandwich and realizes “the chicken tastes…off. Worse than off, it tastes like it had suffered a long illness, lain miserable in the chicken coop, and died an excruciating death….”

Wadler admits that she is terrified of brain surgery and radiation. Finding the funny is her defense against her terror.

What is Ageist?

Wadler’s fearlessly funny approach to life has me thinking about the difficulty of being humorous about aging. Being an older adult certainly has its ridiculous moments that can look funny from a certain angle. At the same time, though, there is a strong current of thought that making jokes about older people reeks of ageism and poor taste. To see examples, just browse the greeting cards on display at your local drug store.

Or consider this tidbit from Reader’s Digest: An article titled “60 Old-People Jokes That Make Aging So Much Funnier.” I suspect few of them will seem funny to you if you were born after 1945. Examples: “What’s the secret to having a smoking hot body in old age? Cremation.” “Which underwear brand do seniors love best? It Depends.”

Anti-ageism advocates slam this type of humor for dealing in harmful stereotypes about old age that cast older adults as feeble, if not feeble-minded. Cathy Goodwin, who writes the blog “Aging in Sneakers,” typifies this line of thinking. Jokes about nursing homes, she says, are “supposedly lighthearted, but for many of us, the idea of living in one is closer to a nightmare than a punchline.” There is lots of abuse in nursing homes, she adds. “That’s not funny. It’s terrifying. We need more outrage, not more jokes.”

And what are we to make of Andy Huggins, a comedian for 40-plus years who gained “overnight success” in his mid-70s when his routines about old age went viral on the internet? Huggins walks on stage with a cane and delivers his stand-up sitting down. He claims to have looked for love on an online dating site: “Carbon Dating.” Another one-liner: “As far as social media goes, you can follow me on the bulletin board at Kroger’s. Or on Mychart.”

And What’s Just Good Fun?

Is that ageism or just good clean fun? Is it okay to laugh at ourselves sometimes, or is all humor about old age harmful negative stereotyping?

My interest in this topic is not strictly academic, but professional. I am someone who has used humor all my life to lubricate social situations. In the beginning it was just to deflect the hatred and disgust of my classmates for being a smart kid, a defensive maneuver in the hopes of surviving junior high school in one piece. Later, in the working world, I cracked jokes to reduce tension and to encourage people to lighten up.

Sometimes it worked. Sometimes I got fired. You never know.

So from a professional standpoint, I would like to write what’s funny about aging, without crossing the line into negative stereotypes and blatant ageism.

My initial instinct is to fall back on a distinction my parents told me as a kid: the difference between people laughing at you and people laughing with you. The former can be cruel, the latter can be affirming.

From that perspective, first-person accounts like Wadler’s are the good kind of humor, because readers are laughing with her. Greeting cards and Reader’s Digest? Bad humor and bad taste.

The good humor, like Wadler’s, may be a psychologically healthy way to deal with what we fear most. We laugh because we recognize the writer’s fears mirroring our own, and laughing is a healthier response than worry, anxiety, or depression.

Besides, laughter is actually good for you physically. Scientists have shown that laughter boosts dopamine and other stress-relieving hormones and chemicals, helping to lower anxiety and depression. Studies also conclude that laughter’s social benefit is among its most effective properties – laughing in the company of others helps support social relationships.

I’ll continue trying to walk that line between affirming laughter and harmful ageism, because I can’t imagine abstaining from humor altogether.

As tropical philosopher Jimmy Buffett once opined, “If we couldn’t laugh, we would all go insane.”