Jeremi sits down with Deborah Grayson Riegel to discuss our varying relationships with humor and how humor helps us in tragedy.
Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “The Ones Who Live.”
Guests
Deborah Grayson RiegelExecutive Coach, Speaker, Instructor, and Writer
Hosts
Jeremi SuriProfessor of History at the University of Texas at Austin
FEMALE 1: This
MALE 1: is Democracy.
FEMALE 1: A podcast that explores the interracial, intergenerational, and intersectional unheard voices living in the world’s-
MALE 1: – most influential democracy.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. Today, we’re going to discuss what is perhaps one of the most important topics in moments of difficulty and trying times, and that’s the topic of humor. Humor is essential to what we do as human beings, but it’s often something we forget about when we’re dealing with tragedy and difficult moments as many of us are today. For our democracy to thrive in difficult moments, we needed to find humor. We’re fortunate to have with us a good friend and I think one of the people doing some of the most exciting work on executive coaching and building thriving social environments. She’s also a fantastic public speaker and an old friend, Deborah Grayson Riegel. Deb, thank you for joining us.
Deborah Grayson Riegel: Happy to be here with you.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Before we turn to our discussion with Deb, which I’m so excited about, we have, of course, our exciting scene setting poem, maybe even a little humorous from Zachary Suri. Zachary, what’s the title of your poem today?
Zachary Suri: The Ones Who Live.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Let’s hear it.
Zachary Suri: They say humor is the only anecdote for madness, the only medicine that can prevent insanity. I remember Saturday Night Live after 9/11, even though I wasn’t there, the firefighters trying to find enough courage to joke, it all seems so cathartic, the way the laughter almost makes you cry. What we truly learn from Hawkeye Pierce and the MASH unit trying to explain war to a nation sending its sons off to die in fields in Vietnam, and the helicopter opening the dirt pads, immortal witnesses to the Cold War. They say humor is the only vacation from routine, and what was Calvin and Hobbes, the dirt-haired six-year-old crawling through the hydraulic jungles of suburban America, some ever press and call for young idealists far truer than any textbook. They say absurdity is the only fair picture of life, the way Paul Simon sings us into Mama Pajama, and the way the illogical lay, lay, lay is in chicken and egg soups seemed to have some thematic relevance for life to the 21st century teenager. How can humor help us through tragedy, help explain death, the thousands falling to disappearing molecules crawling along the sand? We don’t turn to some higher art, philosophy, study of death, some larger epidemiological logic for dying. No, we glue our weary bifocals to bittersweet humanity and humor, our explanation for The Ones Who Live.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: That’s wonderful, Zachary. What is your poem about?
Zachary Suri: My poem is really about the power of humor to help us move paths, tragedies, and help explain the moments that we have just lived for people who survive these tragedies and see such suffering around them.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: There’s a range of humor you referred to from Saturday Night Live to Calvin and Hobbes. Why did you include all these?
Zachary Suri: Well, I think it’s really important to recognize that pop culture is in many ways one of our best ways of understanding our society and of moving past tragedy.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: That’s fantastic. Deb, you spent more time thinking about this than anyone else I know. How do you approach these issues?
Deborah Grayson Riegel: Well, first of all, I just want to say that was a beautiful poem, and what I loved about it in particular was I didn’t know whether to smile or cry. There’s a really fine line for many of us between knowing whether to laugh or whether to cry. I think you evoked a wide range of emotional experiences. So thank you for that, Zachary.
Zachary Suri: Thank you.
Deborah Grayson Riegel: Yeah, and in terms of how do we think about it, it’s interesting to think about humor, especially in challenging times. We’ve had lots of challenging times, you certainly brought some specific ones up in your poem, Zachary. I first think about humor as a way of us connecting socially, whether it is a shared reference from MASH, as you said, or Calvin and Hobbes, or something that we see on the news. When people find the same thing funny, it builds or reinforces an immediate social bond, that is social connection. At times like this, especially now that we’re dealing with some social distancing, that’s actually one of the ways that we can keep connected is by sharing things that we think are funny.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: What do we find funny? How do we know that something’s funny? One of the questions that was famously asked, I think, when they finally did another Saturday Night Live episode, two weeks after September 11th was, “Can We be Funny Again?”
Deborah Grayson Riegel: Yes, and the retort was, “Were we ever?” That was the retort that came in that made something that was funny even funnier.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Correct.
Deborah Grayson Riegel: So there’s this traditional formula that says, tragedy plus time equals comedy. Do you know that one?
Dr. Jeremi Suri: I’ve heard it, yes.
Deborah Grayson Riegel: Yes.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: But I’ve never fully understood it actually.
Deborah Grayson Riegel: So the idea behind it is that something that is brutally painful plus enough distance to not be as emotionally charged, or triggered, or whatever your experience was, that ability to get a little space and distance from it, you combine those two things and you can think about it in a funny way. There’s this common retort that says, too soon.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Yes.
Deborah Grayson Riegel: So these days, too soon maybe jokes around the coronavirus, but a funnier application of that is if somebody makes a joke about the Lincoln assassination and you say, “Too soon,” it’s absurd, it’s clearly not too soon.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Right.
Deborah Grayson Riegel: So there’s lots of different ways that people find humor in things, but I do always go back to that formula of tragedy plus time equals comedy, and that isn’t true for every tragedy and nobody knows what the right amount of time for one person is, may never be the right amount of time for another person depending on the impact that that tragedy might have had on them. So it’s a guideline rather than a role.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Right. I remember, I don’t know if people tell this joke anymore, but I would hear it when I was growing up, people would say, if something terrible happened and people were ignoring it, and trying to talk about something else, they would actually use the Lincoln assassination as a joking point of reference. They say, “So Mrs. Lincoln, other than that, how was the theater?”
Deborah Grayson Riegel: Exactly. It’s absolutely absurd and it’s something that I’m hoping, and Zachary, I realize I haven’t checked in with you to see how you’re feeling about the whole Lincoln situation and I recognize. For our listeners, we might’ve said spoiler alert because we’re going to reveal something that happened in American history that you might not know about, so all of those things.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: But if they’ve been in one of my classes, Deb, they definitely know about Lincoln’s assassination.
Deborah Grayson Riegel: Well, depends on how well they did on the test, right?
Dr. Jeremi Suri: That’s true.
Deborah Grayson Riegel: Yeah, and I recognize you probably grade on a curve.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: I often do want them to re-enact certain events since we might create a theater jumping scene with guns and things of that sort.
Deborah Grayson Riegel: Fascinating, I would love to sit in on that one day.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Why is humor so important? Robert Gates, former Secretary of Defense and still a figure, I think, one of the few figures we viewed on all sides of the political spectrum. He says in his memoir that he’s never met a good leader who didn’t have a sense of humor.
Deborah Grayson Riegel: Yeah. I thought you were going to name him among his many titles as noted humorist, and I would have laughed at that as well. When you share that perspective, never met a great leader who didn’t have a sense of humor, part of what a sense of humor does, especially with a leader, it allows you to demonstrate some vulnerability, and it’s also a way to take a risk. When you share something that feels funny to you, you actually don’t know if it’s funny to the other person until it comes out of your mouth. That requires a tremendous amount of vulnerability and risk-taking.
In fact, as you had mentioned in the introduction, I’m not just a speaker but I also teach presentation skills and public speaking, and what I often say to my clients is, “It is fine for you to start your presentation with a joke, but don’t say I’m about to tell you a joke.” If they laugh, it was a joke, if they don’t, it was a story, and I mean that quite literally. It’s a joke if it’s funny, a joke is funny story. For leaders, part of it is demonstrating vulnerability, part of it is risk-taking which are two characteristics that are really important for leaders as well. It also demonstrates that you are capable of changing your perspective. So when you use humor, it means that you’re actually able to reappraise a situation, especially a situation that might feel stressful, or overwhelming, or challenging, or unknown, and you’re able to reappraise it and look at it in a different light, and I think all of those are key traits and behaviors that we look for in our leaders.
Zachary Suri: So you talked about how we can use humor to build community and to be good leaders, but how can humor be used to heal us especially in a time of tragedy?
Deborah Grayson Riegel: There’s the physical aspect and the psychological aspect, and I don’t want to draw an artificial firewall between the two because we know that mind and body have a tremendous connection. So one thing that we know from studies actually of patients who suffered from fibromyalgia, people who suffer from that really are often in constant pain or have tremendous flare ups. Studies of patients with fibromyalgia showed that when they were using humor, they had a reduction in pain. So there is actually a reduction of the pain that is felt from inflammation that happens physically. When we use humor and are exposed to humor, it decreases stress, it reduces tension, it actually is shown to inspire hope and it gives us new ways to think about old or current situations, all of which is a part of building resilience. Having resilience and having hope and being able to choose that over despair, when you lean into humor, you are choosing that over despair even if it’s just for a moment.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: It humanizes the moment, doesn’t it?
Deborah Grayson Riegel: It humanizes the moment.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: What I always find in both leadership settings and also in public speaking settings, is a little humor also creates a new connection. I know you’ve thought about this a lot, how do we understand that?
Deborah Grayson Riegel: It’s interesting. I spent five semesters teaching at the Business School at Peking University in Beijing. One of my concerns when I went over there was, will my humor translate? Now, what I really should be keeping me up at night is does my humor translate even within North America? I guess the jury might still be out on that, but I was really concerned about whether my brand of humor would translate. There were two things that I found out. One thing that I found out was actually something that I learned from Al Gore, he didn’t tell me directly, I have not yet had the honor.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: To travel outdoor and humor is surprising enough.
Deborah Grayson Riegel: Yes, exactly. As you talk about gates and noted humorous, but one of the things in his, oh, I’m losing the name of, what was his incredible video? Inconvenient Truth. Thank you.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Inconvenient Truth.
Deborah Grayson Riegel: Inconvenient Truth. He starts off inconvenient truth by talking about, I was, some version of, I was almost the President of the United States. Something that was very self-deprecating.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Too soon endeavor.
Deborah Grayson Riegel: Too soon, and spoiler alert, by the way as we gear up for the 2020 election, both of those at once. One of the things that I learned is that self-deprecating humor which is something that is pretty common for me, pretty common for most of my friends and colleagues, is something that doesn’t translate into hierarchical culture. So I knew that going in to teach in China, I actually had to work to establish my credibility which meant that I couldn’t use one of my old tactics which is self-deprecating humor. So that was number one. The other thing that I did learn was that people in China have children, sometimes just one, but people in China have children and so you can joke about common things about children. People are married, you can joke about things that have to do with marriage. There are some common experiences that bond us and translate over time. I will just tell you one story which was the first time that I went over to Beijing, I decided like this is a really big trip I need a grownup to come with me. Important note, I was 37 at the time, but you don’t really feel like a grown up, so I brought my mother-in-law with me.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: I can’t believe you brought your mother-in-law.
Deborah Grayson Riegel: I brought my mother-in-law. I take my mother-in-law please. I brought my mother-in-law with me and introduced her to the woman who was running the program who came to the hotel to meet me. For the next few days, she kept asking me, “Is that your mother or your mother-in-law?” She was very confused and I assumed that I wasn’t being clear in my language and I just kept saying, “No, that’s my husband’s mother, that’s my mother-in-law.” In day 3 she said to me, “You know Deborah, in China, mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law don’t always get along.” I said, “We have that in America too.” It was such a great reminder about how many things are universal no matter where you are.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Yes, and it made a connection for you that you wouldn’t have had otherwise.
Deborah Grayson Riegel: Absolutely, and it became a wonderful story to tell about my mother-in-law and to my mother-in-law and in fact, at my mother-in-laws funeral which was a year and a half ago. I stood up and started by saying, “I know that daughters-in-law all over the world, have been waiting for the opportunity to get up and speak in public about their mother-in-law, this is not going to be that kind of eulogy.” Because I loved her so deeply and was able to tell that story.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: That’s wonderful. That’s really, really wonderful. It brings up another point about humor that I think we need to talk about. Which is that leadership in a democracy in a complex society where you have all sorts of difficult moments, like the ones we’re living through now. It requires leaders who can adjust the circumstances. You want to believe that the people you’re working with, people in positions of authority have the ability to adjust to unforeseen circumstances. The story you are telling highlights how humor often comes out of that? It turns the awkward into something that’s not just awkward, but now a connection, right?
Deborah Grayson Riegel: Yes. One of my favorite phrases is, “Embrace the awkward.” Embracing the awkward goes back to being vulnerable, going back to being a risk taker, making those human connections because everybody feels awkward at different times. I think it’s something that I learned starting in college when I became a founding member of the University of Michigan’s first improvisational comedy troupe. Improve at its best and most brilliant, is about embracing not just the unknown, but the awkward. So in our leaders, we are looking for people who can be flexible and who can improvise, but they have to start with a foundation of credibility. Nobody is going to trust you to improvise if all you ever do is improvise and haven’t demonstrated some sound thought and sound strategy leading up to the act.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Is humor correlated with intelligence?
Deborah Grayson Riegel: Well, since I’m hilarious, I’m going to go with yes.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: It correlates with modesty too, I can tell.
Deborah Grayson Riegel: Oh, my goodness, absolutely. I think inversely proportional. I don’t actually know the real studies around that, I would imagine if you think about Gardner’s multiple intelligences, it is a kind of intelligence that could be relational, communication, environmental, I think it’s own kind of intelligence.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: I think so too. Zachary?
Zachary Suri: Well, I just think too that humor can also be used as a very powerful tool to disarm the arguments of others. I mean, as I mentioned in my poem, one of my favorite TV shows is MASH. What they do is they use humor to disarm American militarism in a very fascinating but also hilarious way. How can we use humor to disarm arguments that in many ways are based in a very serious story?
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Is part of our problem with hyper-partisanship depth that we have humorless arguments that are being thrown from one side to the other, and humor could unpack that in certain ways?
Deborah Grayson Riegel: I like the use of the word could in there as opposed to a should or a will. I think it could and I think that humor is so subjective that it requires special care as well. I think about the fact that what is funny for one is not necessarily funny for somebody else, and you think about the impact of humor that can have racist undertones, homophobic undertones, all of those things. I think about a show like All in the Family. All in the Family was hilarious at its time, and you could not get away with that same script today. So things change over time, sensibilities change over time, and individuals have certain things that feel untouchable for them that you might find funny and they may not. So I think it’s we could and we also need to be thoughtful and careful about it.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: There’s a really good point that it’s not just that some things are too soon to be humorous, some things might no longer be humorous that were humorous in the past.
Deborah Grayson Riegel: Yes, that is true as well and I also think about the recent movie, Jojo Rabbit. Did you see that?
Dr. Jeremi Suri: I did. I found it very funny, I don’t know if you did.
Deborah Grayson Riegel: I thought I found it very funny and very touching. I loved it and I was a late adopter because in my mind I thought, which is where I keep my thinking. In my mind I thought to myself, why am I going to see a Nazi comedy? What about that could possibly be funny making light, it is not Hogan’s Heroes. I didn’t see it for the longest time and then I had a really long flight and I said, okay, the worst that happens is I turned it off. I didn’t pay $15 to see it in my local movie theater, and it was so funny and so warm and delightful that it helped me think about humor, which is how often we have biases around what we believe to be funny and like any other bias, it’s important to take the unconscious and make it conscious and run an experiment with it, but experiment with it on yourself.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: I agree. I would have thought it was too soon. For Jews it should always be to soon to make from Nazism and the Holocaust. But on the other hand, it was funny. But it also cut deeply because of the current moment we’re in. So it was humor that worked because it was distant from the tragedy but close to another tragedy. That to me was actually what made it so moving.
Deborah Grayson Riegel: I’m also experiencing that with Hunters. I don’t know if you’re watching that on Amazon Prime.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: No, what is Hunters?
Deborah Grayson Riegel: Hunters is a show on Amazon Prime, it stars Al Pacino. It’s a team of renegade Nazi hunters, because Nazi’s are living in America, and takes place in the 1970s. It is based on a true story, and watching every episode to me feels like a Quentin Tarantino movie, a full Quentin Tarantino movie that is violent, and filthy and hilarious, and you’re watching it and scanning for, can I be laughing at this? You just do.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: That’s amazing, we have to add that to our list.
Deborah Grayson Riegel: Add that to your list.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: So Deb, one of the things we like to do on our podcast each week, is also really talk about, not simply how we understand the issue, but how all of us, particularly our younger listeners, can move forward and use this perspective to enhance their experience with our democracy today. What is your advice? I know you’re, again, the best in the business. What’s your advice that you give to people about how they can incorporate humor, and not to become stand-up comics and improv artists overnight, that’s not going to happen, but to incorporate humor into their daily lives, into their leadership, into their public presentations. How should people who want to be better at this become better at this?
Deborah Grayson Riegel: One of the coaching questions that I often ask the leaders that I work with is, what’s another way of looking at this? So whether they’re wrestling with a business challenge, a communication challenge, a change they didn’t anticipate. We all have a way of looking at something, and when you ask, what’s another way of looking at it? Then you ask it again, and what’s still another way of looking at it? Then you ask it again, what is still another way of looking at it? By the time you asked that question three times, four times, or five times, number one, they often hang up on me after the third time, but it forces you to shift your perspective over and over again. Humor at its core is a different perspective on something, it is re-framing, refocusing, and reappraising our current situation through a different lens. So I would say to anyone, if you are wanting to lean more into humor, keep asking yourself the question, what’s another way of looking at this? What’s another way of looking at this? What’s another way of looking at this? Until you might get to something that is so absurd or get to something where you’re so tired of thinking of perspectives that your defenses are down and you realize there may actually be a perspective that has some humor in it.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: I love that because one of our themes in our podcast and the way we approach democracy is to think of democracy as the humanization of empathy, that it’s about creating connections that are not just about voting in a ballot box, but about caring about and connecting with communities that are different from oneself. I’ve long thought that’s really what James Madison meant by pluralism, by the intersection between different communities that maintain their difference but still feel connected and part of some larger political, social, and cultural body.
Deborah Grayson Riegel: I love that.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: What you’ve just described is actually empathy. It’s about trying to see the issue from many different perspectives, and using humor almost as an exercise. Right?
Deborah Grayson Riegel: Yes, it’s an exercise. It’s another perspective. If we give ourselves permission to explore multiple perspectives that can all be true at once. If we think about what’s going on now, it’s hard, it’s scary, it’s overwhelming, it’s fascinating. Maybe it’s a little bit fun as we lead into our adaptive leadership and experiment with new things. It’s overwhelming, it’s underwhelming, and another perspective is it’s pretty funny that this is what the zombie apocalypse is now, except that we’re all in sweatpants as opposed to armor.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Now, there is something incredibly absurd about having these self-important meetings on Zoom and other conferencing software where most of us are not even wearing pants.
Deborah Grayson Riegel: Yes, that’s fascinating.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Maybe I’m revealing too much.
Deborah Grayson Riegel: Yes, so TMI, to soon, spoiler alert, all of those things.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Zachary, is this helpful for you? I know you and other students of mine struggle with, on the one hand, trying to be engaged and trying to really use your energy and your anger at times to change the world, but at the same time wanting to make it humorous and fun. Does this help with that?
Zachary Suri: I think it definitely does, and I’ve seen it myself that students who are vehemently opposed to one another when it comes to all sorts of things can come together over humor that may in fact be self-deprecating or it may in fact completely undermine the positions that they’re taking. But something that’s funny can really just bring everyone together.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: How do you deal with another issue that Deb brought up so well, how do you deal with things that might be funny but also off-base or offensive?
Zachary Suri: Well, I think what’s really great about the moment we’re in is that we can have a discussion about this. I think there are a lot of people who disagree, even among young people, about what is offensive and what isn’t. But just having that discussion is what really is important.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Yes. Deb, final question, maybe the question that matters most to all of us. When will we be able to have some real humor about this terrible moment that we’re dealing with.
Deborah Grayson Riegel: I don’t know about you, but I’m finding humor in it all ready. I’m not finding humor in the global scope of people losing their lives, and I’m able to find humor in small things. So for example, my kids are both college freshmen, my daughter attends Duke, my son attends University of Michigan like his mother, go blue, sorry. Before they went to college, I had said to them a year ago, if you don’t get into your first choice schools, we’re going to have college at home, we’re going to call it bunker U, you’ll live and work in the basement, you’ll come up for meals and that’s what we’ll have. Well, when they both came home from college, I said, “Welcome to bunker U.” Our first night at dinner, my daughter Sophie said, “I have to say, the meal plan is pretty good here.” So there is opportunities to find humor if you’re ready and willing to look.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Well, and I’m sure that made what was an awkward and perhaps anxiety ridden dinner much more fun, and it is connected you-all as a family, even more than, I know you’re all ready deeply connected.
Deborah Grayson Riegel: Yes. Of course, I am the funniest, and every member of my family is funny, not as funny as I am, but still funny.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Well, and I want to say I’ve known you Deb now for about 30 years.
Deborah Grayson Riegel: More.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: Come on.
Deborah Grayson Riegel: More.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: I’m 31, so it can’t be more than that.
Deborah Grayson Riegel: Got it.
Dr. Jeremi Suri: But one of the things that I think has always made you successful in every setting that I’ve seen you in, and I’ve seen you in many settings, is just this, that you have an ability to make people feel comfortable, to disarm people, and to connect people. I think it’s your humor, I think it’s your ability to see the world from different perspectives, and I really want to thank you for sharing that with us. I want to encourage our listeners to look you up, we have your information on the website and attached to the podcast, everywhere it’s posted. I hope people will benefit from this introduction and also to working more closely with you. We need your humor as we enhance our democracy in these difficult times. Zachary, thank you for a wonderful poem, and thank you to our listeners for joining us for this episode of “This is democracy.”
MALE 2: This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.
MALE 3: The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harrison Lemke and you can find his music at harrisonlemke.com.
FEMALE 2: Subscribe and stay tuned for a new episode every Thursday featuring new perspectives on democracy.