You’d be shocked by how much my siblings and I laughed when our father died

One night, sleeping in my bed in London, I was woken by a phone call from my sister in Australia. She said that our father had had a stroke, and I should fly home as soon as possible. She passed the phone to a nurse at the hospital, and he told me in an almost cheerful Australian lilt that I wouldn’t make it: “It’ll take you 24 hours and he’ll be dead by then.”

Deborah Frances-White hosts the global hit podcast, The Guilty Feminist.Credit: Joe Armao

My dad was relatively young and had always taken care of his health, so it was a great shock. There was no Wi-Fi on the plane, so I just had to hope that he was waiting for me and that the nurse was wrong. I arrived tear-stained and completely unkempt from the long-haul flight. When I walked into the hospital my mother looked at me and said, “You’ve changed your hair.”

This is a line from Out of Africa, a film we’d watched together in which Meryl Streep takes a journey across a hazardous Kenyan desert during a war, fighting lions and sandstorms, to get to her husband. It’s the first thing he says to her, and it makes her laugh. When my mother said it to me, we fell into each other’s arms laughing and crying. This is how I knew the nurse was wrong. My father was still alive. I got to sit with him and was told he could hear me as I held his hand and told him what a wonderful dad he’d been. He died a few hours later.

That night, after my mother went to bed, my siblings and I sat on the kitchen floor and drank schnapps. And we did something completely instinctive and primal as we sat as close to the earth as possible, weighed down by grief and gravity – we laughed. We laughed so much we cried, and we cried so much we laughed. We told funny stories about our father and shared memories and jokes from our childhood that only the three of us would understand. You’d be shocked by how much we laughed the night our father died, unless you’ve been through the same thing.

The next day, when the people from the funeral parlour came to give us depressing brochures about cremation and burial, I made an aside to my sister that made her giggle. The funeral director laughed as well. He leaned in as he slid a blue urn across the table, “Would your dad look good in navy blue?” Silence. “Little funereal humour there.” We all stared. “They give you a book of jokes when you train. For awkward moments.” We ended the meeting soon after. Who the f--- does this guy think he is, making light of our father’s death?

Finding dark comedy in a desperate or hopeless situation, otherwise known as gallows humour, is a relatable human experience. Laughing and crying are both reactions to heightened emotion. It’s possible that crying when laughing, or laughing when crying, is the body’s attempt to find equilibrium. More than that, if a condemned person is literally headed to the gallows, breaking the tension with wit gives them power – for a moment, they are in charge of the situation. We human beings can refuse to be completely consumed by our tragic lot if we take mastery over it with a joke.

If the hangman makes a gag about the dead-man-walking, that’s just cruel. He’s a sadist who is reinforcing the homicidal violence of his all-powerful position and humiliating the victim at the end of their life. It’s hard to think of anything worse. In other words, the same joke can be empowering or dehumanising. The ownership of a joke is key.

Nothing captures the paradoxical virtues and vices of freedom of speech better than comedy. Free speech is dear and indispensable in our democracy, but it can also be a driving force for hatred, fake news and polarisation. Comedy is the final frontier of freedom of speech because context, authority, irony and parody are all at play.

But comedy can also be a Trojan horse for sticky and powerful ideas that can play a part in shaping our world view. Comedy can make damaging ideas palatable and portable. Comedy can make those who are already disempowered seem risible to those in the dominant position. Comedy can also be an arena to release tension and say the unsayable, giving shape to fearful things that lurk in the shadows. It can be a place to air and even mock societal fears.

Screenwriter Nora Ephron used to say, “Everything is copy.” She said that to mean that things that seem shocking, devastating or appalling when they are happening to you can be turned into a story you will later tell for the entertainment of others. If you fall over, you might be the butt of the joke at the time, but if you later tell the story of the fall, it’s your laugh. Words that are malicious and hurtful in most contexts, when owned and reframed by a comedian, can be an ironic reversal of hate speech. So, let’s talk about jokes.

There is currently a debate among comedians and comedy audiences about whether the current push-back on jokes which seem to “punch down” rather than “punch up” is censorship from an overly sensitive, faux-offended minority with more clout than they deserve, or a sign of social progress in which comedians are held accountable for systemically violent statements like anyone else would be. Even comedians who in many ways seem progressive don’t agree on free speech. Here’s a sample of some recent remarks from the current crop of outspoken comedians, showing the range of viewpoints:

“Far-left political correctness is a cancer on progressivism” – Bill Maher

“If something as benign as political correctness can kill comedy, then comedy’s already dead” – Hannah Gadsby

“Comedians have a responsibility to speak recklessly. Sometimes, the funniest thing to say is mean. Remember, I’m not saying it to be mean. I’m saying it because it’s funny” – Dave Chapelle

“I do think it’s important, as a comedian, as a human, to change with the times. To change with new information … I think it’s a sign of being old when you’re put off by that” – Sarah Silverman

I think, overall, this range of views is good. Convergent thinking is undesirable. It stifles creativity, flattens innovation and homogenises diverse voices. It’s also essentially impossible for comedians.

You and I may both have hard lines on jokes we consider unacceptable, but those lines might be different. How do we decide which line is the right line?

Deborah Frances-White

One of the biggest roles of comedians in society is to think of something you haven’t already thought of and surprise you with a new way of looking at the world. Even if a comedian is reinforcing the status quo, they need to have a twist on the everyday because a punchline is a surprise by definition. That requires leeway and bandwidth in a creative space, but that space, as is true of almost everything in life, is neither infinite nor fixed.

You and I may both have hard lines on jokes we consider unacceptable, but those lines might be different. So how do we decide which line is the right line? Do we even want some kind of groupthink on that? How do we (or should we) ask speakers to be responsible without returning to top-down censorship?

Part of the reason I want to analyse freedom of speech through the lens of comedy is that hate speech is often clear to see when it isn’t intended to amuse, provoke or subvert. There are strong anti-hate-speech laws in many countries which punish people for using slurs in public.

But comedy seems to operate in a grey area where things which are manifestly unacceptable somehow get a pass because the intention is to entertain and provoke laughter. Sometimes the comedian is using irony, so the literal meaning and the message of the joke might be at odds. For all these reasons, comedy is an excellent space to analyse the power, purpose and policing of free speech.

No one really knows why we laugh, but academic studies suggest that laughter plays an important role in social bonding. Academics Guillaume Dezecache and R. I. M. Dunbar suggest that human communities, being much larger than those of other primates, require more time for social maintenance – and that laughter is a means of providing additional bonding capacity by expanding the “grooming group”. Their study demonstrates that laughter enables a threefold increase in the number of bonds that can be maintained simultaneously, which has the potential to significantly increase the size of bonded communities.

Baboons pick lice off each other to bond and reinforce social structures. Humans, who are usually lice-free and running in larger packs, use jokes and laughter instead. It makes sense when “making fun” is about raising and lowering each other’s status in jest. Grooming among animals can be an act of affection or dominance, much like teasing someone you love.

You know someone is a friend if they ask you to make them a cup of tea and you can say, “Yes, Your Majesty” (raise) or “Are your legs painted on?” (lower). You wouldn’t say that to your boss’s boss or your new boyfriend’s mother. This makes sense of why you can endlessly rib your own mum but no one else is allowed to. It’s why being given a (friendly) nickname in a new workplace or friendship group is a sign you’re starting to belong. It’s why your best buddies are generally the people you laugh with most often.

Edited extract from Six Conversations We’re Scared to Have (Hachette) by Deborah Frances-White, out now.

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