This morning, my husband Mark, strode into the bedroom while I was getting dressed. “Our dishwasher is broken! It’s not emptying the water!! I had to empty it by hand!!!”
“I’m sorry the dishwasher wants to make your life miserable,” I said. “I pushed and nudged you to put everything into the dishwasher and stop washing by hand. I made you wash all the plastic containers in the dishwasher. In my efforts to conserve water, I broke the dishwasher. It’s all my fault. I’ll call the appliance people later. Do we still have a warranty?”
He gave me the husband look that said, “Oh, you naive person.” Then he left to get the dishwasher file folder. He returned with it, looked at the instructions, and said, “A QR code to see what’s wrong! I hate these downloadable manuals.”
“That must be my fault, too,” I said. “First, I make you wash everything in the dishwasher. Then, there’s the QR code. I wonder what’s next?”
We both laughed out loud.
Later, I searched for “dishwasher not emptying” or something like that. There are about a gazillion videos that explain, step by step, how to fix this. I showed Mark one and he is ready for his weekend chore of fixing the dishwasher.
Things break, all the time. Sometimes I wonder if I should celebrate when things work.
But humor can help us manage these irritating challenges.
Humor Allows Us to Reframe Many Challenges
A broken dishwasher is not the end of the world. It’s an irritant, but not a big deal.
I really like to use humor to deal with those challenges. Oscar Wilde said, “Life is too important to be taken seriously.” I need my sense of humor to be able to manage all the craziness.
Here are the three forms of humor I tend to use most often and did use this morning:
- Hyperbole, where I overemphasize some aspect of the situation. This morning, that was “all the plastic containers,” as if they created extra washing cycles. (They might have, but I suspect not.)
- Incongruity, where something doesn’t match the rest of the situation. That was the bit about the dishwasher wanting to make his life miserable. The dishwasher can’t want anything, never mind to make someone’s life miserable.
- Self-deprecation, where I belittle myself so the other person can see the strangeness of the situation. That’s when I said the QR code was my fault.
Sometimes, all we need is a little nudge to allow us to reframe the entire situation and become more comfortable with the challenge of the moment.
What about a bigger or worse challenge? Humor works there, too. That’s because the more we practice our sense of humor, the more able we are to reframe, divert, or sublimate the problem into just another day of life. Most of the time, we know how to deal with life. And when we don’t? Humor might help us find an answer or two because we reframe the problem.
That’s the question this week: When do you reframe challenges with humor?