Comparative Drama

An Aesthetics of Anesthetics: The Problem of Humor in Medicine

In spite of that old adage—"laughter is the best medicine"—it is hard to overcome the feeling that illness and humor are fundamentally incompatible. Indeed, this basic assumption is often used as the source of comedy itself: the incongruous intersection of laughter and suffering highlights the ways in which the former might somehow trump the latter by way of an ironic "deadening" or desensitization. In a literature review for the Southern Medical Journalin 2003, physician Howard J. Bennett finds little support in published studies for the idea that laughter meaningfully promotes health or healing, despite popular beliefs; the only direct medical benefits he substantiates concern pain management through a kind of comic anesthesia. "In one well-controlled study," Bennett reports, "humorous movies reduced the need for postoperative analgesia in orthopedic patients." ¹If comedy does work upon the body, it seems to do so exclusively by placing pressure on one end of a kind of Cartesian lever, prying apart the humorous experience of pleasure from the physical reality of disease and illness.

Such insights might come as no surprise for theories of humor— and, indeed, of aesthetic experience more broadly. But they also define a distinct tradition in modern and contemporary drama that often uses the incompatibility of laughter and illness as a vector for multivalent critique, registering both social conventions about what might define an [End Page 151]appropriate ethic of care as well as how those conventions substantiate ongoing cultural hypocrisies. For example: Halley Feiffer's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Gynecologic Oncology Unit at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center of New York City(2016) opens on just such a display of torturous incongruence. Karla, a standup comedian in her early thirties, is sitting in a shared hospital room next to her unconscious mother, who is recovering from a hysterectomy after receiving a diagnosis of endometrial cancer. Because of the privacy curtain dividing the space, Karla is unaware that the other unconscious cancer patient in the room has also received a visitor: the middle-aged Don, who is silently watching over his own mother. When Karla begins to workshop a series of vulgar jokes aloud, Don makes his presence known—and the ensuing argument climaxes in a challenging inversion of comic wit. Don:

(Pulling out all the stops in a vicious cross-fire)

NO, what the – F – is wrong with YOUand your self-obsessed hipster ME GENERATION?! Your mom is in the hospital with cancer. Things are not looking good. Things are looking, in fact, pretty grim.

(Building to a whisper-scream)

So GIVE UP THE COMEDY FOR A HOT SECOND. LET IT GO. PUT IT ON THE BACK BURNER. Oh, and here'sa radical idea: drop the VIBRATOR JOKES and FOCUS ON YOUR MOM!!!

Karla:

(Whisper-screaming, too.)

I AMFOCUSING ON MY MOM. And she fucking LIKESVIBRATOR JOKES!!!

Don:

(Darkly sardonic.)

Yeah. Seems like they're really killingover there. ²

What makes this moment so effective is the way that Feiffer's caustic dialogue uses the ironic terms of humor to indicate a potent intersection between social norms, individual subjectivity, and interpersonal connection. Don's objection to Karla's standup routine points to an assumed gap in empathy: Karla's jokes, he asserts, are indicative of her generational "self-obsession" that is ignorant of and insensitive to her mother's needs as a cancer patient. On the other hand, Karla's rejoinder challenges Don's assumption—i.e., that humor indicates a disavowal of illness, and that illness itself is a uniform experience (" all your mom is now is cancer," he declares a bit later ³)—by asserting that there is no universal [End Page 152]standard of interpersonal care: vibrator jokes areappropriate for their particular relationship. Yet Don once again fires back, appropriating the jargon of professional comedy—to "kill" is to succeed with an audience— both to underscore the failure of Karla's routine (no one is laughing) and to indicate that humor does not mitigate...