Frontiers Friday #126: Humour (Part IV)🤪⭕️

The final punchline and poignant tales from the Frontiers.

Here’s the final installment on the topic of Humour from Frontiers Friday.

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1. 📽 Watch: Tig
   I was not familiar with Tig Notaro’s work before this Netflix documentary.
   Here’s the brief: After comedian Tig is diagnosed with stage II breast cancer, she creates a poignant stand-up set that becomes legendary overnight.
   Here’s the trailer:
   

2. 📽 Watch: Nanette
   Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby show, Nanette is in a class of its own.
   How does one make you laugh one minute and move you to tears the next? Her punchlines and personal revelations on gender, sexuality and childhood adversities has re-shaped comedy.
   If you haven’t watched this before, I highly recommend that you do.
   Here’s a poignant clip:

   “Do you understand what self-deprecation means when it comes from somebody who already exists in the margins? It’s not humility. It’s humiliation.
   I put myself down in order to speak… in order to seek permission… to speak. And I simply will not do that anymore.”

3. 👓Short Read: Majority Affective Disorder, Pleasant Type.

   It is proposed that happiness be classified as a psychiatric disorder and

   be included in future editions of the major diagnostic manuals under

   the new name: major affective disorder, pleasant type.
   In a review of the relevant literature it is shown that happiness is statistically

   abnormal, consists of a discrete cluster of symptoms, is associated with

   a range of cognitive abnormalities, and probably reflects the abnormal

   functioning of the central nervous system. One possible objection

   to this proposal remains—that happiness is not negatively valued.

   However, this objection is dismissed as scientifically irrelevant.

   ~ Author of Doctoring the Mind and Madness Explained, Richard Bentall¹, in Journal of Medical Ethics, 1992.
   
   

4. 😂 Laugh: “Mom, where did I come from?”
   A six-year-old asked her mother: “Ma. Tell me the truth. Where did I come from?” The flustered mother thought, Must I really start explaining the details of sexual reproduction already?
   So she asked, “Tell me, Debbie, why do you want to know?”
   Debbie said, “Cause the kid next door said he came from Melbourne. I wanna know where I come from.”

   
   

5. ⏸ Words Worth Contemplating:
   Taken from Richard Nisbett’s book, Mindware, highlighting the importance of framing:

   Consider the Trappist monks in two (apocryphal) stories. Monk 1 asked his abbot whether it would be all right to smoke while he prayed. Scandalized, the abbot said, “Of course not; that borders on sacrilege.”
   Monk 2 asked his abbot whether it would be all right to pray while he smoked. “Of course,” said the abbot, “God wants to hear from us at any time.”
   

   As Frank Zappa said,

   "The most important thing in art is the frame... you have to put a "box" around it because otherwise, what is that shit on the wall?"²

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Reflection

Attention is a moral act.
When working with a client, how do you frame your perspective? How do you guide your attention?
When things aren’t resonating, take a laugh, and be willing to change the frame.

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1. The British Psychological Society (BPS) is lucky to have people like Richard Bentall. I wish we did in other countries.

2. This is taken from Zappa’s Essay featured in Creators on Creating, an edited book by Barron, Montuori and Barron, 1997., p. 196.