Humour has always been used to cope with and make light of challenging situations. Bringing humour into a serious topic is not meant to belittle its weight, but instead lift some of it for the recipient.
Court jesters of the Middle Ages were relied on to deliver comic relief and often called upon by royalty in times of high stress. Jesters were even brought to the front lines of wars to tell jokes to the soldiers, sing suggestive songs, and taunt the opposing line. They tried to keep the soldiers laughing until they moved into battle.
Though we don’t have court jesters to call on anymore, we can use social media as a constant source of laughter. Despite humour being a large component of our lives, it is usually avoided in therapeutic practices. Dr. Brian Kaplan firmly believes in integrating the power of humour into therapy.
“It is a great pity when people doing ordinary therapy don’t use humour when the situation cries out for the use of humour,” Kaplan said.
Kaplan has created the acronym ‘SMILEE’ to refer to the physiological benefits of laughter.
In the 1970s an American, Frank Farrelly stumbled upon the use of humour and clinical reverse psychology to catalyse positive behavioural change. He travelled the world teaching this approach, which he dubbed ‘Provocative Therapy’ and taught Kaplan, and his art therapist wife Hephzibah, directly.
Kaplan reminds us that we are not a single self, but a multitude of subselves that present different aspects of our personality and conditioning. Some subselves can dominate behaviour in unhelpful ways. A provocative approach – or the term coined by the Kaplans, neohumour – is highly effective at quietening down any aberrant subselves allowing more congruent behaviour to hold sway.
The idea of subselves is not new, but rather a useful naming of the aspects of personality. Freud used Id, Ego, and Superego to label parts of the psyche. Carl Jung used archetypes to describe aspects of an individual. Over the years, many therapists have used various labels for these sub-groups of personality.
Before a session, Kaplan introduces the idea of Provocative Therapy and explains how humour will be used to quieten down helpless or stubborn subselves. He always asks explicit permission to use this approach, which is usually granted very quickly. Kaplan says that therapeutic humour must always be delivered ‘with a twinkle in the eye and affection in the heart’, the Golden Rule of Provocative Therapy. It is key that the client can always tell that humour is used with their best interests in mind.
Reverse psychology functions under the assumption that people do not enjoy being told what to do. One of Kaplan’s interventions is to congratulate the over-influential subself encouraging those very behaviours in comical extremes. The issue becomes clearer to the client when it is amplified, mirrored back and encouraged even more. There are many strategies to do this. While it feels like a warm friendly conversation it often elicits life-changing effects.
An example of such an exchange:
The hope is that the patient gains autonomy over their problem and comes to a solution on their own. The absurdity of Kaplan’s approach mirrors the absurdity of the person’s unhelpful behaviour. Kaplan has found that, often, people already know the solution to their problems and advising them directly is pointless. Humour serves to galvanise the positive shift the clients request.
“By extrapolating to absurd, they begin to think, ‘That's ridiculous what he said’”, Kaplan said. “Then they come down from the extrapolation and think, ‘You know what, it's a bit ridiculous what I’m already doing, it's already too loud.’”
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Dr Brian Kaplan's book, co-created with his wife Hephzibah, was published by Loba in 2021. Entitled Almost Happy: Pushing Your Buttons with Reverse Psychology, it includes original images of 114 archetypal buttons and offers provocative suJESTions to provoke these archetypes to be more congruent.
Also see neohumour.com | Download a PDF of this Article