Category Archives: Models

Examples we can productively study

Humor from Role-Type Violations

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[The recent success of Britain’s Mischief Theater Company in stage and video productions around the world is a reassuring reminder that the norms of comedy are alive and well.  As this essay suggests, comedy often flows from simple violations of what an audience might expect. It can be funny to see someone gleefully ransack the minor social conventions the rest of us are so careful to observe.]

There are many theories of comedy, and no shortage of academics and philosophers who have weighed in. As the cliché goes, it’s a serious subject. My favorite theory of humor in  dramatic settings proposes that our impulse to laugh flows from observing settings where individual actions violate normative expectations. We watch a play or film. The character that an actor is playing seems to be a recognizable type, perhaps a businessperson, a young suitor or a priest.  Comedy is often born in these surroundings when earnest characters fail to enact social scripts they have supposedly mastered.  That’s the premise of Mischief Theater’s The Play that Goes Wrong (2012), where crack actors portray members of an amateur troop that bungles a story that is supposed to be serious.

In traditional comedies the actions usually can’t be dire or cruel. But when a puffed up socialite gliding through a hotel lobby slips on a banana peel, that’s funny.  If the same thing happens to a child, not so much. The humor lies in the punctured dignity of the socialite’s pratfall.  It reminds us of the distance between who someone aspires to be and the mortal that they are, and it’s the essence of farce.

This is the set-up facing an earnest and tuxedoed Henry Fonda in Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve (1949).  He has dressed to be the perfect suitor for a shrewd young woman he wants to impress. The setting of a party is the right place to make the impression. But he just can’t quite pull it off.

Sometimes its words rather than behaviors that can be the source of violated expectations.  When Rowan Atkinson’s Father Gerald tries to perform his first nuptials in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) it becomes clear that the nervous priest has come up short in finding for the familiar language needed to help the equally jittery groom:

Another variation on the mismatch between a scene action  is to introduce into familiar surroundings a character who is physically or temperamentally out of place. Charlie Chaplin continually put his scruffy Tramp in reasonably affluent settings that emphasized the pathos of a kind little man facing a much tougher world. The contrast was greatest when he costars where beautiful women such as Virginia Cherrill in City Lights (1931) and Paulette Goddard in Modern Times (1936). The effect of his efforts to romance them is both funny and sentimental.

Groucho Marx and Robin Williams created types defined more by their manic times. The often brilliant stream-of-consciousness riffs of Williams were at least echoes to the wisecracks and double-entendres that poured out of Groucho. In both cases there is comic power in characters who could leave the occupants in a well-ordered room looking like they just survived a tornado.

And, of course, that’s the point.  Comedy may seem to be only a source of passing amusement. But it is also a form of discourse that reminds us of how much social life relies on prescribed rules of conduct.

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The Rise of Telehealth

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Well down the path of protecting health care workers with vaccines and masks, it remains for insurance companies to decide whether to still cover virtual visits.

Just a few years ago most people who studied health communication expressed doubts about the value of remote health “visits.” A phone or video appointment with a professional might be fine for a patient or client isolated in a remote location. But more recently, the more typical telehealth “visit” has gone local, with patients talking to a provider just a few miles away, usuallly via some version of Zoom.  Indeed, no person with symptoms of COVID was really welcome in a typical medical office, especially when vaccines were still months away.  Rates of virtual visits for all types of care are now at about 35 percent.

I certainly was among the skeptics, believing that a live face to face encounter is far preferable. And health professionals note that if they take time to notice, they may learn more about a patient’s condition in the small ways they present themselves during an in-office examination. But COVID obviously made telehealth “visits” a safer alternative.

Now, well down the path of protecting health care workers with vaccines and masks, the question remains for insurance companies whether to continue to fully reimburse health providers for virtual visits. And since states pitch in for federal insurance, many are grappling with what they will reimburse. Some state leaders have expressed concern that virtual visits are easy to abuse, and maybe little more than a glorified phone call. Then, too, it takes some planning and skill  to do exams remotely.

The behavioral health therapists I know bridle at the suggestion that they do any less for a virtual visit. Some argue that they often achieve more because they have to listen closely to a patient’s or client’s descriptions of their world and concerns. Not surprisingly, a face on a flat screen sometimes gives away very little. With video, the work and the payoffs are ironically in the process of active hearing and listening: something we are less apt to do in the presence of a lot of visual stimulation.

 

The Human Glitch of Required Video

There’s also an unexpected glitch with a mandate that specifically requires video visits. Many older patients  and clients are hardly in the position to use a computer or smart phone to connect with a professional. What is second nature to most of us is often awkward for a senior with limited abilities. They may not be able to pull off a video chat, with all the normal prerequisites of finger dexterity, access codes, Wi-Fi connections, and basic management of the software. And, to be frank, there aren’t enough staff around these folks to stand by and help.

For these seniors, phone visits are often adequate and preferred. They’ve grown up with telephones. So far, through much of the pandemic insurers have usually allowed calls to be counted as full “visits.” But those who pay our healthcare bills have a hard time imagining that seniors would be challenged to manage Zoom calls. Most surely need a more active imagination to understand why what is essentially video conferencing is poorly suited to an assisted living or nursing home situation.

There is also an additional advantage to audio-only visits. They allow a person to give up the natural anxiousness that comes with the offering of oneself to the gaze of others. This is no small matter, as anyone with a teen in the house knows. Almost all of us worry about how we will look to others. It’s part of the human condition. Face to face meetings require, in sociologist Erving Goffman’s perfect phrase, “the presentation of self.” Our presence in the same space with others carries the double burden of trying to meet perceived expectations, and implicitly inviting others to judge the-outer most shell of the self.

To some extent that still happens with voice-only messages.  But the so-called “white coat syndrome” is probably reduced. We can retain more of our personal “front,” making it easier to focus on what we are saying. For now, it remains to be determined how routine medical visits will look in the coming years.