Writing Satire Is Making Me Take Myself Less Seriously
By: Ryan Fan
Tags: Satire, Health, Humor, Mental Health, Writing

I’m usually a very serious writer. I take a very analytical and emotional approach to the topics I write about, and readers can usually count on me for an effort to give nuance, research, as well as personal experience to heavy topics like race, religion, politics, the economy, TV, sports, and a lot of topics in between.

Recently, however, I’ve been writing a lot of satire. I wrote a satire making fun of how liberals can be blind to their own racism, a satire on the exploitation of many self-help authors, and a satire on bad writing advice. There are a lot of topics I didn’t make fun of, which I thought in the past would have just been bad taste, but recently, I’ve been making fun of a lot of things.

Sometimes, satire and humor are the best modes of communication.

I wrote an essay on how white liberals could be so blind to their own racism, too, but for a lot of us, humor conveys a message better. And, for a lot of us, sometimes, humor is the best way to express emotions.

A 2010 Harvard Medical School report states that laughter stimulates endorphins and serotonin, down-regulates stress hormones, and bonds people through the up-regulation of serotonin. A lot of us will not unite in our beliefs, but a lot of us can unite through humor and witty statements and satire. One of my friends, who is very conservative, loves Saturday Night Live, which is a symbol of liberal political resistance to Trump these days.

Writing satire has helped me take myself and my writing a lot less seriously, and that’s a very good thing. It takes a lot of emotional effort that can be draining when writing long, thoughtful pieces on a heavy topic, but a satire keeps things light and engages us on a subject.

To be clear, I don’t think a discussion with satire is the only way to have a discussion. But it’s sometimes the best place to start. Humor is inherently a coping tool that allows us to take a break from a heavy topic.

For those of us who suffer from depression, according to Robert W. Griggs, the best break is something that makes us laugh. Griggs found that he first found humor as an effective coping mechanism in his therapist’s office. He looked at all the book titles and found that the titles forebode an overwhelming sense of doom. Griggs thought to himself this:

“Okay, I know I’m sick, but I can’t have all this stuff wrong with me.”

For him to be able to laugh when he felt so ashamed and apprehensive going into the therapist’s office gave him hope that the therapy was going to be okay. Griggs tells us that finding humor in a situation allows us to take a step back and see things more clearly and bring everything back to earth. He reminisces to when he was in the psych unit with other patients, and he laughed at the funniest scenes of movies.

“Locked in that place with no control over what happened next, we could laugh, which meant we had some control after all.”

Of course, it’s important to proceed with caution when mixing humor and mental health. Biting and bitter sarcasm can cause a lot of pain when it’s used to express deeply-rooted anger at someone. Humor is not the end all be all and should be used with discretion, but it’s a tool for all of us to take ourselves a little less seriously and ground ourselves.

Like all of us can’t be laughing all the time and grounded all the time, I acknowledge that I can’t either. I’ve been writing a lot more satire in expense of serious articles and wrote satire all of yesterday, trying to come up with headlines about Mother’s Day that were funny. It was a nice break from my usual essay-writing, but it couldn’t replace it.

Satire was a way for me to take myself less seriously. I didn’t need to be the expert on everything, which I know but don’t necessarily accept. I don’t need to be perfect, whether it means fulfilling my productivity goals, exercising every day, or trying to be the best online teacher. When I write satire, I laugh. If it isn’t funny to me, I know it’s probably not that funny to my audience — so I have a laughing fit every time I write satire so my readers can feel some semblance of the same emotion.

Inherently, we as humans want to feel like we’re in control. But the best humor and satire often strike us by surprise and make us realize that, well, it’s OK not to be in control. Who does feel in control when we have a pandemic like the Coronavirus upending our lives?

“Jokes work because they defy expectations,” the Harvard Medical School report writes. The report makes sure to differentiate laughter and humor: laughter is a social signal that’s like a punctuation mark, and humor is an evoked response to shifting expectations. Our frontal lobes work to seek pattern recognition, and when those expectations are broken, are brains shift away from informational processing and into an emotional response in the nucleus accumbens, the brain’s pleasure reward system.

A perfect joke is provocative enough to grab someone’s attention, but not so provocative that it’s outright offensive or bigoted. I’m still learning to navigate these lines but some editors, including Susan Brearly, have helped me immensely in a non-judgmental manner.

I used to think that I just wasn’t funny. Well, in real life, I can be a funny person, but I thought that as a writer, humor and satire just weren’t my place. My place was as an essay writer that persuaded or someone who told compelling personal stories, or someone who documented his profound experiences with faith.

To write satire? That just seemed like it was for someone else.

And then I started writing satire more and more. I sampled some Onion articles and wrote fake news-style satirical stories, and then pivoted to just general satire where I made fun of something I knew.

And the person we know best? Ourselves. The best of my satire now is when I make fun of myself. I’ve written my fair share of self-help advice and articles. I wrote those pieces because there are habits and techniques that work well for me — and yet I recognize a lot of readers’ frustration with seeing way too many self-help pieces, so I made fun of the conniving and ambitious thought process of writing a self-help article.

In effect, making fun of myself is possibly the best form of comedy. I can be provocative, funny, and have attention-grabbing punchlines, and yet I won’t go too far because I know my own limits and boundaries. If you’re in the place where you feel you can make fun of yourself without being too self-critical, I would suggest going for it, because making fun of myself in satire has made me less self-critical in real-time. When you’re someone who can take being made fun of, you don’t take criticism as personally, nor you open yourself up to self-acceptance as well as being more vulnerable with others.

Writing satire has made me take myself less seriously, and it doesn’t matter how serious a topic is or how depressed I feel — humor helps us heal.