On the 4th of July, I was at a get together at a girlfriend’s house along with some of her extended family. I was having a conversation with her where we were talking about one of our recent fun adventures of the flu going through the house, and our jobs as mothers to clean up, diagnose, feed and care for people despite having the flu ourselves. Her brother with motives I will never understand, randomly made the comment in passing “Oh, you’re friggin’ hypochondriac, Man!” It was an odd remark as it was out of place as there was nothing to the conversation that was out of the ordinary. She was shaken by this remark. Like me, she has family members that actually are hypochondriacs, and many of us who have been affected by this behavior tend to underplay when we are sick so as not to be perceived as a hypochondriac.
Unfortunately this in and of itself is not healthy either as people tend to ignore simple health problems like a persistent cold and cough until it turns into full blown pneumonia, as was the case with my girlfriend. I have a feeling she was hoping her family would note the contrast between her and her hypochondriac family member, but in turn they just ended up rolling their eyes for making mountains out of molehills and being hospitalized for pneumonia. So when her brother made this remark she stopped short and told him she has always striven, albeit perhaps not in the most healthy manner, to not be that type of person and it hurt her deeply to hear that remark because of it. Her brother’s reaction was simply to wave his hand in the air and say “Oh, lighten up already! You can’t take a joke.” End of discussion.
I was there and I have seen this over and over again. People saying something really stupid with the original intent to injure. The remarks are usually an attack on character as opposed just simply remembering something that could be construed as funny. It is never “oh gosh, I remember that time we went to the movies and spilled the popcorn, and while you tried to pick up the popcorn, your kid spilled the soda-it seemed like you couldn’t cut a break that day!” It is more along the lines of “You’re such a klutz!” When the person they are referring to does not simply lie down and be insulted, they take no responsibility by saying “oh that was a joke, such and such needs to lighten up and be able to laugh at themselves.”
It is so common that I wonder why it is not common bad etiquette like telling your host they are a horrible cook or racial slurs. But then again, I noticed that people who subscribe to this kind of behavior have no respect for personal boundaries anyway.
Last week I was happy to see someone else had addressed this behavior before, none other than C.S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters:
The real use of Jokes or Humour in in quite a different direction, and it is sepcially promised among the English who take their ‘sense of humour’ so seriously that deficiency in this sense is almost the only deficiency at which they feel shame. Humour is for them the all-consoling and (mark this) the all-excusing, grace of life. Hence it is invaluable as a means of destroying shame. If a man simply let’s other pay for him, he is ‘mean’; if he boasts of it in a jocular manner and twits his fellows with having been scored off, he is no longer ‘mean’ but a comical fellow. Mere cowardice is shameful; cowardice boasted of with humorous exaggerations and grotesque gestures can be passed off as funny. Cruelty is shameful-unless the cruel man can represent it as a practical joke. A thousand bawdy, or even blasphemous, jokes do not help towards a man’s damnation so much as his discovery that almost anything he wants to do can be done, not only without the disapproval but with admiration of his fellows, if only it can get itself treated as a Joke. And this temptation can almost be entirely hidden from your patient by that English seriousness about Humour. Any suggestion that there might be too much of it can be represented to him as ‘Puritanical’ or as betraying a ‘lack of humour’.