Humour can both heal and trigger grief, University of Alberta study finds

Donna Wilson lost her uncle a few months ago, and her many experiences of grief led her and other University of Alberta researchers to study grief in 10 participants.

The study wanted to know if humour is a trigger or coping mechanism for them.

What did researchers find? It can be both.

“One interesting case: it was a woman who lost her beloved husband almost two years before,” said Wilson, the lead investigator for the study. “And he was really funny. He liked humour. He always told outrageous stories and enjoyed a good joke and always was laughing and she felt it was really inappropriate to be hearing humour.”

Wilson says some participants shared they’d be hit by waves of grief if they heard jokes their loved ones would have enjoyed if they’d been alive.

But eight out of 10 of them used humour to help themselves and others take a break from grief.

“My uncle Doug would have been 90 years old in two weeks,” said Wilson. “He died on Christmas Day, if you can imagine, so pretty recent. And he was there all my life, And every time we saw him, we visited him, he was always smiling. He could always find something to laugh about.

“One person I interviewed, just in the few months after her husband died, someone sent her a really funny cartoon joke on St. Patrick’s Day. And she laughed and she said, ‘You know, that’s the first time I’ve laughed in about six months.’”

Marcus Fung, an Edmonton laughter yoga instructor, says that when he practices laughter as an exercise, he touches on something that feels like stuck grief. So if grieving Edmontonians want to tap into that, he shares one laughter yoga movement.

“Arches backwards so I’d be like…” demonstrated Fung as he started laughing. “Right? And so there’s this notion in the physiology that opens up that channel for laughter.

“Sometimes when you’re laughing – when you’re laughing really hard with your friends and you’re almost laughing so hard you’re crying – you don’t really know if you’re laughing or crying? I think that’s a clue to us, that the way our physiology is wired, that those two are interconnected.”

Wilson says whether humour can be healing or triggering really comes down to each individual.

“You may be surprised to find out a good joke can make you remember your uncle Doug, or whoever it is you’re grieving. And just accept that. That is normal. Grief is normal,” she said.