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'Why it’s sensible to be silly'*
Elle Hunt Via The Guardian/Observer
‘In this strange in-between time, half in, half out of lockdown, I now realise that cultivating a sense of the absurd might be crucial to weathering the uncertainty of the weeks and months to come. Silliness does not have to deny the gravity of the situation – but it can help you get through it.’
‘By the fifth week of lockdown, I had mastered the art of silliness. My flatmates and I had drawn smiley faces on fruit, stuck googly eyes on vegetables and dressed up as our favourite pop stars. On social media I noticed similar responses to the “unprecedented” times we found ourselves in: parents jumping in on their children’s TikTok dance challenges, people dressing up in black tie or costumes to take out the bins. I’d chalked it up as cabin fever, but even in this more relaxed phase of lockdown, with some of our pre-pandemic pastimes back on the agenda (albeit in adapted form), the spirit of silliness endures in my flat. It turns out that playfulness is, in fact, a distinct personality trait, like extroversion or conscientiousness – and those who possess it in adulthood may be more resilient.
In this strange in-between time, half in, half out of lockdown, I now realise that cultivating a sense of the absurd might be crucial to weathering the uncertainty of the weeks and months to come. Silliness does not have to deny the gravity of the situation – but it can help you get through it.
Humour, in general, is well established to be beneficial in coping with stress and adversity. Dr Nick Kuiper, a professor emeritus of clinical psychology at the University of Western Ontario, who has been researching humour for more than 30 years, says it can function as a reframing mechanism, creating psychological distance from a negative event. “Past research has shown that those high on a coping measure of the use of humour can see potentially stressful events in a less threatening manner, and as more of a positive challenge,” says Kuiper.
But more than an appreciation of comedy or jokes, it is what might be termed silliness that I have found myself leaning on over the past few months – a kind of contriving whimsy for whimsy’s sake, that could easily be dismissed as juvenile in adults – especially in those without young children themselves.
‘On social media, people are dressing up in black tie to take out the bins.’
Photo: Gulf News
For millennials like me, a proclivity for fancy dress, theme parks or ball pits might be held up as evidence of an extended childhood, a social media obsession, or a failing with personal finance. But as philosophy professor John Morreall has written, historically all humour has been framed negatively. Plato and Aristotle, for example, discouraged laughter as an expression of scorn, as do certain verses in the Bible. Prior to the 20th century, few philosophers or psychologists even mentioned that humour is a kind of play, or saw the benefits in such play, wrote Morreall.
While a century of study of humour has come to view the trait as a character strength, silliness itself is still not considered entirely positive. According to the OED, the word “silly” has evolved to have a range of mostly negative meanings from its original sense of “happy, blissful, lucky or blessed” in old English, to “innocent”, “harmless” and “pitiable”. Today there is usually some judgment attached, though the precise meaning is unclear.
“Everybody’s silly at some time, it’s just that it’s not identical,” says Dr Janet M Gibson, a professor of cognitive psychology at Grinnell College, Iowa.
In researching 800 papers on the psychology of humour, Gibson came across no evidence that it was a sign of immaturity. “When I grew up, ‘silly’ was an insult. But psychologists don’t seem to have thought that it was immaturity that caused silliness.” She suggests that silliness is not negative, but inappropriate displays of it are received as such: “It takes a lot of social intelligence to know when you can be silly.”
Some people find it harder than others to switch between playful and goal-oriented states. Rather than playfulness being a stage we grow out of, research has shown it to be – to a greater or lesser extent – part of our personalities, determining how receptive to it we remain through our lives.
Dr René Proyer, a professor of psychology at the Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in Germany, says playfulness is a personality trait, akin to the “big five”: agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness to experience, emotional stability and extroversion. Playful people generally score higher on the last three, but Proyer found the trait could exist independently.
Playfulness is also “psychologically different” from humour, he adds. “Though there is overlap, you can be playful without being humorous… You might just enjoy the activity.”
That is supported by Proyer’s findings that playful people act out their propensity day-to-day, and that they generally prefer partners who do the same. He gives the example of one person surprising the other (say, by sticking googly eyes on a squash): “He or she may laugh – but there may just be the feeling of surprise or joy.”
Proyer has found four basic types of playful adults: “other-directed”, who prefer to play with others; “light-hearted” people, who “regard their whole life as a type of game”; those who are “intellectual”, amusing themselves with thoughts, ideas and their own challenges; and, finally, the “whimsically playful”, who are entertained by unusual or “small day-to-day observations”.
All of these may be present in one individual, to a greater or lesser degree. (I identify myself as whimsi-intellectual and one of my flatmates as all four, turned up to the max.) “I don’t think that there are many people who aren’t playful at all, in any of these dimensions,” says Proyer. “The way you personally express your playfulness can be different at work, in your leisure time, in your private life.”
It can function as an approach to problem-solving, managing relationships, presenting information or even conflict negotiation. When Proyer’s five-year-old daughter refused to eat her lunch, the compromise reached was to sit not at the table but beneath it: “terrible for adult backs,” says Proyer, “but it worked.”
His research has found playful adults to be observant and good at innovation and problem-solving, able to see from different perspectives and to find interest in even monotonous tasks. As Proyer sees it, it is a positive trait – though he agrees that there may need to be new vocabulary for it to be appreciated as such. (In German, he notes, even the word for “playfulness” has the same negative connotations that “silly” has in English; while “silly” itself translates to mean “stupid”.)
‘For me, playfulness has been a sort of stress relief, pushing the limits of good sense.’
For me, playfulness has been a sort of stress relief, pushing the limits of good sense and our housebound reality. It is telling that my flatmates and I plumbed new depths of silliness at the party we threw to mark six weeks of lockdown, popping balloons with skewers in our mouths and our hands tied behind our backs.
Had you found yourself at such a party, you would have been justified in leaving immediately. But it is those moments of levity, no matter how contrived, that stand out in my memory of lockdown so far, marking not only the passage of time but our mastery of it – if only in the smallest, inconsequential domains.
New York Times writer Molly Young described her quarantine experiments with sleeping in places other than her bed, working from her floor, and eschewing clothing and cutlery “just to see what it was like”. Through these “minor acts of norm-shedding”, Young wrote, she was able to warp reality, creating a new one where she had total autonomy. I recognise the impulse. Silliness can be self-protective; a way of eluding an “unprecedented” challenge instead of caving into it. Radio 1 Breakfast host Greg James described his job to me last year as generating “fun for fun’s sake” against a backdrop (even then) of toxicity and fear, saying: “Isn’t it a great time to be silly?”
To play is to bend limits rather than rally against them and maybe, in doing so, find unexpected room to move. It is in essence freedom, if only illusory – and there can be relief in that, too. “That willingness to do silly things, to be playful, can be like saying, ‘We’re going to relax the constraints of the world,’” says Gibson.
Lockdown may have eased but we have a long way to go before anything like normality returns. For as long as we are in this limbo, I am happy to hang on to that funhouse-mirror lens I found in lockdown, and make space for silliness. It can be liberating to look into the abyss – and find a pair of googly eyes looking back.’- *This article was first published in The Guardianon 23 August 2020
Read more:
Photo: A Fine Parent
100 Simple Ideas for Parents to be Playful and Silly with Kids
7 Psychological Benefits of Playfulness for Adults
In Praise of Laughter and Joy in these Dark and Uncertain Times
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Jeremiah Emmanuel in Conversation and Dialogue with Kieran Yates, The Guardian, on the occasion of the publication of his book: Dreaming in a Nightmare: Finding a Way Forward in a World That’s Holding You Back. *
Jeremiah Emmanuel: 'I hope my book gives people the courage to dream'
'A member of youth parliament at 11, deputy young mayor at 13, Brixton-raised youth activist Jeremiah Emmanuel is now being published by Stormzy'
‘Your definition of success isn’t going to be the same as someone who’s gone to Eton where they’ve been
prepared to be future prime ministers.'-Photo: The Guardian
‘To this day, Jeremiah Emmanuel remembers the first time he caught the 345 bus from Brixton, when he was eight years old. “The last stop said South Kensington – I had never heard of this area before. So I’m looking out the window, and it looks really different. By the time you got to Chelsea, the floor looked the same colour as the day it was paved,” he says, now 21. “I felt like there were so many communities who were so close together and so far away living on parallel lines. Why is there so much inequality in the country?”
The shifts seen out the window of the 345 embody the question at the heart of Emmanuel’s debut book, 'Dreaming in a Nightmare: Finding a Way Forward in a World That’s Holding You Back.' What separated the world at the other end of that bus trip from where it began, next to his favourite haunts: Creams, a dessert cafe where he and his friends would congregate and eat Oreo waffles after, he says, “youth services in Lambeth got decimated”; or the Brixton McDonald’s, also known as “Brikky McD’s”.
For me, it was just the norm. I would hang out in McDonald’s for hours, run over to Lambeth town hall to do my youth politics, then run back to be with my friends again.”
When we meet, we’re near his new home in Vauxhall, just north of Brixton. He proudly holds his book, with his BEM (British Empire Medal), which he received for his services to young people in 2017, on the table in front of him. These are just two of a striking roll call of achievements; a member of the UK Youth Parliament at 11, former deputy young mayor of Lambeth at 13, a former army cadet. He now works with the Gates Foundation and describes himself as a “youth activist and social entrepreneur”.
On the face of it, all this can be seen as a far cry from the trauma in his early life that he describes in the book: being frequently homeless with his mother and siblings until he was seven; being aggressively stopped and searched by police when he was 15 – in the same week as visiting Downing Street to collect an award for his community work; and performing first aid at a house party on a boy who had been stabbed.
“A major way that I got over my trauma was by forgetting,” he says. “My father passed away, being homeless, the brief stint in the care system, when my mum got ill – I lost my memory. It was all just impressions … The writing process brought it back.”
The title, Dreaming in a Nightmare, he is keen to clarify, relates not to Brixton specifically, but to any environment that actively disempowers its citizens. Billed as a memoir, he also calls it a toolkit for empowering young people, to lay out the methods he has used to find success. Like persistence and self-belief, both seen in the email (printed in the book to be used as a practical template) that he sent to the chief executive of Rolls-Royce, aged 17, offering to help the company connect with young people: “Last year, I founded the BBC Radio 1/1Xtra Youth Council … I think Rolls-Royce would benefit from the advice of a similar group.” Rolls-Royce then hired Emmanuel to help it attract more job applicants from young people.
“You can only see what is in front of you,” he says now. “So your definition of success isn’t going to be the same as someone who’s gone to Eton where they’ve been prepared to be a future prime minister or the CEO of Fortune 500 companies. We need to see it.”
While the memoir of a 21-year-old must operate differently from a memoir that comes with more lived experience, reading Dreaming in a Nightmare gives the sense of how bearing the brunt of austerity Britain ages a person. The impact of the 2008-09 recession, the student debt that he was once scared of, the need to work for a charity to plug the gaps of government – all reflect the prospects and challenges facing Gen-Z. Emmanuel includes interviews with his peers to bolster his points, such as Kayla, a close friend and unofficial news broadcaster who will call if there is bad news; or Nathan John-Baptiste, AKA “the Wolf of Walthamstow”, who made more than £25,000 selling snacks from his school toilets back in 2017. Emmanuelwas lacking in his own entrepreneurial approach as a one-time muffin magnate at school. As he humbly acknowledges: “The first business lesson I learned was an important one: never eat your own product.”
Dreaming in a Nightmare was his first foray into professional writing, after the musician Stormzy met Emmanuel through his youth work, and forwarded the manuscript to his Penguin imprint Merky Books. Nine drafts and 12 months later, Emmanuel had a book, written while listening to the soundtrack from his childhood: gospel singers Kirk Franklin and Donnie McClurkin, Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti and Nigerian rapper Burna Boy, as a way to bring him closer to his ancestry.
Writing the book meant sitting down with his mother, Esther, to talk about her life in Nigeria for the first time, he says: “There was a lot I didn’t know, and it was emotional. Like, she was the victim of an armed robbery in Nigeria by people brandishing machetes. When I heard about it, I was angry. For the first time we really connected on a deeper level. So yeah … find out about your family.”
When he quizzes his mother about growing up in Nigeria, he doesn’t dwell on the exoticised abstractions of a mystic land, but takes a very Gen-Z approach to learning about his ancestry, by immediately going to Google Street View to find the exact house on Biaduo Street in Ikoyi, Lagos, where she grew up. It is how a new generation can experience ancestral homelands, bringing these stories of the past into the present in new ways.
Despite new approaches, few things have changed for his generation, still at the mercy of crippling austerity, especially in black, inner-city communities whose members are substantially more likely to be unemployed, live in precarious housing, and be at risk of Covid-19 than their white counterparts. When he repeats old adages, such as “working twice as hard to get half as far”, it is wisdom that could be passed down to any immigrant child in Britain at any time in history.
Emmanuel’s overall position – that we can work with structures like the police and corporate brands – may feel disappointingly safe to some, especially when more and more young people are calling for abolitionist approaches and reimagining new structures, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, or even the recent A-level results debacle, which has amplified fury at UK academic elitism. That is not to say that Emmanuel is without challenge; in one powerful example in the book, he files a complaint to what was then called the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) after a stop and search in Brixton – which then redirected his complaint to Brixton police station. With hindsight, he patiently explains his reaction, and the failures of this system: “The idea behind creating the IPCC was a good one … I have no interest in attacking the police for doing their jobs, but new channels of communication and a new dialogue are desperately needed.”
Though he evades questions directly relating to party politics (“I don’t delve into the political system a lot because of my charitable work”), you get the sense that what Emmanuel is really advocating is to broaden imaginative horizons that are compressed by social deprivation. The fact remains that, for a generation facing unmeasurable challenges, there is immediate work to be done. For Emmanuel, power comes in his ability to look beyond the limitations of a broken world to reimagine a life beyond it. His mission, to empower young people, uses businesses, organisations and projects as examples, with a heady dose of corporate-speak – but he also allows himself the occasional poetic moment. “We all have a dream,” he tells me. “I’m not dreaming all the time but I now know how to do it. I hope the book gives people the courage to do the same.”- *This interview was first published in The Guardian on 20 August 2020
Photo: Penguin Books
A moving and powerful account of the problems faced by a new generation, from crime to poverty to an increasingly divided society, from an extraordinarily accomplished young activist and entrepreneur.
'My name is Jeremiah Emmanuel. I’m twenty years old. I’m an activist, an entrepreneur, a former deputy young mayor of Lambeth and member of the UK Youth Parliament. I wanted to change the world, but the world I was born into changed me first.
Raised in south London, I lived in an area where crime and poverty were everywhere and opportunities to escape were rare. Violence was accepted, prison was expected. Your best friend might vanish overnight, never to be seen again. That was the world I knew; the only one I thought was possible for people like me.
But somehow, as I got older, I found my way to a different world: a place where people listened to you, where opinions were heard, where doors were opened, where there were opportunities around every corner. Everything had stayed the same and everything had changed.
This is the story of how I did it, the people who helped me get there, and the huge hurdles I – and my entire generation – have to learn to face and overcome. It’s the story of how to move forward in a world that’s holding you back.'- Buy the book HERE
A selected readings on similar topics and issues from our archive
The scar on the conscience of Britain: The neglect of its children, youth, students and more
The Broken Economic Model and the Inhumanity of the Lost Decade of Austerity
Austerity driven Homeless children put up in Shipping Containers in ‘Great Britain’
Austerity and its Consequences: No Hope for the Youth
Life, death and economics: Austerity is a killer
Recession, Austerity, Mental, Emotional and Physical Illness
Crisis after crisis and the crucial voices of hope
Is Neoliberal Economics and Economists 'The Biggest Fraud Ever Perpetrated on the World?'
World Transformation and the Youth: Youth to Make the World Great Again
Do you have an eye for justice and sense of duty? Then, these questions are for you.
The Youth of Wales Message of Hope to the World at the Time of the Coronavirus Crisis
GCGI Celebrating Activism and Hope with British VOGUE
In Search of a Better Tomorrow: Reasons for Hope In Times of Uncertainty
This is How to Make the World Great Again: The Compassion Project
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Andrew Marvell 'died of an overdose after spurning Catholic malaria cure'*
Academic finds evidence that Puritan poet took opiate-based remedy
that instead caused him a lethal seizure
Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) was initially believed to have been poisoned by his political enemies.
Photo: The Poetry Foundation
Nota bene
Reading about Andrew Marvell’s fate, reminds me of
Trump and his thoughts on the healing powers of BLEACH to cure COVID-19!!
‘President Donald Trump during an April 23 White House briefing in which he suggested — without evidence —
that both ultraviolet light and disinfectant could be used to treat the coronavirus in humans.’-Caption and photo: Business Insider
And now reverting back to Andrew Marvell and his opiate-based malaria remedy!!
He famously begged his mistress not to be “coy”, warning her: “The grave’s a fine and private place/But none, I think, do there embrace.”
Now new evidence uncovered in a 350-year-old manuscript suggests that Andrew Marvell went to his own grave prematurely, after he accidentally overdosed on an opiate intended to treat his malaria.
Since 1678, the circumstances surrounding the metaphysical poet’s sudden death at the age of 57 have been shrouded in mystery. At the time, there were rumours that the Hull MP, an outspoken Protestant and staunch supporter of Oliver Cromwell, had been poisoned in London by his political or religious enemies.
Nearly 200 years later, a medical account attributing his demise to an attack of malaria was found – and this is the cause of death that has been accepted ever since.
But an academic at the University of Hull has discovered that Marvell had in his possession a handwritten recipe for the remedy mithridate, which suggests the poet was using potentially lethal opiates to treat the fevers caused by his malaria.
The recipe, touted as a remedy “for the plague, fevers, smallpox and surfeits”, is scribbled in a collection of sermons that was formerly assumed to have belonged to Marvell’s father, the Reverend Andrew Marvell, and is held in Hull History Centre. “I noticed that the recipe couldn’t have been from Marvell’s father’s lifetime [Marvell senior died in 1661], because it says it was “made use of” during the great plague [of 1665],” said Dr Stewart Mottram, a senior lecturer in English at Hull. “That threw up a whole series of questions.”
After unearthing evidence that suggested this “very fragile” collection, which includes many of Marvell’s father’s sermons, was actually once owned by Marvell himself, Mottram revisited contemporary accounts of the poet’s death. His paper about his discovery will be published later this year. “People have assumed that Marvell died of malaria because he wasn’t given quinine, a treatment still used today. What I’m suggesting was he died with malaria, because of the drug he took. It was the drug itself – the mithridate – that killed him.”
At the time, opium was a popular painkiller and, as Marvell’s recipe demonstrates, was also viewed as a cure for a wide range of medical problems. “You could take it for anything,” said Mottram. “It had this reputation for being universally beneficial.” It was even perceived as a poison antidote.
Then some doctors began observing that taking mithridate could cause “apoplexies” – strokes – that could be fatal. “And that’s actually what the cause of Marvell’s death was. Literally days after his death, letters were written saying he’d died of an apoplexy.” If Marvell hadn’t overdosed on opium, Mottram believes, he would have survived infection with the strain of malaria that was prevalent in England at the time. It is rarely fatal in human populations. “Malaria was common in 17th-century England, particularly in estuary areas of eastern England like London and Hull. But it was a fairly benign disease.”
Even during Marvell’s lifetime, some English doctors had learned that quinine was a better treatment than mithridate for the fevers caused by malaria. But the drug was viewed with suspicion by Protestants, because it came from South America, which was ruled by Catholic Spain.
“Quinine as a drug was associated with Catholics and Jesuits, and therefore it had a bad reputation in Protestant England,” said Mottram. “If Marvell is known for anything, it’s for his Puritan views and the fact that he supported Oliver Cromwell during the Commonwealth. He’s unlikely to have wanted to take a drug that had a reputation for being something that passed through Catholic hands.”
This prejudice towards mithridate and against quinine may account for the high mortality rates in malarial areas of England at the time. “Marvell offers us a case study, a window into why people who had malaria were dying.”
The fact that Marvell owned a manuscript containing a recipe for mithridate also shines a light on the poet’s wider interests in medicine throughout his life. “There are little-known poems he wrote about disease, including two in Latin about smallpox, and another, also in Latin, which prefaced a translated medical book called Popular Errors in 1651. This book berated the public for doing precisely what Marvell ends up doing – taking too-strong and too-frequent doses of opium. So Marvell writes a poem commending a work that attacks people for overusing opium – then dies from overdosing on opium.”
The English translator of Popular Errors, Robert Witty, was Marvell’s friend and may have been the very doctor who mixed the dose of mithridate that led to his untimely death. “We know that Marvell summoned a doctor, and that Dr Witty, his friend, was with Marvell in Hull in the days before he died.”
Another irony, Mottram points out, is that for nearly two centuries, historians believed Marvell was poisoned. “Actually, what he was poisoned with was a poison antidote.”
*This article by Donna Ferguson was first published in The Observer on 16 August 2020
Read more on similar stories:
Don’t listen to these crackpot coronavirus myths
How Ancient Cure-Alls Paved the Way for Drug Regulation
Mithridates’ Poison Elixir: Fact or Fiction?
Bat soup, dodgy cures and 'diseasology': the spread of coronavirus misinformation
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