COMMON-SENSE NOTES // By Idris B. OdunewuLaughing Through the Storm: How Humor Can Help Us Not Only Survive but Thrive in Turbulent Times
The world feels heavy again. In a time such as this, laughter can seem almost obscene. Who dares to joke while the world burns? Yet, perhaps the better question is: how can we not?
The world feels heavy again. Politics seethes with bitterness. Civil liberties bend under pressure. Wars erupt in places that once seemed far away but now echo through our daily lives. The news scrolls endlessly across our screens, a litany of anxiety and outrage. Even those who try to keep perspective sense a low hum of exhaustion running beneath it all. In such moments, laughter can seem almost obscene. Who dares to joke while the world burns? Yet perhaps the better question is: how can we not?
Throughout history, humor has been one of humanity’s most reliable tools for survival. In times of chaos and despair, laughter has offered more than comfort. It has provided a way to endure, to resist, and to reimagine. It has allowed people not only to survive turmoil but to find meaning within it. When societies have stumbled toward darkness, humor has often been the faint, defiant light that refused to go out.
In the mud-soaked trenches of the First World War, soldiers passed around what were called “trench journals.” These were small, homemade publications filled with jokes, cartoons, and biting parodies of military life. They were written by men who might not live to see another dawn. Yet in their humor there was fierce vitality. A soldier who could laugh at his commanding officer’s incompetence, or at the absurd bureaucracy that governed his daily misery, was a soldier who had reclaimed a measure of control. The laughter was not escapism; it was rebellion against despair.
On the home front, humor took on a different tone. Cartoons in British and French newspapers mocked rationing, bureaucracy, and even the government’s endless propaganda. It was a shared language between civilians and soldiers, a way of saying: we see the absurdity of this, and still we carry on. The laughter bound them together across distance and terror.
By the Second World War, Britain had institutionalized humor as a national defense. Radio programs offered wry commentary on the war’s hardships. Jokes about Hitler’s ridiculous mustache or the blundering Luftwaffe circulated even during the Blitz. The laughter that rippled through shelters as bombs fell overhead was a strange kind of prayer, not for deliverance but for dignity. It said, simply, that the human spirit would not be cowed.
