Smoking
More Healing Tales
Decades ago, I worked in a learning center at a settlement house in the inner city of Chicago, where I made up little games designed to teach educationally disadvantaged children reading, arithmetic, and other school subjects. Victor was a nine year-old boy who had a gift for comedy - he could do impressions of Laurel and Hardy and other types that were very accurate and funny - but he misused it. For example, for a learning project called "Jokes," children read jokes aloud for fun, all the while practicing reading, pronunciation, vocabulary and public speaking. When I extended the project a second day, Victor said to me that he was going to mess up what I was planning to do. True to his word, he performed comedy that was quicker and funnier than the children's joke-reading, seduced one boy away from the small group entirely by doing a brilliant impersonation of a drunk, and created an aura of distraction over the whole group.
Since you can teach nothing without receiving attention, I improvised a game in which the sole idea was to make people laugh. By using my hands to pull my face down into a long frown and standing inappropriately close to someone, I could at will make any child laugh.
"You can't make me laugh," said Victor.
"No one can make me laugh."
Having captured his attention, a momentary triumph, I approached
this disruptive class clown, stood perilously close to his nose,
and pulled my face down into a long frown. Victor did not laugh.
I stared into his eyes and was amazed. "Those are the saddest
eyes I've ever seen," I thought. "He can make anybody
laugh, but no one can make him laugh."
In order to try to get behind his defenses, for the sole purpose
of trying to make him laugh, I decided to put him in a story without
his knowing I was doing it, and I improvised the following tale
-
"There was once a king who was very sad, because he could make everyone else laugh, but no one could make him laugh. He tried and tried to find someone who could make him laugh, but no one could. He kept making other people laugh, but never got to laugh himself. He became so sad that he finally put out an offer: anybody who could make him laugh would win the princess and half the kingdom. However, if the person trying to make him laugh failed, he would be hanged.
"Knowing all too well that no one could make the king laugh, no one took him up on his offer, until a stranger came to town and fell in love with the princess. 'Half the kingdom, I could live without,' he thought, 'but I could never live without this princess, so I really have nothing to lose.' He took up the king's challenge."
At this point, in the guise of the stranger trying to make the king laugh, I tried a number of silly things, including all manner of funny faces, hoping to make Victor laugh. However, Victor really was the king in the story, and nothing would work. Finally, I gave up.
"The stranger was unable to make the king laugh," I said, "and so he was hanged." At that point I rolled back into a half shoulder stand, putting my feet in the air. Victor gave a small chuckle - not a real laugh, more of an "A for effort" laugh, and that was it.
Two weeks later Victor said to me, "Have you noticed I've changed? Everybody's been noticing, my teacher, my mother … I went home one day and said to myself, 'Why are you so grouchy all the time? You don't need to be grouchy like that.' And I stopped being grouchy."
From that point on I noticed that Victor was a joy to be around and never disrupted anything. I had the funny feeling that my innocent story told only to win the laughing game had communicated something much more deeply to the boy's sadness than I had intended, and given him a way to look at himself and then change what he was seeing. I could not be sure of this, but the change in Victor was unmistakable. Once, when two boys were arguing, he said to me, "Do you mind if I talk to them? I know these guys," and stepped in and mediated. Near the end of the school year, I was headed to the local library to see some films with a group of over-heated children when an argument ensued and began to escalate towards out of control. Putting on my most authoritative voice I said, "What is going on here?" Victor, who happened to be coming towards us, overheard what was happening and immediately went into a comic riff about how one boy had said thus-and-so to a girl, but another boy thought it was addressed to him and responded thus-and-so, and another girl thought he'd said thus-and-so..." and at that point, everybody in the group started laughing and the argument was forgotten.
Instead of disrupting the group, the class-clown had healed it.
This taught me something about the power of teaching through the unconscious, and I began to use this language more consciously, and saw many children have break-throughs and make remarkable life-changes. At that point, the federal grant I was paid under ran out, because its critics felt it was not doing any good, and I moved on to other things. Over a decade later, I remember walking along and I thought of Victor, and his spirit seemed so huge and loving it could take up a city block with healing good humor.