Depression Talk

In her best-selling memoir Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America, hysterical author Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote about how much she hated jokes about depression and Prozac. Her reasoning is that making jokes about depression “trivialized” the matter. Depression, no matter what it’s mutation, can be an incredibly painful and often lethal condition.

Which is exactly why we should joke about depression all that we can. Humor, meet Elizabeth Wurtzel. Elizabeth Wurztel, meet Humor.

Remember Humor?

One of the symptoms of depression is that it robs you of your sense of humor. This is probably why Elizabeth Wurtzel is so upset about depression or Prozac jokes. It’s because she can’t find much of ANYTHING funny, let alone her own condition. The same thing happens to me when my depression takes hold of me by the throat. Suddenly, everything in life is incredibly serious and monumental, even very trivial things like spilling your drink or waking up five minutes late.

Your whole sense of perspective is thrown off when you have depression. You feel exactly like the old line from a stand-up comdey act: “I’m a piece of crap the whole universe revolves around.”

Laughter: The Best Medicine

In fact, if it wasn’t for depression, we might not have a lot of comedians. Making fun of themselves, even how miserable they found life to be, was fodder for their jokes. Not only that, it was a great way to deal with their depression. By laughing at something scary, we take away some of it’s power to scare us. When we aren’t so blinded by fear, we can get a much better perspective of ourselves and our world.

Making fun of depression has pretty much been a career for some comedians like Woody Allen and Richard Lewis.

Granted, not all comedians with depression found the relief they needed from making people laugh. The late great Richard Jeni was one. He was a brilliant comedian and a contemporary of Bill Hicks when he committed suicide by self-inflicted gunshot wound in 2007.

But laughter and humor helps jolt you out of the ruts your thinking can get into. Cultures from all over had sacred clowns which helped make fun of anything serious. Just as the Iroquois needed the Society of False Faces, we need comedians willing to make depression jokes today.