Humour to keep us sane

Black humour is the glue that holds police officers and other emergency service workers together – but is it a healthy outlet or does it store up problems later on? Syreeta Lund writes

Dealing with dangerous or horrific incidents can inevitably leave its mark on people, but does having a sense of humour help colleagues work through traumatic situations? Dr Sarah Charman, of the University of Portsmouth’s Institute of Criminal Justice Studies, has examined the role of dark humour in the workplace among ambulance crews and police officers and found it “provides comfort and creates a bond that crosses the occupational divide”.

“Emergency workers frequently find themselves in unpleasant and unpredictable situations, at odds with the heroic status and image presented in television dramas. They regularly deal with death or near-death. They face messy and mortifying situations the rest of us never have to encounter,” she says.

The work, published last month, looked at the views of 45 ambulance staff, police officers and firefighters and said they found that humour acts as social glue. “By normalising a situation through humour, a stressful encounter can be made more manageable – humour allows people to control feelings of fear or vulnerability,” adds Dr Charman.

“For these people, it is often a case of if you didn’t laugh, you’d cry. Both have a tension-reducing effect but it’s not socially acceptable for professionals doing their job to cry.”

Dogberry has appeared in the pages of Police magazine for decades and is one of the most well-read sections of the magazine, with police officers swapping humorous stories of The Job.

Clive Chamberlain, chair of Dorset Police Federation, also pens the monthly Sidelines column in the magazine and often uses humorous anecdotes as a way to convey a more serious message. In relation to using laughter as the ‘best medicine’ for dealing with difficult situations, he says: “Is it a good or bad thing? I don’t know. I suppose it’s good in that it will help someone through an incident without going to pieces, it helps to deflect real feelings – but that’s good as long as at some point in the day you are able to download, share and acknowledge what you really feel with someone else.

“To continually deflect true emotion is ultimately bad… and can result in all sorts of mental health and other problems. I nearly drank myself to death and know others who still are.

“Ultimately police and emergency service workers are human, prick us and we bleed – we also have feelings. Many of us are not comfortable with acknowledging those emotions but it’s important to remember that big girls and boys do sometimes need to cry!

Police officer turned stand-up comedian Alfie Moore believes the black humour prevalent in the job can be found in many situations where a ‘you and them’ scenario exists Alfie Moore is a police sergeant turned stand-up comedian, who has appeared in his own show, I Predicted a Riot, and has appeared at the Edinburgh Fringe. He uses some of what he has experienced and observed as a police officer in his routine.

He says: “It’s not, in my view, exclusive to 999 services or even colleagues. I think any situation where there is a ‘you and them’ scenario it’s prevalent – for example, in schools, among teenagers, shop floor workers, the military, prisons and so on. The more difficult the circumstances and conditions, the greater the need for a sub-culture.

“I would say it is more prevalent in 999 and military services than other jobs because of the very testing emotional demands of dealing with the terrible incidents they have to face.”
In one scenario he recalls a horrifying incident where they discovered a disembodied head on a riverbank, only to be asked by a police operator: “Is he still breathing?”

Journalist Steve Bennett, editor for comedy website Chortle, said of the stand-up routine: “His closing story, about a disembodied head that showed up on a riverbank, is a brilliantly funny yarn full of slapstick and the grim humour that comes from the conflict between the unyielding organisational bureaucracy of the police and the ‘seen-it-all-before’ officers actually on the ground.”

Dr Charman said in her research that there is effectively a mutually defined ‘joke book’ written for and by members of the emergency services which reinforces a combined cultural identity; acts as glue in a way outsiders might see as trivial; helps build a strong reliance on each other’s skills and qualities in difficult situations; and fosters a strong degree of trust and rapport.

The research is published in the International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy.

This article was first published in POLICE on line magazine