The Quip
I have written elsewhere about laughter and what it does to the texture of a session—the way it can release something that an hour of patient work has been building toward, arriving faster and more completely than technique alone manages.
What I haven’t written about is the specific mechanism: not laughter that arrives unbidden, from the body or from the situation, but laughter that I produce deliberately. The quip. The obtuse answer.
The response that chooses the absurd interpretation of a perfectly ordinary statement and commits to it without explanation. I have been doing this for as long as I have been doing the work and I cannot always explain in advance why I do it in a particular moment. I can say that it has never failed, in thirty years of attempting it, to amuse. I offer this not as a boast but as the closest thing to an empirical observation I have made about my own practice.
A man arrived from Melbourne. He was on his third glass of water before we had really settled into the session, and I was already watching the quality of his tension—the shoulders, the way he turned his head—the signs of someone who had made a decision he was now in the process of actually living with. He said, to the room rather than to me specifically: this is the first time I’ve done this. I said: don’t you have water in Melbourne? He looked at me for a moment and then laughed, and after the laughter the tension in the room was a different kind of tension, the kind that belongs to two people sharing a space rather than to one person managing his arrival in it. We went on from there.
I notice, when I think about why that particular kind of response works, that it refuses to do the thing that the situation might invite—the reassurance, the gentle acknowledgement, the professionally calibrated response that says yes, it’s normal to feel uncertain and you’re very welcome here. Those responses are available. They are not wrong. They simply do the work by addressing the anxiety directly, which confirms that the anxiety is the thing we are both looking at. The absurd answer addresses the anxiety indirectly: refusing to let the anxiety become the subject of the conversation. It changes the subject entirely, to something so obviously beside the point that the only available response is to find it funny, and in finding it funny, to step sideways out of the state that produced the original comment.
Another man had questions—many questions, arriving in quick succession, with that slightly urgent quality that questions get when a person has been holding them for a while. After some number of them he said, without particular ceremony: hit me if I’m being intrusive. I said: can I really? He laughed. Again, the thing I chose not to do was what the moment invited—to reassure him that he wasn’t being intrusive, that the questions were welcome, that there was nothing to apologise for. All of that was available and would have been true. What I said instead picked up his phrase, took its permission literally, and held it up to the light. The laughter arrived instantly.
The prostate conversation went several rounds, which is perhaps why I remember it. He announced, at some point during the session, that there was nothing wrong with my prostate. I said I got it checked every week or so. He said: not by a doctor. I said: doctors, teachers, truck drivers, priests, nurses, all sorts. He laughed. What I recall about this exchange is the particular quality of the laughter—it started at the truck drivers, built at the priests, and the all sorts finished it. The list was funny because it was true in a way that was not the way he had expected me to be true about it, and the unexpected honesty inside the comic framing produced a particular kind of laugh, the kind that comes from genuinely being surprised by something.
The American I found less garrulous than I had anticipated—he was the one who spotted the generalisation. I had said it casually, with the lightness of something offered as a shared observation between two people in a room, and he paused and said: are you saying all Americans are garrulous? I said: yes, of course. We both laughed. I find this exchange interesting to reflect on because the joke only works if he plays his part in it, which requires him to understand that the yes, of course is not a defence of the claim but an acknowledgement of the generalisation’s absurdity. That we both arrived at the same understanding simultaneously, without negotiation, is itself a kind of connection—a brief shared reading of the thing.
The man with sensitive nipples I remember particularly fondly because the comedy accumulated gradually and then arrived all at once in a word. I had been returning to his nipples during the session because they were responsive and the responsiveness was, in the context of a massage, information about where the body was paying attention. Each time my hand moved toward that area he flinched, a small involuntary recoil that came before any actual contact. I watched this happen several times and then, when my hand moved and the flinch came before I had even arrived, I said: Pavlov’s dog. He laughed for a while. What I find interesting about this one is that the laugh was partly at himself—at the reflex that had produced itself without his authorisation, the gap between what he intended and what his body did—and that he could laugh at it was itself part of what the session had produced. An hour earlier, the involuntary flinch might have produced a different quality of response.
The man I saw regularly, the one whose voting I had thought about before he arrived, offered a different kind of comic opportunity. He was a man whose life had several clearly observable dimensions that pointed in different directions politically—the concern for social welfare, the commercial career, the farm. I had been turning this over the night before his visit, not strategically, just in the way that the interesting parts of people’s lives continue to occupy the mind between sessions. When he arrived and I asked who he voted for, I stopped him answering before he could and laid out the three possibilities, each with its reasoning. He laughed uproariously before telling me he voted Liberal. The laughter, I thought, was recognition—the experience of being seen as containing contradictions that someone had actually thought about rather than resolved into a single simple category. I had done the thinking, not because it was useful, but because he was interesting.
The last one I want to record is brief and perhaps the most honest. A man asked what men wanted to do in a session. I said lots of things. He asked what I did. I said: what I am told. He laughed. There is more inside this exchange than the laugh suggests. I was describing something real about how I worked—the way the session shaped itself around the man in it rather than around a predetermined sequence I imposed on the session. What I was told was not instructions from above; it was attention to what the session itself was indicating as the right next move. The answer was funny because it sounded like deference and was actually something closer to its opposite. Or perhaps the two are not as different as they appear, which is also funny, in its way.
I want to say something about why the lateral answer works when it works, with the understanding that I am describing a tendency rather than a method. The obvious answer to any statement addresses the statement. The lateral answer addresses something adjacent to it—finds the word or the phrase that opens sideways, that discovers what else the statement contained besides its intended meaning.
When a man says this is the first time I’ve done this, he means something specific: that he is new to this situation and is aware of being new to it and perhaps hoping the awareness is not too visible. Don’t you have water in Melbourne? takes the surface of the statement—the first time, which could refer to drinking water as easily as to anything else—and pretends to take that surface seriously. The pretence is obviously a pretence, which is why it’s funny. And in the funny there is something released that the direct acknowledgement would not release.
I notice that this is only possible in a particular kind of atmosphere—one in which a man can already sense, or is beginning to sense, that what is happening in the room is not governed by the usual management of appearances. The quip requires a certain freedom to land without offence. I could not have said to every man who walked through the door something obtuse about Melbourne and expected laughter. I said it to that man because something about the moment allowed it. What produced the moment I cannot describe with any precision. I notice the moment and I respond to it. Sometimes what arrives in me is a question. Sometimes it is the quip. I rarely know in advance which it will be.
Sometimes I am intentionally obtuse. By that I don’t mean I deliberately construct an absurd reply. I mean I deliberately choose not to answer the obvious meaning of a statement. What arrives instead is rarely planned. It appears quickly, usually before I have had time to think about it. The intention is conscious. The words are not.
What I know is that laughter, when it comes in these circumstances, arrives from a place that the work has been preparing. It doesn’t create the ease. It releases what the ease had been building. And then we go on.
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