"Laughter sets the spirit free to move through even the most tragic circumstances. It helps us shake our heads clear, get our feet back under us and restore our sense of balance and purpose. Humor is integral to our peace of mind and ability to go beyond survival."

(Captain Gerald Coffee, POW in Vietnam)

Many Americans captured during the war in Vietnam were held as prisoners for years. Some are still listed as "missing in action" to this day. Captain Gerald Coffee, who spent seven years in a POW camp in Vietnam, has said that the POWs were generally kept isolated in an attempt to break their spirit. They managed to keep their spirits up, however, by tapping on the wall of fellow prisoners and telling jokes in Morse code. Coffee feels that humor was essential to his survival as a POW.

I interviewed Captain Coffee in 1993, and he said that humor was the one thing that was almost constant throughout his stay in the camps, even if it was sometimes a grim humor. For example, the prisoners were often tortured with ropes. When a new POW would arrive, they would always explain the daily routines and how they went about communicating with each other. Then they'd say, "It's not so bad once you get to know the ropes." They would look for humor wherever they could find it, including the way they and their captors lived, and even the brutality of the guards.

The POWs often got depressed about their aloneness and feared that they would never get back home. Anything that could break through this anxiety and depression was always welcome. In his book, Beyond Survival, Coffee describes an old cell that had been converted to a shower. Someone had scratched onto the wall, "Smile, you're on Candid Camera."

You can imagine the effect discovering this message had on a prisoner standing there with his head down, wondering if he was ever going to get out alive. In Coffee's case, he said, "I laughed out loud, enjoying not only the pure humor and incongruity of the situation, but also appreciating the beautiful guy who had mustered the moxie to rise above his own dejection and frustration and pain and guilt to inscribe a line of encouragement to those who would come after him . . . he deserved a medal for it."1

Coffee's stories remind me of an old Shel Silverstein cartoon showing two men being held prisoner in a dungeon. They are clamped to a wall with irons their wrists and ankles. Below them is a pit containing alligators, and it's 30 feet straight up to the top of the dungeon. So they're against the wall like two insects on a pin. One looks at the other and says, "Now here's my plan."

Coffee believes that there was a constant awareness in the POW camps that humor helped keep things in perspective. In spite of how bad things got, it helped them distance themselves from it for a moment and see that things could be worse. If it helped keep their problems in perspective, it can do the same for yours.

One of the most significant things to emerge from my conversation with Captain Coffee was his view that "having some humor skills before being confronted by the adversity played a very important role" in being able to use humor in the camps. And that is precisely why the 8-Step Humor Skills Training Program (discussed in this column, beginning September, 1998) is designed the way it is. If you want to have access to your sense of humor on your high stress days, you first need to spend some time on each of the preliminary steps. The basic foundation skills discussed in the early steps will gradually become a part of your everyday style of relating to the world. And this is the point at which you can begin to use humor to cope effectively with any kind of stress.

[Adapted from P.E. McGhee Health, Healing and the Amuse System: Humor as Survival Training, Kendall-Hunt, 1999. To order call 800-228-0810.]

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