It happens all the time: A tense, stressful situation at work, then an offhand remark, followed by laughter and perhaps a knowing nod. The tension is reduced. Such spontaneous humor can maintain morale or it can reinforce feelings of despair and helplessness. It all depends.

Working as a hospital chaplain, I often wondered about the spontaneous humor generated in this stressful environment: areas like the emergency unit, intensive care, neurosurgery, and coronary care. The flippant observations, verbal shorthand expressions that are quickly understood by those sharing the experiences.

People acquainted with such settings know that this humor has a distinct flavor. Simply stated it's crude, so crude that it is "for staff ears only." Its conveyors are fully aware of its offensiveness, should it be overheard by others. More often than not the humor victimizes the patients and, when taken at face value, it conveys insensitivity,even though this is never, never the intent of the purveyors of such humor.

Actually, my interest was more on what wasn't said than what was. I had some understanding of the need of what I then called "negative humor." But the glaring absence of positive humor, how come? I reasoned this way: if the humor inherent in these settings was negative, then some essential quality was absent. What that was or how to express it, I had no idea.

Then sometime later, while examining American frontier humor, I found similar dynamics but from a more comprehensive viewpoint. This viewpoint gave me a systematic way to consider this negative-positive humor phenomenon.

My categories now became "coping" and "hoping" humor. Here are examples of two different humorous treatments of a single theme. This gives an "experiential" basis for understanding the distinctions I make between these two.

The theme is aging. Aging is a fact of life, one that has demoralizing possibilities. The following examples are from contemporary birthday cards:

Feeling old? Don't. We know someone your age...and on good days he can still feed himself.

Another in this same vein: (Woman on the telephone) Your birthday today? Really? How old? No?...Have a nice yesterday.

Then this one: Happy birthday It