5 Stages of Public Ridicule
A brief analysis of a bully culture.
Our culture is in dire need of tools to help discern the difference between appropriate humor and destructive cruelty. In this post I explore the problem of bullying in our society and the role of humor by suggesting five stages of public ridicule: (1) The mining for material, (2) The humiliation, (3) The recruitment of an audience, (4) The provocation, (5) The defense of the bully.
Stage One: The Mining for Material
Public ridicule begins with a bully who sees your story as material to be mined, plundered, and sold to an audience. The bully puts your experiences and characteristics before your personhood. The bully then mines descriptions - picking you apart and selecting what can be used to mock, belittle, and humiliate. The bully assumes control over you and feels the freedom to use their distorted and limited knowledge of you to reshape your identity in the eyes of others. It’s as if someone has ripped pages of your life story away and rewrote the parts they want to present to their audience.
Stage Two: The Humiliation
Often that material is presented as a joke. Something as seemingly innocent as ascribing a nickname to another can be a form of control that replaces a person’s given name with a name chosen by the bully – a taking from and a giving to without the other person’s consent.
The name we use when we present ourselves to others serves as an important anchor to our sense of self-worth. By exchanging that name with another without that person’s consent, the bully demoralizes the individual and invites ridicule from others. In a way, the nickname strips the person of the identity captured in their chosen name, and puts a new name on them that they have not chosen.
When cruel words and nicknames are directed at a person forming their sense of identity, such as a child, the messages can be disorienting as the person tries to discern what is true. The impact can be long-lasting and profound. To This Day is a video project based on a spoken word poem written by Shane Koyczan. It illustrates the kind of public ridicule children can grow up facing and the impact bullying can have on them.
Adults are also subjected to public ridicule. We shouldn’t be so ignorant and callous as to think words only effect children. We see more and more ridicule used by politicians and public figures precisely because they find it to be effective. Humor can be a terrible weapon used against anyone when it is held by a cruel and articulate person.
A nickname can carry great weight and deeply impact any person when it is based on something significant to that person’s life, such as personal suffering and the work someone has done to overcome that suffering.
In her book Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman suggests that trauma survivors can, "transform the meaning of their personal tragedy by making it the basis for social action. While there is no way to compensate for an atrocity, there is a way to transcend it, by making it a gift to others."1
Making your suffering a gift to others always comes with risk because you do not know how another person will receive that gift. When it is ridiculed and belittled by a bully, their cruelty inflicts a double-wound: the suffering is minimized and the work to transcend that suffering is mocked.
Stage Three: The Recruitment of an Audience
The bully turns his audience into his most powerful ally and their laughter becomes his most wounding weapon. For just a moment, the bullied person can hang on to the hope that perhaps the audience will suffer with them, will be embarrassed for them, will get angry at the cruelty, will stand up for them, will do something. But their laughter signals a collective turning away from the wounded. Perhaps they are ignorant of the hurt. Perhaps they are indifferent to it. Perhaps they delight in it. It is a betrayal. Who do you turn to for support when everyone around you seems to be taking pleasure in your ridicule?
Stage Four: The Provocation
One of the most difficult challenges of being humiliated is not knowing how to respond. Because these attacks are veiled by humor, something that appears positive, it becomes difficult to see them for what they are, and therefore to defend yourself. It feels as if you are cornered. Do you fight back? Do you try to withdraw? Do you pretend it doesn’t bother you? Do you laugh along?
Sometimes a bully delights in provoking a person into reacting in a way that provides the bully with more material for ridicule. If you cry, you get ridiculed for being “soft” and “overly-sensitive.” If you fight, you get ridiculed for “overreacting.” In other words, your emotion in the moment collapses back on you as the bully and his enablers view your defense as additional entertainment. The bully pushes you into a corner and then turns your reaction into another spectacle to be enjoyed by an audience. When audience laughter turns to audience shock, the bully wins. He can simply feign surprise at your reaction and act as if he did nothing to provoke such a response.
Stage Five: The Defense of the Bully
The humiliation of others becomes the price a bully culture pays to be entertained or to think of themselves as better than the ridiculed person, or to simply maintain the peace and avoid dealing with the bullying behavior. That purchase is then defended along these lines:
First comes the excuse of the bully. That’s just so-and-so being so-and-so. He doesn’t mean any harm. He teases you because he likes you.
Then comes the justification of the humiliation. It’ll teach you to be tough. You have to learn how to take a joke. Learn to laugh at yourself. Don’t take life so seriously. You deserved it.
Then come the comparisons. Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you. It’s not as bad as {fill in the blank}. So-and-so had it worse than you. Those same jokes have been directed at others and it didn’t seem to bother them.
Each of these defenses take the focus off the cruelty of the bullying behavior and the impact on the bullied person. Rather than opposing the humiliation, a bully culture opposes the opposition to the humiliation. In the end, unopposed public humiliation of another is a mark of an abusive culture. Witty insults, sarcasm, belittling remarks, and unfair comparisons debase the targeted person. And the laughter of an audience, whether that audience is in an auditorium, classroom, or living room, is a key indication that humiliation is taking place. The reaction of the provoked person becomes further entertainment. The bully learns what to attack in the future. The injured person is ignored. Efforts are focused on preparing the targets of bullies to accept similar attacks from those in their life who have been conditioned to see them as the brunt of jokes. The bully is protected and the bully culture is reinforced.
To create a safer future, we have to confront the cruelty, even when it is couched in humor.
Herman, J. L. (1997). Trauma and recovery. New York: BasicBooks. P. 207