The obtuse side

I presently see several teen clients (15 to 18) of varying degrees of intelligence, maturity, insight and capacity to engage in therapy. To my prescient lack of surprise, not one of them was able to understand or feel the humorous meaning in the several Gary Larson The Far Side cartoons I showed them. Two of them:

 

I cannot remember what caused me to suspect, strongly suspect, that these teens would be at a loss to grasp the irony of a snake suffering mental distress or an insect named Carl, or the nonsense of a man happily whistling in hell, or the anthropomorphizing of a fly requesting his moribund friend’s stereo system. I know I was struck by a lack of subtlety in their thinking and feeling: Kids today needing therapy live and breathe psycho-diagnostic memes instead of the felt senses in their own bodies. One young man did have a smart insight. He said that he and his fellow teens learn the world through videos, not still images or the printed word. Rather than their mind insinuating itself like a diamond drill into the captive audience of the image or sentence, it sits bovine-like before the rushing freight train. My image was of teenagers milling about the sidewalk as a misshapen wooden cart hauling manure trundles by. As it passes them, a clump of manure falls off the back and that’s what they are left with.

I’m sure there are other factors. The world now wants young people to become money-makers not dream-achievers. Social media has decentered them from themselves: They are Nathaniel Branden’s “social metaphysicians,” whose reality ground is not the link between their senses and Planet Earth but their cohort’s judgmental heads. They have parents who have agendas instead of empathy. Whatever the causes are, I deplore that a 16-year-old can stare at a delicately trenchant cartoon and think “duh,” as we children of the ’50s used to scorn our lesser peers.

Recently, another consideration availed itself. Wanting to share and compare my assessment with my attorney sister, I showed her a slightly more obvious Far Side cartoon. It features a few aliens standing in the entranceway of their just-landed spaceship while a crew member lies flat on his ass on the ground, having tumbled down the steps. There are several humans gazing at the scene. One of the aliens in the entranceway remarks: “Wonderful! Just wonderful! . . . So much for instilling them with a sense of awe.” My sister did not find the cartoon funny. Her thought was that she has possibly lost her sense of humor. I wonder if this has happened to many young people today, those in therapy and those not, owing to the factors named, to the toxic social and political atmosphere, to their home and school environment, to lives of appearance and allure. That would be most unfunny.