HUMOR— A PATHWAY TO META

If you are like most people (and as a Meta-Coach, I hope you are not!), you wouldn’t have even a clue that humor requires multiple meta-levels. You would not be any the wiser to how humor offers a doorway into “the back of the mind.” Nor would you immediately guess that humor can help you diagnose a client’s personality or be a signal for limiting beliefs. Yet humor can do all of that and more.

Philosophically and psychologically humor actually exists as a significant conceptual problem. That’s because when you start to “explain” it, it is not easily explained. When you start to explain it, you then have to define it and that introduces even more problems. That’s because there are many different kinds of humor— some healthy and some quite toxic. That was the problem I quickly encountered when I began to model the structure of humor. There are different structures for different kinds of humor.