Is Teasing Good For You?

The NY Times Magazine has worthwhile article defending teasing. Increasingly, children and adults are being prevent from engaging in this kind of play.

The reason teasing is viewed as inherently damaging is that it is too often confused with bullying. But bullying is something different; it’s aggression, pure and simple. Bullies steal, punch, kick, harass and humiliate. Sexual harassers grope, leer and make crude, often threatening passes. They’re pretty ineffectual flirts. By contrast, teasing is a mode of play, no doubt with a sharp edge, in which we provoke to negotiate life’s ambiguities and conflicts. And it is essential to making us fully human. (source)

The article is quite thorough and examines teasing behaviors among animals as well as humans. It seems that teasing serves a very important social purpose. Really it is a "playful provocative mode of commentary" that allows things to be said that would otherwise go unexpressed.

Teasing is just such an act of off-record communication: provocative commentary is shrouded in linguistic acts called “off-record markers” that suggest the commentary should not be taken literally. At the same time, teasing isn’t just goofing around. We tease to test bonds, and also to create them. To make it clear when we’re teasing, we use fleeting linguistic acts like alliteration, repetition, rhyming and, above all, exaggeration to signal that we don’t mean precisely what we’re saying. (source)

This has huge significance for understanding relationships, of course.

Studies find that married couples with a rich vocabulary of teasing nicknames and formulaic insults are happier and more satisfied. Romantic teasing provides a way of negotiating the conflicts that send many couples to the therapist’s couch. To explore how playful teasing shores up marital bonds, I asked couples to tease each other using the same nickname paradigm used in the fraternity study. The nicknames they invented drew on the metaphors of love documented by the Berkeley linguistics professor George Lakoff: they made references to each other as food objects (“apple dumpling”) or small animals (“adorable duckling”). The more satisfied the couple, the more the teasing was filled with off-record markers. And in a separate study, partners who managed to tease each other during a conflict — for example, over money or an infidelity — felt more connected after the conflict than those couples who resorted to the earnest criticism many therapists recommend. Teasing actually serves as an antidote to toxic criticism that might otherwise dissolve an intimate bond. Teasing is a battle plan for what Shakespeare called “the merry war.” (source)

Teasing not only helps communication, it actually helps establish and maintain intimacy bonds. We often tease those we wish to know better.

This causes me to reflect on the teasing that occurs between congregation and pastor. I'm always delighted when parishioners make fun of me--I think it's a very healthy way of negotiating the hierarchy that otherwise exists. I tease right back--especially during the announcements. I find that it only increases the mutual bond of affection.

-t