Kermit Cole: Dialogical Therapy and Quantum Theory Walk Into a Bar…

Hello, my name is Bob Whitaker, and today I have the pleasure of speaking with Kermit Cole. We’ll be speaking about a philosophical enterprise that Kermit is now deeply engaged in. That is, broadly speaking, how humor can help in creating a shared experience that is helpful to the healing process. Kermit, in his experiences of being with people in psychotic states, has seen humor as a moment when a connection can be made. In many ways, this project is bringing Kermit back full circle to his work as a film director, early in his professional career.

After dropping out of Oberlin College, he joined a mime troupe that toured the U.S. as well as Italy and Greece, inspired by his interest in humor as well as how connection arises in the spaces between words. One of his first films was a short titled Before Comedy, which is a film performed entirely without words. Another, which he directed in 1994, was titled Living Proof: HIV and the Pursuit of Happiness.

I met Kermit shortly after I published my book Mad in America in 2002. He was working at that time as a Residence Director of what might be called a halfway house in Cambridge called Wellmet. This was for people who had been discharged from or who were avoiding stays in psychiatric hospitals. The house was modeled to a degree after the Soteria Project.

Then in 2012 after I published Anatomy of an Epidemic, Kermit, Louisa Putnam and I transformed my blog site into a web magazine, also called Mad in America. Kermit was the founding editor of the site, and for the first few years, he was something of a one-man band, posting science reviews, blogs and personal stories at a feverish pace. After retiring from that position, he trained in open dialog therapy, and Louisa and Kermit practiced dialogically inspired therapy with clients in New Mexico. Both Louisa and Kermit are Mad in America Board Members.

The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to the audio of the interview here.

Robert Whitaker: Kermit, welcome to MIA Radio.

Kermit Cole: Hi. Good to be here.

Whitaker: It’s nice to have you here. I think the way to start is really to go back to your time as a mime to understand the path you’ve been on. Tell us why you were interested in mime and a little bit about your experiences touring in the U.S., Italy and Greece.

Cole: One starting point is when I was in a conversation with people about faith and religion and what we believe in. I remember saying the words, “I believe in comedy,” but I didn’t know what I meant at the time. It was a very deeply felt statement, and in some ways, this has been a thread through my life, trying to understand what I meant by that and what the implications of it were.

I didn’t just mean I wanted to laugh. I felt like there was something I was seeing in comedy, and the fact that I had seen laughter arise in my family at some of the hardest times that we went through. It just seemed like it was always there among people who were dealing with something at a very fundamental level.

Mime drew me because I knew that I wanted to make films, and I knew the thing about films that interested me was not just the words, but the silent moment in between the words. I felt like I could learn how to tell stories through mime that were very much like the kind of stories I knew I wanted to tell in film. In some ways, mime is an extremely efficient way to tell film-like stories. I signed up and just started doing it, and that led to being a member of the troupe and traveling to Italy and Greece and learning.

Whitaker: When you were doing street theater, would it be a planned performance, or would it be just extemporaneous and you would respond to the moment?

Cole: We started out doing stage, that’s what we were interested in. We booked a tour of Italy doing stage work and then one day we were walking through a piazza, and I said, “I think if we froze, we’d get a crowd,” and we did. Within a few seconds, some tourists were taking our pictures, and then there was a crowd. But the crowd didn’t know how to interact with us. They didn’t know what we were doing, so they were right up in our faces. There was no line between us. I saw a little girl looking at me, and her mouth was agape. I just locked onto her eyes and imitated her face and she instantly was transported into this look of wonder, and we just went from there.

Whitaker: There’s the moment of connection you’re talking about.

Cole: Exactly that. So from there we eventually built a whole street routine with these kinds of unexpected connections. In one of our pieces, I was a janitor who was moving around mannequins, and that was everybody else and knocking them over and using one mannequin’s feet to catch the other one and stuff like that. What I noticed as we were doing the performances was that these pieces that would work well on stage didn’t quite work on the street until I made sure that I had an audience. I’m defining an audience as a bunch of strangers who are aware of each other and are reacting together and reacting to each other.

Whitaker: The audience has a shared response in a way.

Cole: As soon as I got that level of connection, then I knew the things that would work on stage would work on the street also. It was about creating this sort of, I’m going to call this sacred space in which people are aware of each other and interacting.

From there we went to Greece, and in Greece, citizens were required to go to the theatre. Watching actors transform and take the perspective of another person, which is the fundamental act of being a citizen if not of being human, is like being able to suddenly see that the world looks different through someone else’s eyes.

Whitaker: What you’re talking about through mime and then your films is about creating a shared experience and environment whether it was mime or through film. You come back and you make the film Before Comedy. Just describe the set-up.

Cole: At the beginning of the film the title says ‘Millions of years ago’. Then you see these figures in what amounts to furry clown outfits stitched together out of ancient world furs with big furry shoes. They are lost and don’t know where they’re going or what their purpose is. Then they run into a bunch of cavemen who are evidently bored. But the first reaction they have when they see these new people show up is to be afraid of them. These are the only two options they live with. Then neither group knows what to do with each other so the clowns just end up walking away, and then they stumble on what we call pie fruits, which were filled with whipped cream, and they suddenly realize what their purpose is.

I think the reason it stands up to repeat viewing is because the first time through, you’re on the journey, you’re seeing things for the first time. The key moment is when you see the light dawn in the clown’s face. You see that something’s going to happen. He doesn’t know what it is yet. You’re just a step ahead, and so you’re watching that happen.

You’re watching him realize who he is and that he’s born to put a pie in someone’s face. I think the reason it stands up to another viewing is because it’s the fact that you realize that you are seeing through another set of eyes, that it’s not just the surprise of it. It’s kind of delicious to realize I’m seeing somebody for the first time that they’re seeing something.

Whitaker: Before this, they’re sort of afraid of each other, they’re scared and threatening each other. But this becomes the moment, that moment of humor, where they see a kinship, so to speak. Now they can be with each other.

Cole: Eventually, I thought that people who have been traumatized really can’t differentiate between being surprised or something new and unexpected happening and being afraid. Anything new, unexpected or out of the ordinary is just encountered as something potentially dangerous. What the clowns are introducing is that there’s an alternative. That surprise can lead to wonder.

Whitaker: I think that’s a great description as we try to connect the dots of this journey. Let’s take a quick stop now with your AIDS movie, Living Proof. What was the voyage of discovery when you made that film?

Cole: After the clown film, I was looking for the next thing to do, and a good friend of mine told me about this photography project that had been started by someone with AIDS. They were setting out to create positive images of people living with AIDS, which was a startlingly unexpected thing to do. At that time, the only image anybody had of somebody with AIDS was a person basically about to die, and the whole conversation on the topic was so filled with judgment and terror. It was so surprising to me that I thought I had to make a documentary of this, and it drew me on a lot of levels.

A lot of the stories that I ended up telling were about people who were maybe on the surface disenfranchised or unappreciated, who then find that the thing that makes them different is the thing they have to offer. In the course of making the film, one of the central stories that came out of it was the people involved in that project, some of whom were straight, and said, “When I got my diagnosis, there was nowhere for me to turn to other than the gay community. I didn’t start out there, but I came to appreciate and respect these people who had given me what I needed when I needed it.” That, to me, was the story I wanted to be part of bringing to the world.

Whitaker: It is the importance of community because people who have been traumatized and psychiatrized can feel very isolated. One of the things that Mad In America often talks of is community and not feeling isolated all the time. It sounds like that was one of the motifs in your movie.

Cole: I’ll just throw in here that when I started doing research, I was trying to figure out how it was that humor was so powerfully involved in so many important points along the way. It turns out there is research on laughter that shows that the arising of laughter isn’t as strongly correlated with something funny happening as it is with strong moments of social connection.

There’s also research showing that laughter is a signal to someone to come play and that the play is safe. That we can interact and we can practice the many things we need to do together to make a full life. The laughter says we are safe together and we can play.

Whitaker: You leave filmmaking and you want to dive deeper. Tell us what you did. You went to school and also became a Director at Wellmet. What did you learn at Wellmet?

Cole: While I was still doing film, I got involved with grassroots peer-counseling. But I found that in doing it, when I got deep with someone, basically I was getting from that moment everything that I had been hoping to get from working with actors or doing anything with a camera. But it felt better because I didn’t feel like I was recording it and selling it to Rupert Murdoch.

When the AIDS film was almost done, I realized that the man who had started the project I was documenting wouldn’t survive to see the opening of the film. I just couldn’t deal with it, it just broke my heart. When I realized that the film was done and it was good, but that he wouldn’t see it in the theater, I just burst into tears. That feeling that I had taken his inspiration this way haunted me.

I just realized that I had to go and be a therapist. I wanted to go deeper with people in these kinds of crises. I didn’t want there to be a camera there. I got lucky in the end and I ended up getting an undergraduate and a master’s from Harvard, which was just sheer luck.

While I was there, I got involved in research on mood disorders and schizophrenia. I was excited about that. But what I was noticing was that people would get divvied up into research on either mood disorders, schizophrenia, or trauma sometimes on really arbitrary criteria that made no sense. So when I would suggest that there were connections between these things, maybe that’s what we should be looking at the best response I could hope for was being laughed at. Usually, the response was more like, “Good luck to you if you think you’re going to have a career with that kind of idea”.

It was just a non-starter but it bugged me. But what I also learned working on the research was that I liked the people and I felt a real connection and affinity with the people who came in with schizophrenia diagnoses, which I wasn’t expecting. But I just realized there’s something here I need to spend time with. That led to getting a job running a group home because I was beginning to get sour on what I was learning.

The building I was working in at Harvard was the William James Building. It’s the tallest building in Cambridge, a literal ivory tower. I was there saying, “Oh my god, William James would be horrified by the things that are being done in his name”. I got this job at the time running this group home with the question in my mind of what happens if you devote yourself to making sure people feel safe.

Whitaker: You lived there so in a way it was a lot like Soteria. You lived there, and you all ate and cooked together.

Cole: Yes. It was started in 1960, long before Soteria, by a disgruntled Harvard professor who hadn’t gotten tenure. He just said to his students that this is no longer a class in sociology, I think it was. He said we’re going to cure schizophrenia. They went and stayed on a hospital floor in a psych hospital for spring break and came out with the idea for Wellmet, which was just the students living in the house with people in crisis.

This was well before RD Laing’s house or Kingsley Hall and it was me and four part-time staff living there. I had people come in and do improv workshops and theater games as I found that was helpful. The bottom line is that I found that people would often want to come volunteer in the house. I would try to make that work and I realized it doesn’t work if you’re not living here. You’re just a visitor and suspect. You have to sort of share it, sleeping under the same roof, breathing the same air and preparing the same food. The thing that I was most happy about for the years I was there was that I don’t think there was a night that we didn’t laugh at dinner.

Whitaker: That’s what I was going to ask you. You would laugh together.

Cole: Yes. I also did hire a comedian at one point. A guy showed up wanting to work and live in the house and he was an aspiring comedian. I thought, fantastic, he can handle all the heckling. But he was even better than that and the last I knew was running a similar house.

Whitaker: I would just say that when I visited Soteria houses in Israel or the medication-free ward in Norway, they were vibrant places. A lot was going on and there was a lot of humor. I think for me, one of the discoveries is we have this image of people with a severe diagnosis as being sort of dour and non-communicative. I’m sure that does happen. But there are also times when there’s a flourishing of communication that can be quite fun. I don’t know if you would agree with that.

Cole: I think people end up with a diagnosis when they’re not behaving or interacting in ways that we understand or expect or that are comfortable. Then that gets magically declared a disease. That can also happen when any one of us has the flu, we act, speak and interact in ways that we wouldn’t ideally otherwise. But people understand, oh, that’s because you have the flu right now. But if you can’t see the reasons that somebody is behaving that way, then eventually, after you’ve run through the possibilities you know of, what you’re left with is, oh it must be a psychiatric illness.

I think the same can be true if somebody is on a drug. They’re not able or willing to, in those circumstances, interact in the way that you and I like. But I think the essential thing in all of this work is to maintain the faith, the awareness that the person you’re hoping for is in there. If you haven’t contacted them yet, that’s on you. You got to wait, you got to hang in there. That’s been my experience. I’ve been with people who have been cast aside and given diagnoses from which they were not expected to recover. And I did hang in with them. Eventually, what they were saying was making sense. They’d given up on saying it in a way that was easy to discern because it hadn’t worked before. Nobody had heard it before.

Whitaker: That’s well put. Let’s jump ahead. You stop being a residence director, you get Mad in America off the ground, and you serve as the editor for a number of years. Then when you stop doing that, you become trained in open dialogue and start practicing dialogical therapy. Can you tell us about discovery, since this is a bit about humor too? Where did you see humor involved in that dialogical space?

Cole: Well, the most significant one was when I finally did get to Finland and go to the hospital where open dialogue originated and for the first time. I watched a session in the hospital. The fact that we were in hospital meant something pretty serious must have happened.

We were there with a young woman and her family. I don’t know what they were talking about because it was in Finnish. The only thing I could do was sort of track the interactions, going back to the little interactions between the words. At first, I saw her eyes dart up, a little smile, and she would say something and just this wave of laughter would circle the room. I mean, everybody in the room was pretty downtrodden. They were staring at the floor; there were long gaps in the conversation. They seemed shell-shocked. But she would say something, and everybody’s eyes would lift, and this wave of laughter would circle the room. It felt to me like a flock of birds taking off.

I left the room thinking this was not incidental. This is not just a quick relief of tension. This is something elemental happening. I remember thinking of it as tectonic plates shifting or groundwater being tapped. I thought of it as a new meaning arising. By new meaning, I mean some shared understanding that was beginning to make a new path forward possible. I walked out thinking, I’ve got to figure out what this is.

That started me reading the research and thinking about it, and along the way I realized it started when I was working with people individually when the person would laugh, we’d share the laugh. We’d enjoy it. We’d enjoy the feeling of freedom that the laughter gives. Freedom from the pain, freedom from whatever it was we were making a joke about. I think there’s an inhibition against going back to that moment because it’s like we just felt free of it. We don’t want to go back right away.

But what I learned to do is to say, “Okay, before we go on, what was under that laugh? What do you think that was? What came before that laugh? What do you think?” A lot of times, I would describe what the person would eventually find as a double bind. A double bind is having two contradictory directives or two contradictory needs. On the one hand, I feel like I have to do this, and on the other hand, I feel like I have to do that. My mother wanted this, my father wanted that. I don’t know how to resolve those two things into one clear action. There are theories that that’s where schizophrenia comes from.

Whitaker: There’s a sense that this moment of humor becomes an opportunity for eventual self-understanding, as you dig into the source of the humor. And to become aware of oneself and these conflicts that maybe we didn’t have before that moment.

Cole: Yes. I think it starts with an awareness and then that led to me thinking about humor itself. Back to when I said, ‘I believe in comedy’, I had at times in my childhood thought I wanted to be a comedian, but I didn’t know what that meant. But there was something in that statement that I wanted.

I did spend a lot of my early adult life trying to be funny in a certain kind of way that was based on looking for witty, smart-alec things to say. But when we would pay attention to it and make the space and the person would become aware of the feeling that that laugh had arisen from, we would find the explicable contradictions in their life that they had been unable to even see, much less express. There I started thinking, what if instead of trying to find something funny to say or be clever, be witty, I just try to sink into the feeling that’s arising, there’s something funny here, and just let myself kind of tune out.

If you’re trying to remember something, and you realize, oh, I can’t do it, I have to stop trying to remember it and then it’ll come. It’s like that with the jokes. If I stop trying to find the joke and just trust that it’s down in there, and just focus on the feeling then it would happen in a few seconds, and my brain would say, oh here it is. Here’s the contradiction, here’s the shift of perspective, and here’s the seemingly irreconcilable perspectives that are both necessary and valid. But it wasn’t because I was being clever with words. It was because I was trying to figure out how to describe something worth seeing.

Whitaker: Tell us about your current work and engagement with the philosophy of humor, and your thoughts about how it could be incorporated into training. Where are you going with this whole project?

Cole: At the end of his life, Einstein was referring to humor as part of the human equation, and he was actively inviting comedians to talk to him about it. He said I’ve solved the physical equation, now I’m trying to solve the human equation. He felt that humor was the key to it. Unfortunately, he died before we got any output on that search. That was why he was engaged in a decade-long debate on the nature of time with the only major philosopher who wrote a book entirely dedicated to humor, Henri Bergson, who was also an accomplished mathematician and understood physics. All these things interested me and I thought if I could have gotten Bergson and Einstein to talk about this, what might they say?

That led me down this path of really studying things related to quantum theory. Einstein referred to one of the key components of it, entanglement, where there can be a connection in real-time or simultaneously, instantly, from one part of the universe to another, irrespective of the speed of light. Einstein referred to that as spooky action at a distance. I’ve sort of reframed it as what I call kooky action at a distance. What a joke does is put a little marker and say, okay, you’re here. This is your perspective. This is what you see. Then a well-executed joke just instantly lifts you out of that moment, out of that place in space and time, and drops you into another one. It could be anywhere, could be a thousand years ago. Suddenly you’re seeing the world through another perspective.

What a joke does is give you two examples and then your brain starts chewing on those and saying, oh, I know what this story is. I can predict the third thing based on these two examples. What the joke does is it suddenly says, nope, you’re wrong. You don’t know the whole story. You don’t have the only perspective on this. Then, excellent, really elegant humor walks you through these feelings of disorientation, surprise, fear, indignation, and anger that can come when you realize you don’t own the whole truth, that there are other perspectives that the truth is comprised of. Then it walks you to that other perspective that you didn’t know about, and it leaves you there saying, oh, this is good. This is better than if I was alone because this means I am connected. I’m in a relationship with others who can watch my back.

Whitaker: You’re digging into this philosophy and understanding of humor. Tell us how you see it being applicable to the world that we are focused on at Mad in America. This world of people suffering from psychiatric difficulties, emotional difficulties, trauma and that sort of thing. How do we take your journey and incorporate it into our thinking about how we help each other?

Cole: For starters, because this trail of thought started with open dialog, one of the things that I was thinking about was to bring more open dialog to the world and get people interested in it. I’ve experienced it as being a very transformative and beautiful way to relate to the world, and also very useful in helping people in crisis. I thought if the only thing people know about open dialog is that it deals with these problems that any given person might not want to ever deal with if they could avoid it, it’s kind of hard to get them interested.

But what I’m saying is there’s something beautiful here. We laugh, we take situations that are hard and frightening and sometimes genuinely tragic, and we laugh together. That arises naturally out of this philosophy. That was the joy of it that we’d have these crisis situations and we’d end up laughing together. I thought if people only knew. Same as with the house I ran, we would often say that if people only knew how much fun we were having, they wouldn’t be afraid of us. So that’s one.

Another is also just about having a particular relationship with the world. I think of it as an openness to connection and to the fact that there might be perspectives that you haven’t considered yet, which is a really useful thing to do when you’re feeling doomed or tragic. To realize that if I can find that place in myself that becomes alive when I laugh at a joke, then when I touch it, I will remember there’s a way to see this that I haven’t seen yet. It would help if I could find somebody else with whom I could laugh about it because then I’ll remember that the story is not over and that those stories I don’t even know about are yet to come, and they’re worth waiting for.

Whitaker: As I’ve been listening I’ve been thinking about how much I enjoy laughing, and how much I enjoy when I’m in a situation where I’m laughing with others. It’s a conversation that makes you feel good about being with others who are different from you or struggling. Because those who you might see as different from you, what you discover through humor is your commonality. The shared experience and shared sense of being able to laugh.

Cole: It’s not just incidental. My theory here is that this is an essential and integral part of the human experience. I think we can be afraid of it, because yes, like any tool that’s powerful or sharp, it can hurt, it can cause damage. We can hurt ourselves and others. But I think if we spend time with it, thinking about it in this way, we can realize like any tool we can learn how to use it and make beautiful things. We can help each other get the most out of the opportunities that come with being human.

Whitaker: That’s a great way to end. Now, Kermit, what is next for you?

Cole: I am putting together an event at the National Comedy Center in Jamestown that we’re planning for October 9th through 12th of 2025. This will be all about spending a few days there together talking about some of these theories. We’ll make CEUs available for therapists. We’re going to be offering webinars before that as soon as we get it together, hopefully in the next couple of months, to talk about these things.

This weekend at the National Comedy Center we will explore the accomplishments of the best comedians. Not to become comedians, and not only to appreciate their art, which we do but to learn from that, to draw from that any insights that we can gain into how to use their ways of being, their ways of creating comedy that the best comedians have worked out over decades and incorporate them into our lives and perhaps into our work as therapists.

Whitaker: Sounds like a great and unique event. Kermit thanks so much for spending this time with us. It was a nice conversation.

Cole: Great. Thanks.

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