Marie C.

Grasmeier We are always joking to stay happy

‘We are always joking to stay happy‘: Humour and Joking as a way of coping
with hierarchy-related stress by seafarers

Presentation held at the ASA2021: Responsibility Conference, 29 March – 2 April 2021 Online,
Panel Irre05a “Laughing at the system: highlighting absurdity and failure through humour”

Marie C. Grasmeier (Bremen University, Department of Anthropology and Cultural Research)

Contact: marie.c.grasmeier@gmail.com

In my presentation, I will focus on the role of humour and joking among seafarers
on global merchant ships as a way of coping with the stress caused by the strict
hierarchical order on board. The findings are an outcome of my doctoral research
in which I explored processes of occupational boundary-work among seafarers in
the global fleet. My data are based on ethnographic fieldwork on a container ship
with a multinational crew.

The workplace organisation on these ships resembles a quasi-military disciplinary

regime which widely parallels the racial segmentation of the crew (Grasmeier
2020). (White) Europeans hold most of the senior positions while the junior
officers and ratings mostly originate from labour supply countries of the global
South (Campling and Colás 2021). Thus, the ship constitutes a postcolonial space
where global North-South relations project into the micro-level of interpersonal
relations among crewmembers (Grasmeier 2021; Markkula 2011).

This hierarchical order on board significantly contributes to the occupational

stress experienced by seafarers (Chung, Lee, and Lee 2017). In the following, I
will examine situations in which seafarers turned this hierarchical order into an
object of comical performances. Let me present some examples of that.

During a safety drill, the rescue boat (you can see it here in the picture), under the
command of the third officer, had moved too far away from the ship, obviously
upsetting the captain. He stood at the railing and yelled at the crew of the boat to
stay close to the ship. The Polish electrician then went to a group of seafarers and
commented on the captain’s arousal:

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Marie C. Grasmeier We are always joking to stay happy

Case 1: The electrician, who stood next to the captain, walked a few
steps aft and then turned to some Filipinos and me with questioning
facial expressions and laughing: “Why he cry to him? Third now is
captain. When he want to go, he go!” We also laughed. The captain
did not notice. He was too busy with the renegade rescue boat (field
notes).

The third officer, so the electrician, was now the ‘captain’ of the rescue boat, and
did not need to obey any orders. In this situation, it is interesting that the
boundaries ran across different nationality groups. In most other instances, I could
observe a particularly strong group cohesion among the Polish seafarers, to whom
also the ship’s command belonged. Most of the time, they made jokes together at
the expense of members of other nationalities.

The one who made the most frequent jesting allusions to the hierarchy on board
was the Filipino bosun. A bosun is something like the foreperson or master
craftsperson of the deck workers.

I once wrote the following down in my research diary:

Case 2: In the locker room, the bosun asked me if I knew it was a

holiday. I said yes. He said: “But for us, there is only work. And I
promise you: tomorrow will also be work. But maybe only till 1500.”
He turned to another deck worker: “Is okay for you we finish 1500
tomorrow?” The latter replied: “Better 12 o’clock!” (field notes).

At first, the bosun made a not at all cheerful remark about the dreary routine on
board the ship, which, holiday or not, consisted only of work. Then, however, he
jokingly asked his subordinate for permission to leave at 3 p.m. due to the holiday.
The latter picked up the line and confidently recommended to end the working
day at lunchtime.

In the afternoon of the same day, at the end of the coffee time, the bosun took up
this theme again in a variation. We all sat together in the recreation room, as
usual: the bosun, all four deck ratings and me.

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Marie C. Grasmeier We are always joking to stay happy

Case 3: Silence for now. After a few moments, the bosun looked at his
watch. He ejected a disgusted, short “Arrh” and quickly turned his
head away. But he stayed seated for now. Then, he addressed another
deckhand in a strict, formal tone: “You remember: only fifteen
minutes”. We all stood up together. Lito, the one addressed by the
bosun, quietly said: “fuck!” (field notes)

First of all, the bosun expressed his displeasure about everyday life on board with
slightly exaggerated horror, by noticing that we had exceeded the break time. As if
he remembered his role as the ship’s clown, he rebuked the closest sitting
subordinate in a formal tone of voice, as if he was the one responsible for the
extension of the break. Because everyone took it for granted that the bosun had to
announce both the beginning and the end of the breaks, this scene is another ironic
break in the hierarchical relationship between the bosun and the addressed
seafarer. The reaction, however, was not laughing at the joke. Instead, the
addressed seaman reacted with a curse that was not directed at the bosun but at the
fact that we had to get back to work.

Two weeks later, another scene took place in which the bosun, the third engineer
and Benjamin, the steward, played the leading roles.

Case 4: I shortly stopped by at the crew mess before I went on deck. I

do not remember who was there and what they talked about. Only that
the bosun came in on socks at some point and the third engineer had
probably commented on it. The bosun replied: “Oh, I will ask.” Then,
he turned to Benjamin: “Mister Steward, is this prohibited?” General
laughter (field notes).

Here, the third engineer played the ball to the bosun by pointing him out to the
dress code in the crew mess that did not exist either formally nor informally. The
latter joined the game by addressing himself in an emphatically formal tone to the
steward, who occupied the lowest rank in the on-board hierarchy, as the
competent authority in matters of mess-room etiquette. He emphasised the irony

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by addressing him with the title “Mister Steward”. This was contrary to all
customary practice. Usually, the ratings addressed each other by their first names.
The bosun was usually called “bos” for short, or, when talking about him, also
“maestro”. That is Tagalog for “master” or “teacher.”

All four scenes deal with what Erving Goffman calls “identity joking” (Goffman
1961:112). The seafarers turned the hierarchy, omnipresent in everyday life, into
an object of small scenic performances. By these “ceremonial profanations”, as
Goffman (1967: 86) called them, they ritually ridiculed the hierarchical order for a
moment. The one who opened the play interpellated to a colleague either by
assigning him, as in the first two examples, a function which they did not have at
all, or by grotesquely exaggerating their formal function, as in the last example. In
the first and last example, a naive reference to the position of the colleague in the
formal structure served as a means of distancing. The pretended misunderstanding
of the formal structure exposed it as something ridiculous. In the first case, the
electrician elevated the third officer, who was actually in charge of the rescue
boat, to the status of a “captain” which suggests the independence of his decision-
making authority. In the last case, the bosun derived an authority over the
behaviour of the guests from the steward’s responsibility for the cleanliness of the
mess room. In both cases, the seafarers turned the hierarchy upside down by
naively taking-literally the specific function. The cases 2 and 3 differ from the
pattern of the other two in that the joke did not draw on any formally existing
competence of the addressed. Instead, the bosun simply and counter-factually
insinuated that the addressed colleagues were responsible for managing the
working hours. The process of ironically refracting the formal structure, however,
was the same. In all four cases, a crew member with the lowest rank in the
respective status group served as the target for the ironic attribution of specific
competencies.

Ridiculing the structure and laughing together substituted for the desire to break
out from its constraints, which was not possible. In light of their own

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powerlessness within the hierarchical structure, it served as a coping strategy. The

seafarers, themselves, also suggested this interpretation:

Case 5: Some of the sailors sat together after work in the crew mess
and spent their time collectively spinning a joke, i.e. talking complete
nonsense. At some point, the cook turned to me and commented: “We
are always joking. To stay happy” (field notes).

Seafarers are exposed to increased stress in their daily lives not least because of
the hierarchical structure and the associated feeling of limited agency and
autonomy. At the same time, everyday life offers only a few possibilities of coping
with this situation (Chung, Lee, and Lee 2017: 929). In this respect, it is only
logical that it was precisely the hierarchical order as the source of this stress that
became the target of humorous coping. Only by permanently ridiculing the
untenable condition did it become bearable, was it possible for them “to stay
happy”. By using their coping strategy of irony to refer to the discomfort with
their subaltern position, the seafarers constructed a positive identity as members
of the lower ranks and, thereby, distinguished themselves from the group of their
superiors (Goffman 1961: 112).

References
Campling, Liam, Colás, Alejandro (2021). Captalism and the Sea. New York:
Verso

Chung, Yi-Shih, Paul Tae-Woo Lee and Jeong-Kwan Lee (2017). Burnout in
Seafarers: Its Antecedents and Effects on Incidents at Sea. Maritime Policy
& Management 44(7): 916–931

Goffman, Erving (1961). Asylums. Essays on the Social Situation of Mental

Patients and Other Inmates. Garden City: Doubleday & Company

Goffman, Erving (1967); Interaction Rituals. New York: Pantheon Books

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Grasmeier, Marie C. (2020). The Fear of Authority. Presentation held at the 16th
EASA Biennial Conference EASA2020: “New anthropological horizons in
and beyond Europe.” doi:10.13140/RG.2.2.16293.52963

Grasmeier, Marie C. (forthcoming, 2021). The ship as a postcolonial space. In:

Agnieszka Kołodziej-Durnaś, Frank Sowa, and Marie C. Grasmeier (eds).
Maritime Spaces and Society. International Studies in Maritime Sociology.
Brill (under review)

Markkula, Johanna. (2011). ‘Any port in a storm’: responding to crisis in the

world of shipping. Social Anthropology 19(3): 297-304. doi:10.1111/j.1469-
8676.2011.00161.x