Mad Men

To fully understand the human psyche, it is necessary for one to observe a game of inner-tube water polo. Forget surveys or research groups. All of humanity’s complexities and contradictions are portrayed most clearly during family-friendly water recreation. Here, what was meant to be completely ridiculous becomes viscously competitive. What was designed to be fun and harmless can result in torn hip flexors and fractured fingers.

I recently played an inner-tube water polo match where a team of middle-aged men dominated the opposing team that was mostly composed of their own families. Against the wrath of the dads, the women and children never stood a chance. What exactly was the secret to the men’s success? It wasn’t skill or athleticism. It wasn’t “a will to win.” It was decades of suppressed rage. You could see it in their eyes.

Like bacteria or termites, anger is something that is ubiquitous but mostly hidden. It functions like a fire, igniting instantly. It spreads quickly and is hard to stamp out. While our nation has unleashed its rage on the political stage, interpersonal anger is still forbidden. Lose your temper at the office, and HR will likely get involved. Fly off the handle at your kids, and CPS will come knocking on your door. Because it is still socially unacceptable, anger is largely kept hidden or suppressed. Just because you can’t see it, however, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

In a 2019 Atlantic article, Charles Duhigg told the remarkable story of a researcher who surveyed the bucolic small town of Greenfield, Massachusetts, in 1977 in which the townspeople were asked to “recall the number of times they became angry during the past week and to describe the most angry of those experiences.” The stories flooded in, ranging from dramatic marital affairs to arguing over who ought to take out the trash. Not only did people respond with vivid detail, some even wrote thank-you notes because they were so pleased to talk about being angry. The survey’s architect, UMass Amherst psychology professor James Averill, said, “Everyone basically thought anger was something that mature people and societies ought to suppress. There was this attitude that if you were an angry person, you ought to be a bit embarrassed.” And yet, Averill’s study on rage was the most successful survey of his career. Across the board, everyone was angry about something.

The struggle to suppress rage is artfully rendered in season 2 of The Four Seasons, Netflix’s dramedy written by Tina Fey. Jack (played by Will Forte) is a likable good guy. After the death of his friend, he is gripped by a sense of meaninglessness and sinks into a depression. Jack becomes insufferable to be around. His introspection gives way to self-obsession, which culminates in a rageful tantrum during a Thanksgiving dinner. Like most angry outbursts, the consequences are far more grievous than the causes. To regain his good-guy status, Jack tries to buy back favor with his friends. When he gives his friend Claude a gift as reparation, Claude refuses. “You got mad. So what? Everybody gets mad,” he says. To which Jack responds, “But I’m not an angry guy.” And this is Claude’s reply:

Okay, Jack. I hate to tell you this, but you are an angry guy. The reason I know this is because I’m an angry guy too. I was always trying to be this happy husband who never disagreed. And I’d be nice and nice and nice until I’d snap. Because I never wanted to be mad. But you can’t deal with it if you can’t say, “I am mad.”

Claude’s confession somehow unlocks Jack from his prison of denial. The admissions start flowing out of him. He’s mad about his friend dying. He’s mad at his wife for trying to fix him. He’s mad at himself for pushing her away. His confession was contagious.

Jack’s words immediately led to my own self-examination. Leave it to a television show to hold the mirror up to my own nature. I spent the first 32 years of my life thinking I was a nice guy. Friendly, enthusiastic, yet easygoing. Not the kind of guy who would yell at his kids for having trouble putting on their shoes or for making armpit fart sounds at the table or for spilling a bowl of oatmeal. But that all changed once the actual kids came along.

It’s been said, “You never know how selfish you are until you get married. You never know how angry you are until you have children.” The rage that once was hidden became clear as day. I was angry. To my horror, anger was not something I could work through or get out of my system. For me, anger only begot more anger (with an additional side of shame). Time and again, it would rear its ugly head while driving or when feeling stressed at work or, yes, even inner-tube water polo. Outrage was not an outlet but a sickness. And I was desperate for a remedy.

While I’m still searching for a total cure, the working remedy has largely been the diagnosis itself. The solution does not begin with suppression but confession. If there’s any remission at all, it often comes on the heels of acknowledging that I am, in fact, angry. Somehow, the monster becomes far less terrifying after it is given a name. But I’ve also been let in on a little secret about anger. Do you want to know how to harness the monster? Make fun of it. 

Rage and comedy are the oddest of couples. What seem like opposites are often mined from the same source. As Harrison Scott Key once wrote in the Humor issue of The Mockingbird, “Rage can be cured and aged into something holy and good, if one can express it with art and irony. … People work out the rage in many ways: medication, sex, watersports.” When people ask him how to write comedy, his answer routinely leaves them uncomfortable. “Harness the rage,” he says every time. In that sense, humor is a fitting antidote to an otherwise incurable illness. Comedy does not seek to exterminate anger altogether but to mine its depths for good material.

Like Jack, we often think the only way to solve the problem of sin is to suppress it. Pretend it’s not there. Fake it till you make it. And to be honest, the fake-it-till-you-make-it approach mostly works. We can get by for a while without the world detecting that we are ticking time bombs. Alas, there inevitably comes a time when the clock runs out.

I find comfort knowing that Jesus did not come to remove the world of sin but to redeem it. Our anger is not something to be hidden but fully exposed. Jesus literally makes light of our rage by shining the light of truth in all the dark corners where it hides. Instead of shaming us, he invites us to take our anger out on him. Not only is he slow to anger, but he is also ready and willing to absorb ours. He even once became the ultimate punching bag, taking hit after hit until we had raged ourselves into total exhaustion. Even then, he loves us still. You can see it in his eyes.