If you turn everything into a joke, no one can catch you in the feeling

I’ve always trusted humour more than I probably should. Not the loud kind. The efficient kind. The kind that arrives early, smooths the moment, and keeps things from tipping into something heavier than planned. I use it myself. Not to avoid feelings exactly, but to keep them at a manageable distance. Present but contained. A feeling, but not a scene.

Watching Fleabag, I realised how rigorously that instinct can be trained.

The fourth-wall look is often described as a joke or a wink, but it’s more precise than that. It’s a pause. A withdrawal. A moment where Fleabag steps out of the scene to regulate what’s happening before it gets away from her. She doesn’t disappear. She edits. She takes the raw material of the moment, trims it, and returns with a version of herself she knows how to carry. It’s emotional self-management performed in public, and it works.

What’s striking is how consistently the show rewards this skill. The jokes land. The room relaxes. Conversations keep moving. When Fleabag narrates her own pain with humour, no one has to sit in it for very long. Especially not her. Comedy doesn’t read as avoidance here. It reads as competence. She’s quick. Self-aware. Good at handling herself. Which raises an uncomfortable question. When did being good at managing feelings start to look like having fewer of them?

Nowhere is this clearer than in her family.

With her father, humour becomes a way of coexisting without touching the grief that fills the space between them. Their exchanges are polite, clipped, almost careful. Jokes arrive to pad the silence, to keep everything from collapsing into what neither of them knows how to say. He offers awkward gestures of care. She responds with lightness. It isn’t coldness. It’s mutual protection. The distance feels inherited, passed down as a way of surviving loss.

With the Godmother, humour works as armour. Each polished insult is met with a smile sharp enough to survive it. Fleabag jokes not because she’s unaffected, but because reacting honestly would cost her too much. The performance keeps her upright in a relationship built on power, cruelty, and aestheticised dominance. Laughter becomes a way of refusing collapse.

And then there’s Claire, where humour is intimacy itself. Their jokes are a shared language, a shorthand built over years. They circle each other with affection and irritation in equal measure. The humour lets them stay close without pressing on the tender parts of their bond. They love each other deeply, but carefully, as if too much honesty at once might destabilise them both. You start to wonder whether humour is what keeps siblings bonded when direct feeling feels too risky.

The same instinct shapes her romantic life. With Harry, humour softens the exit, making something painful feel civilised. With the Arsehole Guy, it keeps the connection shallow enough to feel safe. With the Bank Manager, jokes turn vulnerability into something socially legible, something that can exist without overwhelming either of them. Each relationship is calibrated. The feeling never exceeds the container.

And then the Priest appears, and the calibration fails. He notices when she steps out of the moment. He sees the edit happening. He doesn’t punish it or mock it. He simply acknowledges it. And once the habit is seen, it loses its protective power. The joke still exists, but it no longer soothes in the same way. Which makes you wonder whether intimacy begins exactly where emotional control stops working.

The show’s symbols echo this logic without spelling it out. The guinea pig café is sweet, sentimental, and contained. A place where affection doesn’t ask very much. Hilary offers love without expectation. The stolen sculpture carries a truth Fleabag can’t quite say aloud. The silent retreat reveals how loud everything becomes when there’s nothing left to hide behind. Even the fox appears whenever she’s close to something she can’t manage with humour alone. None of this is grand symbolism. It’s practical. Objects and rituals that hold feeling when she can’t.

What makes all of this land is how ordinary it feels. Fleabag isn’t doing anything extreme. She’s doing what works. These are habits people acquire slowly. Joking at the right moment. Softening reactions. Making pain palatable. The kinds of strategies that stay because, once upon a time, they helped. Watching her doesn’t feel like watching someone unravel. It feels like recognising the small ways people sand down their emotions so they fit more easily into daily life.

That recognition extends beyond the show. Many of us practise our own version of this editing constantly. We call it composure. Or self-awareness. We add irony where sincerity might feel too exposed. We reach for wit before the feeling has a chance to settle. It isn’t deception. It’s emotional administration. And sometimes I wonder whether all this fluency has quietly taught us how to feel less, rather than how to feel better.

Online life sharpens the instinct further. Feelings arrive filtered. Vulnerability comes with a caption that reassures everyone it’s under control. Even honesty is styled. A bit clever. A bit ironic. Nothing too earnest. It mirrors Fleabag’s glance to the camera. Step out. Reframe. Step back in with something easier to consume. Adjust the tone. Keep it moving.

Eventually, the mechanism fails. The joke doesn’t land. The look to the camera comes back empty. There’s no edit to soften what’s happening. And in that pause, the cost of all that careful management becomes visible. You can’t fully inhabit a moment you’re constantly moderating. You can’t feel something all the way through if you’re already preparing the punchline.

The ending resists spectacle. She walks away, not because she’s been transformed, but because she finally understands what humour has been doing for her all along. It steadied her. It protected her. And it kept her slightly outside her own life.

That choice feels small, almost modest. But it lingers. Especially now, when so much of life encourages us to stay edited. To be quick. To be witty. To package feelings in ways that won’t slow anyone down or ask too much of the room. We’re fluent in this language. We use it at work, online, in relationships, in the way we talk about ourselves before anyone else gets the chance.

Which makes Fleabag’s quiet refusal feel less like an ending and more like a question passed on. What would it mean to stay in the moment a beat longer. To let the feeling finish its sentence. To resist smoothing it into something easier to consume.

Sometimes honesty isn’t a confession or a breakthrough. Sometimes it’s simply not reaching for the joke. Letting the feeling arrive without resizing it first. Even if it’s awkward. Even if it lingers. Even if no one laughs.