When I was about five years old, I was riding in the car with my maternal grandfather. I suppose I was doing a lot of talking, being afflicted with the malady since infancy. My Grandfather said, “Abbott, I think you got a screw loose.” I immediately shook my head and told him, “I think I can hear it up there Grandpa.” He laughed and laughed, and I was very pleased with myself. I had made him laugh. He told my grandmother about my joke. Not exactly celebrity status, but ever since I’ve been cultivating opportunities to ply the humorist’s art. I am sure that is one of the reasons I write on Substack. There are thirteen, first-person, singular pronouns in this paragraph. It’s not entirely about you dear readers, I’m sure you’ve noticed.
“This will make you laugh.” Forty-some years ago one summer I was working in the northwest corner of Nebraska doing pole maintenance. My crew was mostly foreigners. Boys I hired from college, fellows from Ecuador and Indonesia, my comrades for the summer. It’s hilly and forested in northwest Nebraska. We were headed into Chadron from the south on US 385 and a motorhome stopped in front of us blocking our lane. The highway was without shoulders. Traffic and visibility were such, we dared not go around the RV. Mildly irritated, we watched as the driver exited the driver’s door and walked around the front of the motorhome. As he turned the first corner, his miniature French poodle, whom we will call Fifi, hopped out and was immediately run over by a semi. Fifi became “Spot.” The dog was obliterated. When the man turned around, he looked at the spot stupidly, slowly realizing what had happened to his dog. The semi pulled over. Everyone in my pick-up was laughing hysterically. Tono, from Indonesia, had collapsed on the floorboards. It was grossly inappropriate for him to melt down, laughing uncontrollably, but we were all laughing, and by any decent measure, it was inappropriate. Embarrassingly wrong.
On a more serious vein, exploring the connection between the divine and humor is daunting. It’s puzzled me all my life. The Book tells us we are created in God’s image. The story (Bible) is the revelation of God to man: That story doesn’t reveal the Almighty’s sense of humor. Neither Abraham, Pharaoh, Moses or the children of Israel, let alone the antediluvians, can imagine the God Most High as a humorist. The closest I can get to God pulling a joke on someone is; God made Sarah laugh within her tent. The absurdity of a ninety-year-old woman giving birth is startling to the point of exclamation. God deadpans, “Sarah laughed” and something about the gravity of those men outside the tent visiting Abraham made Sarah lie. “I didn’t laugh.” “But you did laugh.” A year later, Sarah gave birth and named the child of promise, Isaac. The name Isaac means “laughter.”
As the humorist GK Chesterton observed, “God always veils his mirth.” Jesus of Nazareth told us no jokes. Evidently, perfect obedience to the will of God is no joke. They laughed at Jesus, the bible says they laughed him to scorn. He’d have been more popular if he’d told a few jokes.
If our sense of humor is part of the image of God in man, then I guess sin is why we laugh when we know we shouldn’t. We laugh at absurdity, and the closer the absurdity is to the truth, the harder we laugh. It is universal. All men laugh. Everywhere, throughout history. The atheist Schopenhauer thought our sense of humor emerged from the triumph pain, suffering, and death have over life. A coping mechanism, to account for the absurdity of life and death. Not being an atheist, I don’t like Schopenhauer’s idea, but… I laughed when Fifi got crushed like a bug. I watch the ‘fail’ videos on the internet. I think they are funny. But, it’s embarrassingly wrong to laugh at others’ pain and suffering, even if no one is watching you do it. My wife, my better half, likes to watch the benign cat videos, where cats, kittens and various little animals behave absurdly.
My sister explained to me why she isn’t on social media. “Because it doesn’t give me joy.” My Facebook feed brings up approximately fifty percent Calvin and Hobbes comics these days. I keep clicking (like) when I see Calvin and Hobbes. Zuckerberg did us all a big favor when he reconfigured his platform to suppress serious discussion and thoughtful speech. Facebook gives me no joy, but now it makes me laugh. Zuck’s FB platform, all the social media platforms, leave us with the illusion we must be doing something efficiently because it takes no effort to look at social media. I’m looking at how much time I waste online. At least being online is wasting time efficiently. Looking at Calvin and Hobbes, I am wasting time in a good humor. It is Bill Watterson’s art that prompts me to think seriously about humor. Why was Watterson’s comic strip so funny? He is a master at combining absurdity, truth, and impiety in simply growing up. Calvin wouldn’t be funny if Calvin’s foils weren’t truthfully what we want in a mom, dad, teacher and girl next door. Calvin’s absurd imagination has to have a hedge about it. The hedge of normality, purpose and love.
I was talking with a friend of mine who has mental health issues. I told him I thought one of the greatest gifts my mother gave me was she didn’t take herself too seriously. She could laugh at herself. Not all the time, mind you. She didn’t like being the butt of my father’s dry wit. But overall, she had a marvelous sense of humor. My friend replied, “my mother could laugh with her friends, but when it came to us, she was very stern and unsmiling. It was always a very serious matter that we respect and obey her.”
My mother certainly took my behavior (misbehavior) seriously and being disrespectful to anyone, including her, was definitely misbehaving. But my mother, who from time to time crossed the frontier into impiety, could see in herself her own inconsistencies, her own misbehavior, and she usually chose to laugh at the absurdity of herself trying to raise children to be good. She wasn’t going to lie to herself or me about her own goodness. It was an occasion for mirth. We laugh at the absurd, and when the absurd is nearest the truth we laugh the hardest. My parents’ marriage was a happy one. And we, their three children, probably had a double portion of family happiness. I do believe my mom and dad anointed us with the ‘oil of gladness’ when they were laughing at themselves.
Before you go, Let me tell you one more funny story. My grandmother taught country school for a couple of years when she was fresh out of high school. I was talking to Grandma about Harry Barr and his brother, George, who were doing pole maintenance work for the company I worked for, Osmose. Grandma got to chuckling. Forty-some years before, she had taught Isaac Barr, their father, in her country school. At that time Isaac Barr was quite young. She remembered calling little Isaac up to her desk about some matter. While standing there, Isaac farted. She and the whole class started laughing. Grandmother imitated Isaac’s voice for me, high pitched, slowly raising to a falsetto crescendo, “It’s not very funny to me!” When she finished, my grandma was in stitches. The moral of the story? Don’t take yourself too seriously, especially if your name is Isaac.
Mankind’s sense of humor and the Divine's joy at reconciliation are connected, but I can't connect the dots. It's just a hunch. Maybe laughing at yourself can be a first step in taking your sin seriously. Honesty is truth's foil. I guess my advice is, “Better watch it.” If you aren’t laughing a little bit at yourself every time you laugh, you probably shouldn’t be laughing at all.
When Genesis 1:1 says "in the beginning" it does not mean the very beginning of everything. This is obvious to many people because God designed the universe BEFORE He created it. Would that it was obvious to more people. THEREFORE, God designed there should be TRUTH and truth is hard. In the midst of truth is freedom of thought and freedom of expression. THEREFORE, lies and absurdity and conflict and humor exist. Often when I voice a simple TRUTH my mom will smile or laugh because the realization of the disconnect between two true conditions is apparent. God laughs because He knows TRUTH. We laugh because we lie and do stupid stuff. The common element is the disconnect or absurdity. That's it, In my view. (BTW, my mom turns 96 this month!)
I enjoyed this one very much. I am sure I would not have laughed when Fifi become Spot though but then again laughter seems to be contagious so I might have eventually joined in.