Healing Power of Humor

April 27, 2008

Dr. David Robins

I was an early convert to the healing power of humor in the 1970’s, believing that my own soul was refreshed and renewed when I could laugh. Laughter for me, is not only the shortest distance between two people, but between me and wholeness of being. I am less interested in Tillich’s “ground of being”, and more interested in the belly laugh of my being, as the source of reverence, joy and unity with life. I wholeheartedly subscribe to the Hebrew wisdom, “A merry heart doeth good like medicine.”

Mark Twain was once asked if he was looking forward to his trip to Europe. He replied, “I would look forward with a lot more pleasure to the trip if I didn’t have to take that fellow, Mark Twain with me.” Like many of us, Twain used humor to get out of his own cranky, worrisome self.

Norman Cousins, the editor and writer, influenced me deeply in connecting humor as a medicine to health. In his book, Anatomy of an Illness, he wrote about how painkillers were having less and less effect on a life threatening disease. So he began to watch Marx brothers movies, and reruns of Candid Camera. An hour of merriment would give him 3-4 hours of relief from pain. Laughter allows our mind and body to reduce pain, lessen stress, and help our immune system.

New England Unitarian and Universalism grew out of Puritanism, and Puritanism is noted for its emphasis on the serious side. We can thank the leaders of the Protestant Reformation , John Calvin and Luther, and others for that. They disdained humor and foolishness in favor of sobriety, piety, thrift and industry. In contrast, before the Reformation, the church of the Middle Ages was noted for its burlesque. After all, laughter pokes fun at the sins of pride and single-minded greed. Pride goes before a fall, and a humble heart is home for God. As religious descendents of Puritanism, we need to be on our guard against taking our religion over-seriously.

One of the biggest changes I have seen in churches in my lifetime has been the use of humor. Church and worship were humorless affairs when I was growing up 50 plus years ago. Ministers didn’t dare make jokes from the pulpit out of fear of looking frivolous.

The 1960’s brought with it protests, the civil rights movement and the women’s movement. Pulpits were either serious about the social upheaval or they were irrelevant. With the advent of the mega churches in the 70’s and 80’s, entertainment and humor became the standard style of worship, and mainline churches had to become more entertaining in order to keep up.

Jesus did not offer much in the way of advice on humor and laughter. In Luke 12:19 he tells a parable condemning a rich person for wanting to eat drink and be merry. Yet, in the beatitudes, the teachings considered to be a summing up of Jesus’ most important message, he offers comfort when he said; “Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh.”

There is a little known story attributed to Jesus about humor that is illustrated in this story. A child was watching her exasperated mother sift through and delete a long list of junk email on the computer screen.

“This reminds me of the Lord’s prayer, ‘the child says.
‘What do you mean asks the mother.
‘You know, the part about delivering us from email.”

Humor and spirituality share many common themes.

Both are deeply personal, and can alter perspective. Both are hopeful, and both have an appreciation for paradox. Both are creative. Both help in letting go, and both offer some grace, often in difficult situations.

Spirituality and humor are both therapeutic when they stimulate an expression or appreciation of the absurdity or incongruity of life’s situations. Humor and spirituality support healing, and coping. Humor and spirituality help me to get myself out of theological conundrums, when I start thinking about questions that are essentially mysteries, and require leaps of imagination rather than reason. Humor relieves the stress of tense meetings and tense moments. I dare say, humor is included as one of my religious responses to life, along with joy and grief, love and celebration, reverence and righteousness. Joseph Bastion wrote that humor is a religious response to life because it brings people together and dissolves differences and hatreds.” He calls humor a ‘liminal’ moment…liminal meaning a threshold moment when one is no longer stuck in the doorway, but moves across. “Such liminal occasions are important to religion because they create a commonality among participants, and the creation of community is a basic function of many religions.”

Humor can bring people together. It distracts for a moment and breathes new life into people and situations, allowing us to cross a threshold into common endeavor.

While humor has long been a part of religion, laughter has been a part of human mannerisms for an even longer time. Zoologist E.O. Wilson writes that smiling and laughing are prelinguistic in humans. Smiling and laughing were two of our facial and auditory expressions long before the “evolutionary origin of true language.” We share smiling and laughing with monkeys and apes, and thus probably with a common ancestor in our evolution.

Had Darwin paid more attention to his children he might have written about the evolution of humor. Jokes begin at a basic level with young children. Booger jokes, bodily function jokes, knock, knock jokes delighted our young children. MIne were particularly enamored at meal time of the joke question, “do you like see food?’, followed by opening their mouth to let me ‘see food’. How they laughed.

In high school I remember offering some assistance to one of our children’s biology projects. The project they chose was to compare and contrast evolution and creationism. They made charts, videos, reports….and sugar cookies. The sugar cookies were in the shape of DNA, eggs and sperm. “A tasteless choice” I commented discouragingly. My child said to me sarcastically, “Dad, we’re dealing with teenagers here.”

Natural selection is a rather comical endeavor. Who in their right mind would try to design a bird from a reptile, or a hoof from a toe, or the outer layer of the brain from a smell receptor, or a human being from a monkey. This is not science. This is more like tinkering with a garage full of spare parts. Can you ask the question and keep a straight face…. “How do you make a $125 pair of Nike running shoes from the Big Bang?” I can’t. The universe is no joke, but there is some occasional humor here.

A smile and a laugh might have been natural selection’s solution to a problem on how to create the best non-violent connection between two people who otherwise might whack each other over the head.

I once heard a David Maslanka Mass at a Methodist Chruch. In the Mass was a Hymn To Sophia, Holy Wisdom, written by Richard Beale. The Hymn to Sophia speaks of laughter as coming from Sophia, the goddess of wisdom, and that this laughter is part of the very fabric of the universe. The poem reads:

Bright window, your night
Is full of stars
And the promise of morning.
Longer in memory than in our eyes.
You are the mask of honesty,
The face without shadow,
The noonday brightness,
The light in the window.
At your hearth I am no longer a stranger.
Mother, help me.
Infuse my heart
With joyful laughter
And call my name
From the unknown place
Behind every atom
Of the universe.

I read recently that the poet Langston Hughes once inscribed a book to a singer; “For Josephine Baker, who brings beauty, laughter, courage and loving kindness to our troubled land.” I have a Langston Hughes book of poetry, “The Panther and the Lash” which I purchased in 1968 as a way to stretch my narrow racial horizons and to understand the Black experience in America. The poems are angry in their denunciation of racial injustice. There was not much room in the world for humor back then. I pulled my Langston Hughes poems off the shelf for a revisit, and found a poem that spoke of the saving grace of laughter as a sign of hope in the face of injustice.
The poem is titled, “Still Here.”

I been scared and battered.
Snow has frizz me,
Sun has baked me,
Looks like between’em they done
Tried to make me,
Stop laughin, stop lovin, stop livin---
But I don’t care!
In still here!”

 Humor and laughter can be revolutionary, but also beautifully and spiritually transforming. “Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh.”