Laughter: a Flash of Joy in the Soul

Such a gorgeous uplifting quotation this week, by Dante Alighieri, "Laughter is a weather-lightening flash of joy in the soul, a flickering of the Light outside, as it shines inside."

It is so true! No matter what is happening to us, laughter will lighten our mood. So long as it is true laughter, coming from a place of inner joy. I have never forgotten a passage in The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, in which he divides the causes of human laughter into "Joy, Fun, the Joke Proper, and Flippancy." He goes on, "You will see the first among friends and lovers reunited on the eve of a holiday. Among adults some pretext in the way of Jokes is usually provided, but the facility with which the smallest witticisms produce laughter at such a time shows that they are not the real cause."

Screwtape describes Fun as being "closely related to Joy - a sort of emotional froth arising from the play instinct. It is very little use to us." (us being devils trying to tempt humans away from God). He continues, "In itself it has wholly undesirable tendencies; it promotes charity, courage, contentment, and many other evils."

But the Joke Proper, Screwtape says, "which turns on sudden perception of incongruity, is a much more promising field. ... The real use of Jokes or Humour is... specially promising among the English who take their 'sense of humour' so seriously that a deficiency in this sense is almost the only deficiency at which they feel shame. Humour is for them the all-consoling and (mark this) the all-excusing grace of life. Hence it is invaluable as a means of destroying shame. ... Mere cowardice is shameful; cowardice boasted of with humourous exaggerations and grotesque gestures can be passed off as funny. Cruelty is shameful - unless the cruel man can represent it as a practical joke."

He concludes, "But Flippancy is the bst of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk *as if* virtue were funny. Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it. ... It is a thousand miles away from joy; it deadens, instead of sharpening the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practise it."

Reading this again has made me appreciate how much of the "humour" and comments on Facebook and other social media, and on TV, come from a place of Flippancy (or cynicism), or at best, the "sudden perception of incongruity" on which Jokes rely. I wonder whether we can return to places of Joy and Fun, and laugh because we are happy, not because someone has played a practical joke on us, or made a cynical remark about the world we live in, and the way in which others are responding to it...