The Gift of Laughter

 This week's quotation is very well-known. It says, "Laughter is music for the soul."

I believe that is so true. Laughter can uplift us and contribute to a general sense of well-being. It can bring us out of sadness or despondency and be a source of joy and connection.

Children seem to laugh far more easily than adults do... I rarely have a good belly laugh these days. But it happened yesterday. I am staying with a very dear friend for some R&R, and we were playing a game of canasta. Normally, we are fairly evenly matched and it is a [very amicable, yet intensely competitive] fight to the finish. But this particular game, *every* hand of mine was brilliant and *every* hand of hers was lousy - she actually had negative scores twice! We ended up weeping with laughter and it felt so good.

Why do adults laugh less than children? It takes very little to bring forth laughter in any of my grandsons, but although I smile often, feel grateful often, I laugh rarely. And the same applies to most of the adults of my acquaintance. Is it that we are bowed down under our responsibilities, less able to live in the now and appreciate the funny moments which come our way? I think it might be. Most of the "humour" I see on Facebook seems to be satirical, rather than simply amusing (except for the cat videos). Maybe that's just my personal feed, and yours is full of genuine laugh out loud posts. I hope so.

Yes, life is serious. Yes, we all have responsibilities. But, I think it would be so good for us (certainly good for me) if we were able to let go of it all (at least, temporarily) and simply laugh. I believe our souls would thank us for it.

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...

The Gift of Laughter

In one of Anne McCaffrey's books, somebody (I think it's Lanzecki in The Crystal Singer) says "A man can sleep any time. But a laugh restores the soul." And I have just been chuckling away at a post on the Tolkien Society page on Facebook, where members were invited to do bad mis-castings for characters in the Peter Jackson films. Of course it very soon got out of hand, and many other cultural references found their way in, from Monty Python's Holy Grail, the Wizard of Oz (Sauron being killed by Edoras falling on his head) and even Dallas (Melkor coming out of the shower and finding it was all a dream). And I will long remember the image of the Nine Riders on black Harleys, with Riders on the Storm by the Doors in the background. And Orc munchkins. And Samwise Gamgee in sparkly red shoes, saying "There's no place like home, Mr. Frodo." It made me laugh out loud, and suddenly the world seems a brighter place.

"A laugh restores the soul." Yes. This is certainly true of the laughter that arises from the joy of sharing something funny with others, or as a side-effect of being happy anyway. But laughing *at* others rather than *with* them has always struck me as a cat of an entirely different colour. I am sometimes accused of having a sense of humour deficit, because I don't often find people falling over / failing to do something / otherwise being made a fool of, very funny. So while I do find many of the posts on Facebook very funny, and indeed, share many of them, some I just don't. This laughing at other people's misfortune *feels* the same way to me as cruelty to animals.

I guess it all comes down to compassion in the end - putting yourself in the other person's shoes, and imagining how they must be feeling. So while I love to laugh, and find that a good giggle brightens my day, I'm selective about what I laugh at.