Posted on: Saturday, June 19, 2004
EXPRESSIONS OF FAITH
Humor is God's gift to all of us
By Tom Schaefer
Swapping stories and chuckling about our family's foibles as we sit around the dining room table is a particular pleasure.
"Dad, when you got up on Saturday mornings to make us pancakes, you looked like a crazy man with your hair messed up," my kids recalled at family dinner.
"Still crazy after all these years," I responded with a grin. And everyone laughed.
Laughter has always carried us — my wife, my kids and extended family — through good times and bad.
When I think of laughter — and another Father's Day — I also remember my dad with his squinty grin and rat-a-tat-tat chuckle. No one loved a joke more than he. Dad, who died in 1980, could fire up a roomful of wallflowers and have the most introverted giggling with delight.
I agree that what the world needs now is love, but it also needs a healthy dose of laughter. Unfortunately, laughter isn't always set up in a good-natured or therapeutic way. Much of what passes for humor has a mocking tone to it. It revels in the mistakes or shortcomings of others.
I confess that I find some of it hard to resist. I laugh when I shouldn't. Humor seems to have an increasingly sharper edge to it. If you don't join in the guffawing, you're labeled a prude, a snob or someone too dense to appreciate "a good laugh."
To be sure, laughter can be healthy.
The late Norman Cousins, a noted editor and writer, proved the efficacy of humor when he was diagnosed in the mid-1960s with a life-threatening disease.
His doctors gave him little hope, so he devised his own medical regimen: He took massive doses of vitamin C and rented classic comedy movies — Abbott and Costello, Charlie Chaplin. He watched one after the other, hour after hour, and the more he did, the more he laughed. And little by little he began to feel better.
Eventually, doctors could not find any trace of his incurable disease. It was another 25 years before he died, after cardiac arrest.
No one suggests that laughter cures all ills or soothes all pain, but it can release a good feeling about ourselves and others that is restorative and enriching.
That's because humor is a gift of God. The story of Abraham and Sarah in the Book of Genesis is an example. At 90, Sarah was beyond her childbearing years, but God promised Abraham that Sarah would bear a child. When Sarah heard of the promise, she laughed.
Nine months later, Sarah gave birth to a child. God told Abraham to name the baby Isaac. The punch line? In Hebrew, Isaac means laughter. The joke, it turns out, was on Sarah.
Humor can have a positive purpose. It can help us move through whatever darkness we experience. While we rightly grieve over losses at some point a memory often triggers a smile. And welling up, a laugh. To suppress such a gift, or to smother it with unremitting grief or bitterness, prolongs the time of healing. Let it out.
On Father's Day, I will enjoy the company of my family. We'll likely tell stories about one another and smile over silly incidents. And I'll think of my father and his infectious laugh. That memory will bring a smile to my face.
Tom Schaefer writes about religion and ethics for the Wichita (Kan.) Eagle.
