“At times, the joy that life attacks me with is unbearable and leads to gasping hysterical laughter. I find myself completely out of control and wonder how life could surprise me again and again and again, so completely. How could a man be a cynic? It is a sin.”
- Norm MacDonald
"A real index of intelligence is humor. It requires great affection for people and the world and the act of being, a forgivingness, and a bemusement. The sure sign of the fanatic is an absence of humor."
- Terence McKenna
How to Fish
It is called a 'sense' of humor because what is funny is detected, not generated. Within all things is hidden latent humorous energy, like the trapped divine spark in the husk of finitude. A hilarious person simply lets it free, like a physicist splitting an atom.
And what of people who seem to pull jokes out of thin air? They are simply tuning in to the steady flow of their own psyches, offering up atoms that bubble up from deep in their subconscious, from their own flesh itself, to be split and freed, to have the latent humor exposed. You can do it too.
Give a man a joke, and he'll laugh for a few moments. Teach a man to fish for humor in the river of life, in the stream of his own psyche, and he will laugh for the rest of his life.
It's often the father who teaches his child to fish, but it was my mother who gave me some of the best fishing lessons I ever received. When I was a child, she had a policy of giving me candy when-ever she caught me laughing at myself. I think it may be one of the wisest lessons she ever taught me: that light, humorous self-awareness is very very sweet.
Laughter as Release
That laughter should be considered any less legitimate a form of release than weeping is a notion that could only be produced by a culture festered with puritanism. It is possible to lean into laughter as a way to handle, process, and release excess arousal and emotion the same way you can with sobbing. It is a skill no more difficult than, say, learning to ride a bike.
People have a very hard time differentiating between audio clips of laughter and clips of sobbing. Both share all the same muscular contractions and expansions. Both can produce tears and activate the periaqueductal gray area of the brain, both turn tension into release by kinetically venting energy.
This pattern- tension to release, tension to release- is at the heart of much of the most visceral human experiences, like sex, grief, music, and horror. Laughter has its place in any of those experiences. I like how comedian Daniel Sloss puts it: “Laughter is not the opposite of sadness. Happiness is the opposite of sadness. Laughter is a reaction. It's free to exist in both.”
Paradoxes
I vividly remember reading in the Midrash1 that “Rav said: One word of levity can destroy a thousand words of Torah” but also reading in the Talmud2 that “ Ravva would always begin his lecture with a humorous remark, and the students would laugh. After that, he would begin the lesson in earnest, and they would sit in awe."
Just as laughter can exist in and alongside grief and joy and wonder, it can create them as well. It can lubricate a thick new idea, and it can shatter a delicate growing one. As Norm said: “Juxtapose the absurd with the profound...and that dissonance is art”.
The paradoxical nature of comedy touches every holy dissonance. When things aren’t funny at all; its kind of funny. Childhoods punctuated by serious events often make hilarious adults; few things are funnier than a man taking himself too seriously; When you mustn’t laugh, laughter comes easiest.
Laughing in the Dark
When prisoners in Auschwitz found humor even there3, they proved there is no place in existence that does not contain a spark of hilarity. This was a spiritual accomplishment at least as great as the fiery self-immolation of Thích Quảng Đức.
One woman laughed as her hair was being shaved at Auschwitz. She was asked why and she joked that it was the first time she’d ever received a free hairdo. Later her hair started to grow back curly- she showed her friends and said “Hey, look, I had a perm!” In the Warsaw Ghetto, which would become home to the largest single military effort by any resistance group against the Nazis, a popular joke told over and over: ‘a man sees his friend Moish eating perfumed soap. He asks his friend why he was doing so. Moish retorts “When they turn me into soap, at least I will smell good.”
Victor Frankl4, one of the most famous survivors of Auschwitz, said of humor in the Holocaust “The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living.” And “Humor was another of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation. It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford… an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.”
To laugh amidst suffering is a holy act. It is to affirm with one's lungs that there is something joyous above and beyond and even within object-level pain, that change is always there, waiting to be uncovered and embraced, and that one has the agency to fabricate this truth. That God and the devil combined still have not devised a day so awful on which man cannot laugh.
On Play
Strong arguments have been made that laughter evolved as a way to signal play. Pay attention to a social event and you will notice constant empty laughs as new people meet each other, even when nothing funny is said. Watch great apes5 socializing and you will notice the same thing. It’s a cheap signal that avoids a lot of expensive fighting: everyone knows you are down to clown, that you are among friends, that all is well.
This signal can be for others, but also for ourselves. Similar to breathing, laughing has the unique quality of being capable of being produced either automatically or intentionally. This is a wonderful paradox to be experienced; one can announce with rhythmic muscular contracts that all is jovial.
Comedy is Surprises
When Norm said that joy ‘attacked’ him and that it was “unbearable and lead to gasping hysterical laughter” he was not exaggerating. These were real attacks- laughing fit episodes so intense he’d sometimes need to take benzodiazepines to calm down. The first such episode was triggered in his childhood, while he explaining to a blind man he was helping what the inside of a grocery store looks like. Something about the paradox of describing sight to the unsighted broke something in his mind. Real modern koan type stuff- he said it was the first time he truly looked outward.
Shortly after a ranting homeless man triggered another laugh attack. Later he found he'd become extremely sensitive to art… until that first episode he said grocery stores were terrifying to him, and that he'd pace endlessly just to build up to the courage to interact with people there. But looking, really looking, so that he could describe the world to a man who had never seen, flipped it for him.
There’s a similar quote to the one I opened with from Norm that I love just as much: "Comedy is surprises, so if you’re intending to make somebody laugh and they don’t laugh, that’s funny.” It reminds me of one of my favorite Norm anecdotes in which he makes a bunch of friends laugh by walking up to a door and saying, in a way only he could turn into a successful bit- “what’s this, a door?”.
Norm understood something about humor and life that made him not just a stand-up, but a comedian’s comedian. Like all comedians, he’d sometimes bomb; but what made Norm unique is afterwards, instead of slinking away and drinking it away, he’d beam ear to ear, walk to exit of the club, stand by the door, and shake people’s hands, laughing. He understood that comedy is surprises, and that the world, with a certain kind of attention, is always surprising, in an aggressively joyful kind of way.
Vayikra Rabbah 16:4 paraphrased in chapter 5 of Mesilat Yesharim
Shabbat 30b
A fascinating paper entitled ‘Humor as a Defense Mechanism in the Holocaust’ breaks down what kind of jokes were told in the death camps:
-Self-directed humor: 47%
-Black (gallows) humor: 25%
-Food-related humor: 12%
-Other/unclassified or overlapping: 16%
Self depreciation, then gallows humor, then food. I can’t think of anything more jewish, save for writing up the exact percentages in an academic journal after the latest empire exterminating your people crumbles to dust.
My most vivid memory from reading Frankl, long before I ever tasted coffee or smoked a cigarette, was of him mentioning in ‘Mans Search For Meaning’ how much it sucked not to have either in Auschwitz. This filled me with a burning desire to understand the deep abiding relationship people have with drugs that still smolders in me today.
“Distinctively human laughter characteristics such as predominantly regular, stable voicing and consistently egressive airflow are nonetheless traceable to characteristics of shared ancestors with great apes.” - ‘Reconstructing the evolution of laughter in great apes and humans’
That policy of your mom's is incredible, have been thinking about how to incentivize that, will be doing that ♥️♥️♥️
Makes sense! I did some volunteer work in a somewhat similar capacity, was definitely meaningful. Glad to hear it resonated :)