Since one of the purposes of humor is to poke fun at and even to release a little hostility over things society generally takes too seriously, therefore, and for some self-protection, I poked the first jibes at preacher-types by quoting Emerson's preference for silence over preaching. Now I should ignore him.
And since the sermon today is not only for the purpose of laughter, if any of you are inclined that way but is also to say something about the psychology of humor and its cultivation because in Unitarian intellectual circles we can’t just laugh—we have to analyze it. I feel I should begin with a happy slap at psychology itself; for example, at some of the newer forms of therapy that have already grown fat as the butts of today’s psychology and psychiatry humor.
“Okay, group,” proclaims one encounter therapist, “we’re going to keep practicing spontaneity until we get it right.”
While a participant in a nude therapy session, assaying a luscious woman, slyly whispers to his buddy, “Man, I’d like to see her with her clothes on.”
And, on the other side of the ledger, one behavior therapist admonishes a teary housewife, “Forget about love. The secret of marital happiness lies in control of the vaginal muscles,” while another confidently asserts, “Just follow our schedules of reinforcement, beep, beep and you’ll become as well-adjusted as I am, click, click, whirr, beep, click, click.”
Then, for a final bit of real insight, a patient is terminating his psychiatric treatment, pulls out a gun and points it at his psychiatrist and says, “You’ve helped me, doc, but now you know too damn much!”
If we are to benefit from the saving power of our smiles—or deeper yet, of humor that becomes more than laughs as a way of life—we shall have to cultivate it. Probably first, though, it helps to know some of the things humor saves us from or ways in which it liberates human beings.
One thing it can deliver us from is the heaviness of reverence. I’m personally big on reverence, particularly for Unitarians since we have so little of it, but it can trap us in too much sanctity for our own good if we don’t laugh about it sometimes. One thing we unicorns are big on is reason—our very reason too can enslave us if we feel we must be entirely reasonable and orderly and cerebral all the time. Remember Chris Raible starting out to write a new set of hymns for us, called them not “Hymns for the Celebration of Life,” as our hymnal is named but “Hymns for the Celebration for Strife!” Most of us also can use occasional release from such things as seriousness, certainly from inferiority, from egoism, naiveté, fanaticism, and routine.
So let’s talk about some of these things with some examples, a number of which I get from the work of a psychotherapist—Harvey Mindess who believes laughter saves or liberates human beings—so remember our salvation is at stake.
At first, it is extremely difficult for the rigid reasoner to relax. To realize that our reasoning and brain power is nonsense too would be a devastating insight, but if we can get there, if we can see the limitations of reason and our own limitations, the contingency and relativity and fallibility of our mental states, then we are freed from absolute reliance upon them. Only in that way can the intellectual neurotic be relieved of his neurosis, of the intellectualism itself.
Closely related to the need to be liberated from reason (so we can again be reasonable without being so unreasonable about it) is the need, which humor can help, to be liberated from the drudgery of eternal seriousness.
Several years ago Harvey Mindess was accustomed to driving on the freeways of Los Angeles daily and grew used to seeing bumper stickers proclaiming, “Americanism is the only ISM for me.” Later, he began to see one put out by a liberal organization which read, “Humanism is the only ISM for me.”
He was not amused by either sentiment and became sick and tired of reading them until one day he saw one worked up by some native wit all in red, white, and blue on the back of his car which professed “Nudism is the only ISM for me.”
That simple statement was doing humor’s first business. It attacked the bigotry of patriotism and the righteousness of altruism at a single blow—even some serious things can be helped by saying them in an unserious way.
Consider this statement, “I wish I were now what I was when I wanted to be what I am now.” [Repeat]
Such a statement allows us to accept things where we are now but takes the sting out of some of what we don’t like about being where we are now.
Or the exclamation (I’ve seen it on lapel buttons), “Help! Help! The paranoids are after me!” This one helps us dismiss our own suspicions as being stupid and even if they are true, suppose you think you’re being persecuted and you really are, so what difference is it going to make in the long run? We’re better off not to take life that seriously.
But can we really take terribly serious terrible things in fun? For example, you can’t take war in fun, not after Vietnam, that god-awful disgrace! Well, no—but yes, maybe. It certainly doesn’t mean we condone war. In fact, it’s the more serious people who tend to make the wars. There are humorous aspects to anything, including war. Look at the humor in the movie “Mash” and several others.
Or consider Richard Amour’s little poem about the Refrigerated Hiding Place, he wrote:
Move over, ham
And quartered cow,
My Geiger says
The time is now.
Yes, now I lay me
Down to sleep,
And if I die,
At least I’ll keep.
We may not often be able to change much with humor, but at least it can help us bear it, whatever it is. In fact, humor changes a great deal—it changes our attitude.
Another area of salvation by humor is its ability to liberate us (somewhat) from inferiority. Making fun of our inferior position helps us to transcend it. Much of the literature of humor of any minority group is like this.
The group rises above oppression through humor, and sends its own stinging humor as well into the side of the oppressor. Most of us identify with the underdog because all of us are in some kind of inferior position for part of our lives or all of our lives. There is always someone above who has more power, more wealth, more intelligence, more acclaim, more authority or whatever, maybe even more humility if we have so little humility as to want more of it than he possesses.
So, in humor, we identify with the underdog. As a simple example, take the relative status given in our society to the medical doctor and the plumber. The doctor’s wife is unable to sleep because the toilet is dripping. So she has her husband call the plumber in the middle of the night. After listening to the problem on the phone, the plumber grumpily declares, “But its 2:00 a.m.!” “So what?” replies the doctor, “If your child was sick, wouldn’t you call me?” “Yes,” mumbles the plumber, “You’re right. So I’ll tell you what to do. Throw a couple of aspirins into the bowl and, if it doesn’t get better by morning, call me again.”
Ever notice how much humor is used to cover up hostility. It can be a way of telling our superiors off, of running them down, of making fun of them, and it relieves the tension and the anxiety in us somewhat to do that.
A Unitarian minister friend of mine who was a VW owner told me once that every time he saw a Cadillac, he wanted to go up and kick a dent in its fender. But making the statement was taking it far enough. In fact, a brutal sense of humor, kept at the verbal level, is a way to avoid violence even if all one does is make a dirty sign at someone else.
I would not recommend what a man I know did when he was younger. He had stopped for a stoplight. The light changed and when he did not move that split second the man behind him lay down on his horn, then began to tap the first fellow’s rear bumper with his own front bumper. Whereupon the man in front pulled up his emergency brake, got out of his car, walked back to the other car, and kicked the man’s headlight out, returned to his own front seat and drove away.
No humor in this behavior, only cool hostility, a very dangerous thing without some verbal release, or better yet, the release of laughter. But something in most of us wants to see the pushy person or the superior acting person get his comeuppance.
We feel that way because we don’t like feeling inferior. Nonetheless, probably you have all heard of the psychiatrist who was addressing his patient and said, “You don’t have an inferiority complex. Your problem is, you are inferior!”
The fact is that we are inferior in some way. Our sense of humor has the task of helping us accept our imperfections, failures, and weaknesses, not deny them. And, paradoxically, we are freed from inferiority by the trick of embracing it. That’s how the name Unitarian stuck with us through four centuries. In the 14th century it was a term of derision until our spiritual ancestors embraced and adapted the term as their own.
Another example of the shaping of humor. Remember James Thurber's Secret Life of Walter Mitty, where the milk toast of a henpecked husband fantasizes in his dreams of glory? He’s something like the dog, Snoopy, in the Peanuts cartoon who pilots his doghouse to dogfights with the Red Baron. Actually, Mitty knows he cowers under his wife’s dominion, but in his fantasies he is a daring aviator, a gifted surgeon, a superb marksman, the unruffled court defendant, a real man’s man, unafraid in the face of death itself.
Remember the passage, “Something struck his shoulder. ‘I’ve been looking all over this hotel for you,’ said Mrs. Mitty, ‘why do you have to hide in this old chair? How do you expect me to find you?’” “Things closed in,” said Walter Mitty vaguely. “What?” Mrs. Mitty said, “Did you get the what’s-it-name? The puppy biscuit? And what’s in the box?” “Overshoes,” said Mitty. “Couldn’t you have put them on in the store?” “I was thinking,” said Walter Mitty, “does it ever occur to you that I am sometimes thinking?” She looked at him. “I’m going to take your temperature when I get you home,” she said.
They went out through the revolving doors that made a faintly derisive whistling sound when you pushed them. It was two blocks to the parking lot. At the drugstore on the corner she said, “Wait here for me. I forgot something, I won’t be a minute.” She was more than a minute. Walter Mitty lit a cigarette. It began to rain, rain with sleet in it. He stood up against the wall of the drugstore, smoking. He put his shoulders back and heels together. “To hell with the handkerchief,” said Walter Mitty, scornfully. He took one last drag on his cigarette and snapped it away. Then that faint, fleeting smile playing about his lips, he faced the firing squad, erect and motionless, proud and disdainful; Walter Mitty the undefeated, inscrutable to the last.”
The story gently gets us right here, no? It says, in the image of its hero, it’s all right to be you! All right to be you. What an important lesson so hard for some of us really to accept. It is all right to be you.
With its gentle humor we see the disparity between our own dreams and the incompetent figures we cut in reality, but it is not sad, really, though a certain sadness and sympathy hangs in there as we grieve briefly for ourselves over whatever life situation makes us feel small.
But Walter Mitty allows us to love the poor creatures that we are, as Thurber obviously loves pathetic Mitty. There is a compassionate insight here again, that it’s all right to be you. We have affection for Mitty and thereby have some affection for ourselves, in some sense, in “the largest sense, we are permitted to enjoy the stumbling, touching little people we can be.”
Now to shift gears and get away from things that are beginning to get sentimental, another thing a sense of humor can help liberate us from our own fanaticism, our own myopic devotion to causes, any cause, no matter how worthy your favorite cause!
It is the humor of satire that helps most here, satire that reminds us again that no religion, not even ours, no view of God, no philosophy, no set of values, no group of moral principles, none of them are perfect, unchangeable, absolute, pure, and sacred-world-without-end, Amen.
We cannot take the satirist completely seriously or we could never support any worthy cause, in fact we would leave reality altogether. But the one who writes satire has a point up to a point—that capitalism, socialism, Black power, and trialism, all positions are biased, all arguments are deceitfully ornamental, all claims are exaggerated in the interest of the individual or institution, or cause one represents. You can’t get away from it!
That we can take any serious person altogether seriously, for he doesn’t see how ridiculous he is in part, nor can we always believe in ourselves because we, too, cannot avoid a fundamental ambivalence and inescapable dishonesty.
So humor can help us overcome dogmatism and fanaticism by laying open the worst in the best of us as well as encouraging the best in the worst of us.
A few years back the New York Times reported a successful dispersion of students at a demonstration in West Berlin when the police used a quasi-humorous approach. While preparing to turn water cannons on the demonstrators, the man in charge announced, “Please move on or be prepared to get your bathrobe and towels ready. We are now going to have to stage some unusual aquatics.”
He continued to handle the situation in this jovial way and the crowd eventually left without violence on either side. A dangerous situation well handled. By the way, do you know what is purple and dangerous and lives in a tree? A man-eating plum.
“Suppose,” wrote Harvey Mindess, “an American police captain was to announce to a mass of protest marchers over his megaphone, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain of your local pigs. I just want to welcome you to our 25th confrontation and tell you that despite my fellow officers’ innate lack of sensitivity, not to speak of intelligence, we do intend to do our best to see that you enjoy yourselves and accomplish your objectives, as long as those objectives don’t amount to wrecking anybody’s property or inciting anyone to riot.’”
And suppose a radical student protester back in the days of protest were to communicate with repressive police in such terms as these, “Speaking in behalf of all the long-haired freaks, I want to thank you for taking the time to supervise our annual picnic and invite you to join in the general merriment after all the boring speeches are over.”
Humor is contagious, just as love or anger is. Think what can happen potentially by its use—laughter rather the piling of one hostility on top of another.
Laughter saves, so when you get a chance, get serious and laugh!
To quote just once more from Laughter and Liberation: “It is not by accident that man is the only animal who has a sense of humor. He is also the only animal who wears clothing, denies himself sex, worships nonexistent deities, starves in order to create, kills and dies for his country, slaves and cheats for his bank balance. Clearly, he is the only animal who needs a sense of humor.”
And now let us pray. O sacred man, symbol of Religious Humanism, we worship even though you don’t exist anymore than God does, but we have seen your representatives, and we are they, deliver us from (we no longer call it sin) the false pride of being smug. When we hear that the definition of a Christian is one who follows Jesus by saying to the Jews, “My religion has more love in it than yours has,” let us remember where it is written that a Unitarian is an atheist who is soft on God. Indeed he is a prickly person yearning to be warm and fuzzy. Amen.
© Robert Mabry Doss