The Grace of Humor

The case of Norman Cousins has always fascinated me. Long editor of the (alas) defunct Saturday Review, in 1965 Cousins was told he had but a few months to live due to an especially virulent variety of arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis, a degenerative disease causing the breakdown of collagen.

He promptly scrapped his gloomy doctor, found another to his liking, and undertook his own recovery. Along with self-administering huge doses of vitamin C, he equally injected heavy doses of humor, the belly laugh sort that produces shortness of breath and abdominal muscle ache. He did this by watching every comedy film he could find, and then laying back waiting for the punch lines, the slapstick scenes, and the comedic surprises.

He claimed 10 minutes of uninhibited out loud laughing would give him two hours of uninterrupted pain-free sleep. Cousins died in 1990 of heart failure, some 26 years after his first doctor told him put his affairs in order.

If humor is life-extending, and even if it isn’t, I’ll take some of it, please. If I’m dying, I’ll watch Mouse Hunt. There is one scene running full minute, maybe better, with no dialog at all that always leaves me gasping. What’s Up, Doc? is another. Both are screwball classics.

But since life isn’t a movie, I also look for glimpses of humor in ordinary life, just the everyday encounters with both friends and with strangers―especially strangers―that take a comical, sometimes hilarious turn. These are true incidents I’ve stumbled into.

* I went to Ace Hardware and found a clerk in the plumbing isle. That never happens, a real clerk at hand, but there she was. That too was unusual, a woman plumber. Holding up a broken something-or-other that she might see it, “It’s a hard life,”  I told her. “Yeah,” she replied, “and then you go into plumbing and it sucks what’s left right out of you.”

* The church was at the crest of a long, steep hill. Roger was driving the snow-covered street up the hill to worship. His car lost traction, rotated 180-degrees so he was now pointed down the hill back toward home. His explanation for skipping worship that Sunday: “It seemed to me God wanted me back home, so that’s the way I went.”

* Visiting a friend in New York I remarked on his dog drinking from the toilet. “Look at it from her perspective,” he told me. “She might wonder why you’re peeing in her water bowl.”

* Sometimes the humor isn’t a punch line, but a lesson. I’m talking with this guy who I take for a Russian. He looks Slavic and talks like it. “Everybody says that but I’m Mexican; now I’m American. And, you want to know what I do for a living?” Sure. “I’m an executive chef; I learned all of it in America.” He started out in the back of a restaurant and worked himself forward.  I’m impressed, I tell him and I am.

“This is the real American part: I run an Indian restaurant. A Russian-looking Mexican cooking Indian food for suburbanites in Kansas City, that’s America.” Then he quotes the punch line: “Is this is a great country or what?”

* One from the Bible. Doing some idle reading I found a dry, sardonic bit of editorial snark at 2 Chronicles (21:20) summarizing the reign of King Jehoram, who “died, let it be said, to no one’s regret. He and was buried in the City of David, but not”― in case anyone was wondering about it―“in the tombs of the kings.” (Emphasis added)

And should you ever feel especially dispirited, there was Phillip, all gushy, telling Nathaniel, we’ve found the messiah. It is “Jesus, son of Joseph, of Nazareth.” Nathaniel replied drolly, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” If you are keeping up with The Chosen, you’ll know line is used as a running joke.

If ever there was a way of adding an amendment to the seven-fold gifts of the Holy Spirit making them eight, I’d vote to include humor. Of course the gifts of the Spirit are specifically imparted at Baptism while humor, on the other hand, seems to be generic to our species, so maybe it doesn’t need to be called out specifically. But if humor isn’t precisely a divine gift granted to all humanity, then I suggest it is close.

Does God have a sense of humor, cracking cosmic jokes on the pleasures and the absurdities of life? I doubt it. Not as we humans practice the funny stuff anyway. Still, at the very least, there are hints God can be playful. Remember that great Leviathan creature, Psalm 104:26, that great beast God “made for the sport of it.”

Maybe God doesn’t laugh out loud (or at us), but He seems to know delight well enough.

A former Lutheran pastor, Russell E. Saltzman lives in Kansas City, Missouri. His latest book is Speaking of the Dead. He can be reached at russell.e.saltzman@gmail.com and on Twitter @RESaltzman. This piece is slightly revised from a previous version pubished elsewhere.

Photo Credit: Dream Works