One of the enriching blessings of growing older all
the time is that it has a way of improving one’s
commitment to laughter — or at least it
should. The person without a good sense of humor
is a person to avoid as though he were a known carrier
of the plague.
Horace
Walpole once said, “I have never yet seen or heard
anything serious that was not ridiculous.” And
Samuel Butler said, “The one serious conviction that
a man should have is that nothing is to be taken
seriously.” It has been said that seriousness
is the only refuge of the shallow. Oscar Wilde
said, “It is a curious fact that the worst work is
always done with the best intentions, and that people
are never so trivial as when they take themselves very
seriously.”
I
remember that when I was in the service, one of the
toughest jobs I had was to keep from laughing at the
wrong times — during an admiral’s inspection, for
example. There is nothing funnier than the
seriousness of the military, especially high-ranking
military. The fancy costumes, the panoply, the
shining sabers, the serious faces — it was all, to
me, hilariously funny.
We
can be serious about situations. When a
youngster is ill or hurt, or someone insults your
spouse, you can get very serious about the situation
in a hurry. But that’s not taking ourselves
seriously. That’s different.
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The
thing that bothered me about Hemingway, as much as I
admired his work, was that I thought he tended to take
himself too seriously. He didn’t seem to be
able to laugh at himself. And I think he
suffered from this flaw in his character.
I
have found it a good rule of thumb to be slightly
suspicious of anyone who takes himself too
seriously. There’s usually something fishy
there someplace. I think this is why we love children
so much: Life is a game to them. They will
do their best at whatever work is given them, but they
never seem to lose their ebullient sense of humor;
there is always a sparkle of humor in their
eyes. When a child lacks this, he or she is
usually in need of help.
Dictators
are famous for their lack of humor. The mark of
a cruel person is that he doesn’t seem to be able to
see anything funny in the world. And, a sense of
humor was what was so great about Mark Twain. No
matter how serious the subject, he could find the
humor in it and bring it out. All the great
comedians have this ability to see what’s funny in
the so-called serious situation. They can poke
fun at themselves. There are those who believe
that a sense of humor is the only thing that has kept
the human race from totally extinguishing itself.
People
who are emotionally healthy, with a sense of
proportion, are cheerful people. They tend to
look upon the bright side of things and see a lot of
humor in their daily lives. They’re not
Pollyannas — they know what’s going on and that a
lot of it’s not at all funny — but they don’t
permit the dark side of things to dominate their
lives. To my mind, when a person lacks a sense
of humor, there’s something pretty seriously wrong
with him.
Samuel
Butler said, “A sense of humor keen enough to show a
man his own absurdities as well as those of other
people will keep a man from the commission of all
sins, or nearly all, save those that are worth
committing.”
It
took a sense of humor to write that, and only people
with blank spaces where their senses of humor should
be will find it offensive. There’s something
so healthy about laughter, especially when it’s
directed at ourselves.
There
are times for all of us when all the laughter seems to
be gone, but we should not permit these periods to
last too long. When we’ve lost our sense of
humor, there isn’t very much left. We become
ridiculous. We must then go to war against the
whole world, and that’s a war we cannot win.
* * * *
Learn more about Earl at earlnightingale.com.
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