What's so funny about being a UU? (July 22, 2007 by Ann Stark)
Back in March, I was inspired to give this talk when I noticed that April first of this year fell on a Sunday. Unfortunately for me, the program committee is SO on the ball that there wasn’t an opening in the schedule until today.
That’s ok with me. If I bomb, it’ll be in front of this smaller, dedicated and – hopefully – more generous audience. Just don’t throw tomatoes if my stand-up act isn’t up to snuff.
So why would I want to talk about humor? Last week, Jim Jackson talked about 6 of the guiding principles to building a community. One of them was finding joy in the congregation. We feel so passionately about so many serious issues that the urgency could turn us all into intense scolds. Joy is deeper than humor. I’m not as deep as Jim, so I’ll stick with humor.
To me laughter is a form of prayer. It’s a way of opening ourselves to life, a way of expressing the delight we feel at being alive. Laughter is also a way of saying "Amen" and "Hallelujah" in a church that doesn't usually encourage such emotional exclamations.
Many people think of church as being a place for the pious and holy veneration of God. In church you must be serious and respectful and even guilty. And you must never reveal a sense of humor about religion or see the funny side of God. Laughter is often considered superfluous, distracting, and at times even sinful. Even here, we tend to be so super-respectful of diverse religious traditions that we treat every part of spirituality with reverence and awe.
But the people in this church love to laugh. I think it’s because humor may very well be the saving grace of religion and humanity itself. Without a sense of humor we would certainly be less wise, less loving, not to mention downright dull. The Unitarian poet e.e. cummings wrote, “The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.”
Several places on the Web referred to a totally un-credited statistic that, on average adults laugh 4 times a day, while children laugh 146 times a day. While I can deal with having a job and paying taxes and understanding escrow, reducing laugher by 97% seems like a really steep price for growing up.
Without laughter we would also be less healthy. It's an old adage but it seems to be true that laughter is the best medicine. Laughing actually changes the chemicals in our body and activates the immune system, making us more resistant to illness. It can speed recovery, reduce stress and pain and ward off illness, maybe even reduce the risk of heart disease. Humor fights anger, fear and depression -- all linked to a variety of illnesses. In the words of Mary Pettibone Poole, "He who laughs, lasts."
A Stanford Medical School psychiatrist found laughing 100 to 200 times a day is good exercise for the body -- equal to about 10 minutes of rowing. Your heart, lungs, torso and back get a short workout and a hormone that speeds blood flow and healing is released. Norman Cousins called laughter, “inner jogging.”
When we laugh we tend to shake loose from petrified patterns of behavior and belief. We can see the world as it is instead of how we've been told it is. Humor has a way of slipping past our rational mind-fields and going right to the heart of the matter. Storyteller Garrison Keillor expressed it this way: "Humor is not a trick or a joke put into words. It's a presence in the world, like grace, and it's there for everyone."
Humor enables us to poke holes through egotism and “common sense.” Whenever someone says something is just “common sense,” Gary often asks, common to whom? Humor takes a conventional wisdom, an assumption, and turns it on its head. Making assumptions saves us time, but it can make us intellectually lazy. The UUs I’ve met here are some of the most intellectually fit people I know. (That’s the part where I suck up to you so you’ll think I did a good job preparing these remarks).
One of the primary functions of humor is to bewilder us, to uproot and disorient us so that we get a new perspective of ourselves and the world. That's why most major religions have used humor, to a greater or lesser extent. They realize that humor is an especially effective way to enlighten people to the truth. Like in the story from this morning’s intergenerational moment. Everybody “knows” it’s good to be an individual, but Stephanie slams it home.
Even our uber-serious Jewish-Christian religious tradition has its lighter moments, such as in the story of Abraham and Sarah. In this tale God is having a little chat with Abraham. He tells Abraham that he is to be the founder of a great nation -- and within a year his wife, Sarah, is to become pregnant and bear a child. Now put yourself in Abraham's situation and tell me what you would do. Abraham is 100 years old and Sarah is not exactly a nubile chick at 90.
Abraham's first response was to gasp at the shock of such a thought, which is certainly understandable. And then he laughs and he laughs and he laughs. Abraham laughs so loudly that Sarah comes and eavesdrops behind the door of their tent. And then we read in Genesis the following description:
“So Sarah laughed to herself. 'Marriage bliss for a worn, old creature like me, with an old husband! That's a laugh!' And she too, doubled up with laughter. The Lord heard it, and chuckled himself, and said, 'Why did Sarah laugh and ask, 'Is an old woman like me really going to bear a child?' 'Nay, Abraham, your wife shall indeed bear you a son, and you must call him Isaac,' which means 'Laughter.'
I like to think of a God with a sense of humor. Why else would creation include the platypus? Can’t you just see Noah loading animals on the ark and wondering what the heck?!?
The New Testament also has humor. Jesus used to stories to express the ludicrous -- such as when he described selfishness as incapable of bringing happiness as a short man trying by pulling at his head to increase his stature. Then, there is the busybody, with a huge log in his own eye, rushing about trying to locate the tiny splinters in other people's eyes. And, there is the man who choked on a gnat, but could swallow a camel -- and the camel that could go through the eye of a needle easier than a rich man could get into heaven. Though Jesus is usually portrayed as a somber savior, it's obvious that he was a good-humored fool for God. I suspect the really funny stuff got edited out by the overly pious.
In Islam, there's a legendary master of laughter called Mullah Nassr Eddin. One of his anecdotes goes like this:
“In the village plaza, under a blazing midday sun, the Mullah, sweating and covered with dust, is on all fours looking for something in the sand. One of his neighbors sees him, approaches, and asks: ‘What have you lost?’ ‘My key,’ answers the Mullah, who continues to search while his neighbor kneels down to help him. After several minutes, sweating and panting, the latter asks: ‘Are you sure that this is where you lost it?’ ‘Oh no,’ replies the Mullah, ‘I lost it at home.’ ‘But then why look for it here?’ ‘Because here, my dear neighbor, there is more light!’” I suppose there’s some deeper spiritual meaning, like we should seek enlightenment where we are, not try to leech of someone else’s. But it’s a funny enough joke to get morphed and repeated as a drinking joke. At least, that’s the first way I heard it.
Zen Buddhism is probably the most absurd of all the world religions. Evidently the Buddha hisownself had a good sense of humor. The zen koans are designed to muddle up your brain enough so you can’t think of anything clearly. Thinking about nothing then gets you connected with everything. The whole concept is kind of funny.
The Zen master uses paradoxes, contradictions, repetitions, exclamations, seemingly irrelevant answers (or even refusals to answer) as means to reveal clarity through confusion.
For instance, "A monk asked Chao-chu: 'Does a dog have Buddha-nature?' Chao-chu answered: 'Mu!'"
Ling-ien was asked: 'How were things before Buddha came into the world?' Ling-ien whacked the questioner with a stick.
These ridiculous, nonsensical answers may seem inconsiderate or even brutal, but the purpose is a benevolent one, and that is to shock individuals out of their narrow view of reality, out of the beliefs and perspectives they have inherited from their culture, family, and friends, so that they can see the world from a fresh, new starting point.
And of course we cannot forget the humor that pokes fun at our own Unitarian Universalist faith. If we cannot look into the mirror and laugh at ourselves, then we will be blind to our faults and our possibilities.
Most Unitarian Universalist humor is harmless fun, but it also shows us why some people can't take us seriously. We're so far out on one end of the religious spectrum that they think we've fallen off completely. It may even give some of us doubts about what kind of tradition we have inherited.
Actually, we have a tradition of not being taken seriously, at least as far back as the nineteenth century. Louisa May Alcott, author of "Little Women" grew up Unitarian in the time of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Her father, Bronson Alcott, was a progressive educator and social reformer. Her family's circle of friends were Unitarian and Transcendentalist - experimenting with Eastern religion and Utopian communities and new forms of education. To neighbors, this was really weird stuff.
For a while the Alcotts lived on a vegetarian farm, Fruitlands, west of Concord, Massachusetts. It was not a success. Emerson complained about having to give them money all the time, and Louisa May realized early in life that she would have to be the family breadwinner some day. She reflected in her memoir, "A Transcendental Childhood," "In those days prophets were not honored in their own land, and Concord had not yet discovered her great men. It was a sort of refuge for reformers of all sorts whom the good natives regarded as lunatics, harmless but amusing."[5]
I have the funny feeling that is our legacy too. There is a strain of benevolent kookiness that runs through our history, a strain that has caused others to laugh at us and us to laugh at ourselves. It's not the whole story, but it reveals some of our better qualities. That same wacky Alcott household that never had enough money and drove Louisa May to vow she would be rich some day also harbored fugitive slaves. Bronson Alcott taught human sexuality in his school curriculum,. Their bold activities made others ridicule them and brand them as dangerous radicals.
One of the foremost of contemporary satirists is Garrison Keillor. On his weekly American Public Radio show, “Prairie Home Companion,” he makes many UU jokes, all of a fairly friendly nature. And we’re usually so thrilled that someone knows enough about us to tell a gentle-spirited and funny joke. I personally believe he is a closet UU, and possibly our best publicist. For instance, he tells us that:
“The first white folk known to have spent time in the Woebegon area were Unitarian missionaries from Boston.” Yeah. Right.
He tells us that, “There are the folks in Lake Woebegon who have a big satellite dish and get 500 channels on their TV - including the surgery channel, the fishing channel, and the Unitarian Channel, which is what the fishing channel would be like if they didn't actually put the fish hooks and lines in the water, but just sat around and discussed whether or not there really are fish.”
And he says that "Arguing with a UU is like wrestling with a pig. Pretty soon you realize the pig likes it."
So, what’s so funny about Unitarian Universalism? We take our community and our principles seriously, but for the most part we don’t take ourselves too seriously. Our laughter gives us humility as well as wisdom. To be a fool is not foolish but refreshing, to chuckle through lectures and sermons is not a sin but the epitome of sanity, and to laugh until we cry is not shameful but sacred.
Laughter is a prayer that says "Thank you life for life!" May each of us say that prayer more than 146 times a day.