- Charles Spurgeon said that “Cheerfulness is next to godliness!” I am beginning to think he was right.
So we laughed and laughed and laughed. Spent the better part of two hours sipping our Cokes and escaping reality.
And it got me to thinking about the vital importance of it all.
I visited Lexington, Kentucky this week. My son wanted to take his dad out for a fun evening and got us tickets for a comedy show.
I have never been to a venue that featured stand-up comics. I can laugh with the best of them but never once felt a need to go somewhere for a designated night of laughter. Still, we strolled into a room that offered three comics – all with clean content. The place was packed, and the atmosphere was curious and supportive and vibrated with the energy of folks ready to have a good time.
The performers didn’t disappoint. They related, as humorists are wont to do, common experiences…with an unexpected twist of insight or of outcome. And two of the three shared religious and church perspectives with amusing insights.
It was a most enjoyable evening and got me thinking afterward about the sometimes- overlooked value of laughter. I remembered author Peter Berger’s comment that laughter is a human technique to help us bear in mind, even if momentarily, that we are not captive to the moment we find ourselves in. Thus, for Berger, humor was “a signal of transcendence.” Viktor Frankl similarly reflected, from the horrific confines of a concentration camp, that humor was a weapon of self-preservation because it gave a person “an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.”
Humor can sometimes be an important prelude to faith. When Isaac’s birth is announced in Genesis, Sarah “laughed to herself,” reminding us that she may well have understood the hilarity of the Divine breaking into an otherwise humdrum existence. At birth she exclaimed, “God has made laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh over me.” That sound was tied to the Lord’s plan of redemption for His people. So, too, the laughter the psalmist records accompanied the Lord restoring Jerusalem from captivity – “Our mouth was filled with laughter and our tongue with shouts of joy.”
Laughter definitely has a role to play in human interaction and emotion. How many funerals have you attended where the gathered end up laughing over something the deceased did, that produces a light-hearted reaction. When that happens, as it inevitably does, I have wondered how in the world we could be chuckling at such a time as this? I have come to believe that perhaps, in that moment, laughter is a gift of God to show that death never has the last word. This is exactly the point of something called “Risus Paschalis” or “Easter Laughter,” where priests in some religious traditions would insert humor into their Easter day sermons. It was an attempt to honor Jesus’s resurrection – the ultimate practical joke God played on Evil itself.
Look at numerous studies given to laughter and humor and they lead you to believe that laughter – particularly at yourself = significantly reduces depression, anxiety and can even promote physical healing, sleep quality and higher life satisfaction. Laughter just works.
Now there are appropriate uses of humor, and inappropriate, just like everything else that is good can be warped. Most comedy clubs offer humor that is vulgar, dark, cutting, and distribute four-letter words like candy at a parade. But this place, at least for that evening, was different and had people crowded in from wall-to-wall to experience laughter without boorishness.
Charles Spurgeon said that “Cheerfulness is next to godliness!” I am beginning to think he was right.
Matt Friedeman
