On Laughter: Notes
Those who kill laughter -- genuine, heartfelt belly laughter -- those who make laughter their enemy are of the Devil's party, and I want nothing to do with them.
Laughter heals community. In our crowded, sessile, modern world, which does not provide the sort of challenges to individual survival that give a competitive edge to those who are functioning members of strong, healthy communities, our own kind provide such challenges in the form of child molestation, theft, rape, identity theft, murder, serial and spree killings, and other horrors. If your communities aren't healthy, if we don't work together to act appropriately to deal with such threats, we perish.
Most of our communities are no longer farming communities and others like them which are so continuously at the mercy of weather and other natural hazards that they have no time or energy left over for sociopathology. We who live in urban communities must get the glue to hold our communities from some other source. The one thing that can serve as such glue everywhere is humor.
Those who laugh at the same jokes, are at least potentially, friends and thus members of the same community. So whatever hates laughter is evil, for it wills to murder community. God bless South Park, PDQ Bach, MAD Magazine, and all their comedic kin! They get us to laugh at ourselves, which we can't do when we are alienated, all alone, and afraid. laughter disarms paranoia and grief. It aborts defensiveness -- and thereby enables a little wisdom to get past our guard and enter our souls. It is that which the paranoid fears most -- and why, among other targets, many paranoiacs hate and fear Jews, whose communities are among the strongest and most resilient in the world, and thus the most resistant to predatory attacks and attempts at takeover by outsiders. (Notice that it is the modern predatory media and politicians who are leading the pack in attacks on Israel and the Jews -- who, by the way, have given the world some of the funniest jokes, comedic routines, and other forms of humor of all time. Jews have survived as well as they have as much because of their jokes and sense of humor as anything else.) Predators like the Nazi honchos and Communist organizations want communities to become to weak to resist takeover. Laughter restores the health of the world, which is justice.
Music defines community in the same way that laughter does. Are psychopaths -- the real thing, those born that way, unable from birth or even conception on to grow a conscience -- unable to take pleasure in music, or at least certain types of music? How about the visual arts? The performing arts? Can such genuine lack of pleasure in one or more categories of each of these art-forms provide accurate qualitative and quantitative diagnostic tests of psychopathology?
In laughter, we are our most human, our most mammalian, our most vertebrate, and least the creature of any particular culture -- including those that work to destroy community, such as jihad cultures.
The "right" laughter is that which most strongly supports our love for one another as neighbors, friends, and kin, and least the fear that drives us apart. When laughter supports cruelty, murder, and horror, it has fallen, entered upon the path of evil.
There is no such thing as one living organism in isolation, without community of any kind. Without community of some kind, survival is impossible. We are defined by the communities in which we do best -- and thus by those jokes we favor for sharing with others in that community.
But why jokes, rather than, say, unifying tastes in food or wines, unifying hatreds, or some other standard of measurement? Because only laughter has the power to make us willingly disarm ourselves, to share a moment of complete openness to our fellows, vulnerable to and trusting of them. Only laughter rewards us with real pleasure for doing that -- and it is that without which community is possible.
Oddly enough, it is grim Saturn Who is, according to numerous traditions, the Lord of comedy and laughter.
Terrorists are, essentially, sociopaths, a few born as such, but most trained into it after recruitment, which is generally at an early age, as young as possible. Their ability to act in concert with others is thereby at best damaged. Therefore civilization can ultimately prevail against them, for the bedrock of all real civilization is shared humor, which provides the glue that keeps men together and enables them to work in cooperation.
While laughter makes us drop our guard with respect to others within our own community, it increases our will to defend that community as a whole against outside threats. Humor has the same relationship to a community what negative-feedback mechanisms that keep our immune systems functioning properly to those systems, making sure that they attack invaders without harming the body's own tissues. Laughter thus defines the "genotype" of our community's culture, its memetic signature or "memotype," the mindset we recognize as "one of our own."
Laughter heals community. In our crowded, sessile, modern world, which does not provide the sort of challenges to individual survival that give a competitive edge to those who are functioning members of strong, healthy communities, our own kind provide such challenges in the form of child molestation, theft, rape, identity theft, murder, serial and spree killings, and other horrors. If your communities aren't healthy, if we don't work together to act appropriately to deal with such threats, we perish.
Most of our communities are no longer farming communities and others like them which are so continuously at the mercy of weather and other natural hazards that they have no time or energy left over for sociopathology. We who live in urban communities must get the glue to hold our communities from some other source. The one thing that can serve as such glue everywhere is humor.
Those who laugh at the same jokes, are at least potentially, friends and thus members of the same community. So whatever hates laughter is evil, for it wills to murder community. God bless South Park, PDQ Bach, MAD Magazine, and all their comedic kin! They get us to laugh at ourselves, which we can't do when we are alienated, all alone, and afraid. laughter disarms paranoia and grief. It aborts defensiveness -- and thereby enables a little wisdom to get past our guard and enter our souls. It is that which the paranoid fears most -- and why, among other targets, many paranoiacs hate and fear Jews, whose communities are among the strongest and most resilient in the world, and thus the most resistant to predatory attacks and attempts at takeover by outsiders. (Notice that it is the modern predatory media and politicians who are leading the pack in attacks on Israel and the Jews -- who, by the way, have given the world some of the funniest jokes, comedic routines, and other forms of humor of all time. Jews have survived as well as they have as much because of their jokes and sense of humor as anything else.) Predators like the Nazi honchos and Communist organizations want communities to become to weak to resist takeover. Laughter restores the health of the world, which is justice.
Music defines community in the same way that laughter does. Are psychopaths -- the real thing, those born that way, unable from birth or even conception on to grow a conscience -- unable to take pleasure in music, or at least certain types of music? How about the visual arts? The performing arts? Can such genuine lack of pleasure in one or more categories of each of these art-forms provide accurate qualitative and quantitative diagnostic tests of psychopathology?
In laughter, we are our most human, our most mammalian, our most vertebrate, and least the creature of any particular culture -- including those that work to destroy community, such as jihad cultures.
The "right" laughter is that which most strongly supports our love for one another as neighbors, friends, and kin, and least the fear that drives us apart. When laughter supports cruelty, murder, and horror, it has fallen, entered upon the path of evil.
There is no such thing as one living organism in isolation, without community of any kind. Without community of some kind, survival is impossible. We are defined by the communities in which we do best -- and thus by those jokes we favor for sharing with others in that community.
But why jokes, rather than, say, unifying tastes in food or wines, unifying hatreds, or some other standard of measurement? Because only laughter has the power to make us willingly disarm ourselves, to share a moment of complete openness to our fellows, vulnerable to and trusting of them. Only laughter rewards us with real pleasure for doing that -- and it is that without which community is possible.
Oddly enough, it is grim Saturn Who is, according to numerous traditions, the Lord of comedy and laughter.
Terrorists are, essentially, sociopaths, a few born as such, but most trained into it after recruitment, which is generally at an early age, as young as possible. Their ability to act in concert with others is thereby at best damaged. Therefore civilization can ultimately prevail against them, for the bedrock of all real civilization is shared humor, which provides the glue that keeps men together and enables them to work in cooperation.
While laughter makes us drop our guard with respect to others within our own community, it increases our will to defend that community as a whole against outside threats. Humor has the same relationship to a community what negative-feedback mechanisms that keep our immune systems functioning properly to those systems, making sure that they attack invaders without harming the body's own tissues. Laughter thus defines the "genotype" of our community's culture, its memetic signature or "memotype," the mindset we recognize as "one of our own."