The most important thing in life is to have a sense of humor. A sense of humor is more important than food, because if you have a sense of humor, you can laugh even though you’re starving, while if you laugh too hard on a full stomach, you’ll throw up.
It’s often said that “laughter is the best medicine.” This actually isn’t true. Penicillin is the best medicine, followed by tetracycline and the sulfa drugs. But, judging by what a joke the Carter administration’s State Department turned out to be, laughter is the best foreign policy. In fact, laughter serves many purposes. Laughter is the way we cope with conflicting emotions. For example, your mother is dying of cancer. You’re sorry she’s dying, but she’s been in pain, so you’re also relieved by the prospect of her imminent demise. Why not kid her about it? Put on a little skit—wear her bedpan on your head and use the oxygen tent noises to pretend you’re Darth Vader. Laughter alleviates fear, too. Your mother really won’t mind dying now, especially if the bedpan was full and she saw you stick your head in it.
Humor can be an effective substitute for aggression, the way it was for Roberto Duran in the second—“No Mas”—Sugar Ray Leonard match. Sugar Ray may have won the fight, but it was Duran everybody laughed at. And humor can also be used as a defense. Humor was used as a defense in the trial of mass murderer Richard Speck. Speck’s attorneys claimed their client should be freed because one of the investigating officers, upon entering the building where all the dead nurses were found, was heard to say, “There’s something funny going on here.”
Still, what is amusing to one person may seem simply squashed flat and run over in the road to another. And what is considered unattractive and sad by some may be peeled up and sailed through the window of the girl’s gym by others. What do we really mean by the word humor? Consider the following list of common colloquial phrases involving mirth.
Yet there are many things that do make people laugh, and sometimes people laugh for no apparent reason. For instance, let’s examine a room full of teenage girls at a slumber party. They are all giggling. Let’s examine them very carefully. (We’ll say we’re doctors, or something.) What are these girls giggling about? They’re probably discussing sex. Perhaps their humor is a means of coping with fear, like the time you spilled a bedpan all over your dying mother. But there’s no reason for young girls to be afraid of sex. We’ll be gentle. Of course, we’re old and gross, so maybe they’re using humor as a defense mechanism like Richard Speck did. But Richard Speck was convicted. And we will be too if that was Mom and Dad who just pulled in the driveway.
Even if the causes of laughter cannot be exactly defined, there are still several recognizable types of humorous activity. There is parody, when you make fun of people who are smarter than you; satire, when you make fun of people who are richer than you; and burlesque, when you make fun of both while taking off your clothes. But the key to all types of humor probably lies in the folk saying “I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry,” or possibly in the folk saying “I didn’t know whether to shit or go blind.” The latter would seem to be an easy choice, but the truly funny person may have trouble making up his mind. For a real humorist is a special sort of person, a man apart, different from the rest of us. He brings to everyone around him the wonderful and unexpected gift of laughter. Think of him this way: If all the world were a church and all the people in the world were silent prayers going up to heaven, the humorist would be a fart from the pulpit.