Humor has as many varieties as love, God, and the weather. It cannot be pinned down, though philosophers and psychologists have tried through millennia. Aristotle, Plato, Sophocles, Kant, Descartes, Schopenhauer, Freud, and Kierkegaard are only a few, plus gaggles of comedians. 

Everyone has a theory. Some link humor’s beginnings to the aggressive play of young apes. Others believe it is bestowed as a divine gift of a beneficent god. Plato protested the “divine gift” theory, claiming laughter was demeaning especially of gods.

  If anyone represents men of worth as overpowered by laughter we must not accept it, much less of gods.—Plato’s “Republic,” c.380 BC

Plato thought laughter overrides rationality and self-control, but what is rational? Things fall apart. Earthquakes, floods, fires, catastrophic illnesses, financial loss, wars, ethnic cleansing, soap in the bathtub, crazy people with guns, crazy people who don’t want gun control, love turned to disinterest.

Early theories of humor include the Superiority Theory claiming the cause of laughter is feelings of superiority and the Relief Theory claiming laughter is the release of nervous energy. Freud felt we laugh as a way to release the tension in our bodies from suppressed feelings—dirty jokes being an example. Ha ha.

The most commonly held theory today is the Incongruity Theory. We expect one thing to happen and something else is delivered up, violating our mental patterns. Somehow this is funny, though mostly when we see it rather than when it happens to ourselves. Then it may take a while, or never, to laugh.

Being amused may not be rational, but it is lifesaving. Sometimes humor simply rushes in to preserve our sanity and our ability to make it through another day. 

  Perhaps humor’s largest function is to detach us from our world of good and evil, of loss and gain, and to enable us to see it in proper perspective. It frees us from vanity, on the one hand, and from pessimism, on the other, by keeping us larger than what we do, and greater than what can happen to us.—Editorial in the “American Journal of Psychology,” October 1907

The siege of Sarajevo lasted from April 1992 to February 1996. Snipers in the Bosnian Serb forces killed over 10,000 people, primarily Muslims, in the city by picking them off one by one from vantage points in the surrounding hills. I was there in 2002. A young man and I were walking along a sidewalk when he started to laugh.

“My friend was killed in exactly this spot. We were right here. He was afraid of being shot so he made me walk on the outside. Bam, he’s the one they got.”  Laughter. “I warned him he should stop being so afraid.”

Oppressed people are experts of dark humor. Humor steps in when hope is small. It is a moment’s detachment from the dark, a kind of enlightenment. 

  Humor is not a personal or a national monopoly. It’s as free as salvation, and, I am afraid, far more widely distributed. But it has its value, I think. The hard and sordid things of life are too hard and too sordid and too cruel for us to know and touch them year after year without some mitigating influence, some kindly veil to draw over them, from time to time, to blur the craggy outlines, and make the thorns less sharp and the cruelties less malignant.—Mark Twain, 1905

It seems this writing should have more humor in it, but I’m taking humor seriously.  

When my father was dying, I slept on a cot next to his hospital bed. One night he began laughing—a rollicking laugh through cancerous lungs. I jumped up.

“Dad? Dad?”

“It’s all been a joke! The whole thing has been a joke!” 

He was lit up, joyous. He saw an ultimate incongruity. He saw love, peace, and harmony before, after, and around his life’s pains, troubles, losses, illness, even his death. It made his life with its difficulties a divine joke. The injuries were of no consequence. At least, not anymore.

There is a reason the Buddha smiles.

  A bird sings in the silence after a disaster and we do not know if it is a rejoicing for the return of quiet or if the bird is checking where the other birds are—as family members check to see who is alive under the rubble. 

This is not a joke. They are just words as I finish writing about what we do not know but find life-giving.