We’ve always known it … that laughter is the best medicine. Now we have studies to tell us scientifically what we’ve known anecdotally since the advent of our species … laughter relieves stress and relaxes muscles … it released endorphins that can no only lighten our mood and raise our energy but it can also relieve pain. It decreases stress hormones and boosts our immune system. It improves the function of blood vessels so that it is literally good for the heart. It is strong medicine. And highly contagious. It is fast acting, fun, free and easy to us. Some who have studied the therapy of humour claim:
Nothing works faster or more dependably to bring your mind and body back into balance than a good laugh. Humor lightens your burdens, inspires hope, connects you to others, and keeps you grounded, focused, and alert. It also helps you release anger and forgive sooner.
Quantitatively speaking, we don’t find all that much laughter in the Bible … we don’t generally think of that ancient literature having a place on the comedy shelf … though that pithy proverb: “laughter is the best medicine” comes from the wisdom literature of the older testament. And if you think about it there is actually a lot of comedy in the Bible … we get characters like Noah who have never seen an ocean designing and building a freighter … we have pouting prophets like Jonah who get taken hostage and burped up in a tragic comic story of the most inhospitable Mediterranean fish … we get cartoons drawn with words by a wisdom teacher like Jesus who says things like … it is harder for the wealthy to enter paradise than for a Mercedes Benz to get through a revolving door, harder for a rich guy to enter paradise than for Bill Gates to get through the night deposit slot at Chase Bank. And then there are a few chapters of the Bible that don’t hold back their giggles at all.
In the once upon a time land of stories, there was this old couple. Sarah was never going to see ninety again and Abram had already celebrated his centennial when three travelling strangers just popped by to that the stork was on her way to them at long last. Both of them nearly collapsed not with the shock of it but rather the hilarity of the very idea. As the story goes, Abram laughed until he fell on his face and Sarai tried to be more discreet at as she cackled in the tent with tears streaming down her cheeks. They laughed because only a fool would believe that a woman with one foot in the grave was soon going to have her other foot in a birthing suite.
They laughed because laughter comes from the same deep place as tears and heaven knows, as every couple who have struggled with fertility knows, they had cried enough about it over the years. They are laughing because if by some crazy chance this wasn’t just a dream, they would really have something to laugh about. They are laughing because as Mark Twain once said, ‘laughter is the soft edge of truth’. And sure enough, as the tale goes, not that spring but the next, their son was born. And they named him Isaac … which is to say, they named him ‘Laughter.’ What better name is there for that what is born of our tears and sorrows?!
This ancient story reminds us that we have it in us to birth laughter from the same deep crevice that is carved by our tears … We have the capacity to birth laughter in response to the graceful comedy of life … to glimpse the outrageous, outlandishness of life and the sheer miracle that we are here … to find as every child does, the laughter that is born of life’s simplest pleasure … in the sights and sounds of the most ordinary moments of life. Isn’t that the great artistry of comedy … to take the most mundane moments we all find ourselves in and see the delight, the absurdity, the craziness, the playfulness that is hidden there … to take our selves lightly … and even to take the heaviness of life and lighten it with laughter …
Laughter is serious medicine … it requires no special license, no qualifications … just committed practitioners who are willing to laugh and cry our way to wholeness … to be creatures of humor and grace; comic children of the cosmos, born to love life with tender tears and gentle humor … that with each smile and tear we may work to birth laughter in the world lighting the load for one another, cutting the pain in half and doubling the joy. In the dead seriousness of the world as it is in this moment, the tonic of humor is still readily available … blessed are those who birth the laughter that harms no one, diminishes no one, belittles no one but shrinks our worries and fears even for a rebalancing moment … and connects us to one another from the deep place that sources our tears and our laughter.
-Nancy Steeves
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