Mirth

"A joyful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.” Proverbs 17:22

The older I get, the more I gravitate toward people who make me laugh. Not the tepid laughter of feigned politeness. Nor the heartless laughter of the bully. Nor the melancholy laughter of the doomed. Rather, it’s the laughter you feel in the depths of your being. During the pandemic, five very old friends, who had grown lonely in their confinement, began to gather on zoom for a ritual we dubbed Quarantini Time. Its real purpose was to laugh. We have continued it ever since. It has not been without sadness. One of our number died just a year ago. Our laughter helps us heal the pain.

Most mornings when I am at home, I walk along Main Street to the post office on the far side of town. Along the way, I run into my friend Aaron, an ear-ringed artist who also serves, in the summer season, as the shopkeeper of his wife’s store. When he sees me coming, he rushes out to the sidewalk for our morning conversation, which inevitably begins with his latest joke. He has a seemingly endless supply of jokes, many of them stupid, often crude, and inevitably politically incorrect. What they have in common is their ability to make me laugh, particularly as Aaron is a pitch-perfect storyteller who makes no effort to contain his own glee. I laugh, not out of politeness, but from deep in my gut, as much at the telling as at the punch line. I can think of no better way to start my day.

This has never been more vital than now, when the world has become such a serious and angry place. In Washington we have a gang taking apart our government – perhaps even our country – whose only smile is a scowl and whose idea of a joke is to ridicule vulnerable people. They are opposed by those for whom laughter has become a luxury in dark times. It may seem absurd, even callous, to talk about laughter in the face of malevolence. Or it may seem like a futile effort to escape from reality. But to me it is an assertion of humanity in a world that has grown increasingly inhumane. As we are told in the Book of Proverbs, “a joyful heart is good medicine.” The primary author of Proverbs is King Solomon, the wisest of the ancient kings of Israel.

I am writing this in California, where we have come to visit our grandchildren. Yesterday my granddaughter Molly asked me how old I was.

“I am 79,” I answered.

“79?” she mused, as if that were an unfathomable age. Then she added in a wistful voice, “I want you to stay around so you can meet my children.” Molly is six.

I may not be around for my great-grandchildren, but I feel younger and happier for the laughs their future parents constantly provide me. I also feel galvanized to work for a better world for those I will never meet.

My enduring image of a dystopian future, which has been with me since childhood, is a place where everything is gray – the skies, the buildings, the clothes, the people’s faces. It is a place where nobody laughs. It is, I think, a modern rendering of Dante’s ninth circle of hell, where the worst sinners are condemned to a realm, not of fire, but of ice – a place without warmth and without laughter.

Call it escapism if you will, but I can think of no better antidote than laughter.