When my late wife Ruth and I went to a church service for blessings on our 50th wedding anniversary some years ago, the minister asked me: “Alex, in the 50 years you have been married to Ruth, have you ever thought of divorce?”
Without a moment’s hesitation, I responded: “Divorce, Father? No! Murder? Yes.” This was typical of my brain-damaged sense of humour. The congregation erupted with laughter, clapped and cheered and my darling wife and I were celebrities for the rest of the two-hour service.
Why am I telling you this? Because I had already learnt, by living a purposeful life as an educator, that there are no one-size-fits-all solutions to the troubles of the world and reality.
The slight irreverence of my retort could fly because we need a sense of humour in order to cope with the immeasurable dimensions of human folly. Often we have solutions right in our face and we don’t see them. It’s like cognitive dissonance.
If you don’t wear specs, it doesn’t bother you. But start wearing prescription spectacles, and you suddenly become aware of how many people around you are bespectacled.
In a word, we must never forget to celebrate the little nuggets of blessing that we have to forage for in the detritus of human folly, or in the slag heap of often-repeated unnecessary mistakes. Not all people respond to humour, but I think a bit of ragging and laughter can go a long way to reminding us of the need to see the blessings that surround us.
The best-helping hands are at the end of your own arms. When you lose hope, you just need to put them together and pray. That’s smart. That is a simple and valid bit of advice. While we do what we can, God will do what we can’t.
And so my column is not about literacy, or the genius of Malema’s usurping what was going to be a non-working day anyway, or the overnight miracle of one guy being placed into the office of the president and the lights stayed on a bit longer – all these occasions should make us smile, knowing that we can. It’s a free commodity.
A smile is not a state-owned entity. And yet a smile and a sense of humour are powerful weapons of encouragement, cohesion, validation, support for the times that trouble us. We are saying, without rancour or the feral inclination to confront and tear down: we are not idiots. We know what’s going on.
Sometimes, the humour is subtle, sometimes clever, sometimes crude. The top one for me is the one about the explorer who had disappeared into the Amazon Rainforest for years.
When the search party eventually found him, slumped over a tree trunk, his back a porcupine of arrows, they asked him with great concern: Do those arrows hurt? He looked at them weakly as well as bleakly and croaked: “Only when I laugh.” That is the all-time classic way of saying: “Hell, I am half dead, but I still have life, and hope and my sense of the ridiculous.”
I think Morgan Freeman’s character “Red” Redding sums it up well in The Shawshank Redemption. He says people are happier when they are institutionalised. It doesn’t require thought or effort. But that is a form of death.
Each human being is unique and individual. We should buy into our own future. We should abandon the national flogging of dead horses and explore other forms of transport. Despair lies heavily on the shoulders of each South African, regardless of race, religion, creed or colour (or are these separate categories in fact one pustule?).
As the Bard correctly said: “Present mirth hath present laughter.” A smile signals the presence of hope. It is infectious. Uproarious laughter is like a kick in the head. We need a few doses of humour for these times. Laugh, and the world laughs with you. Cry, and you cry alone.
* Alex Tabisher.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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