A sense of humor – Touch The Future

I think one of the things about our country is we simply have forgotten how to do that a little bit, how to just think that things are just absolutely just so funny, just about nothing. And I love it when Michael and I do workshops, that’s a great part of it. We just are weird and we even tell wonderful jokes. So I think that sense of humor is really important.

Things to think about

When was the last time your laughed with children?
Young children love to talk about bodily functions and find them funny for a long time. Do you limit this kind of talk, why or why not?
Why is sarcasm not appropriate for young children?
Bev says that children laugh 400 times a day, but adults laugh 6. How can we preserve that sense of humor in our adult lives?

Highlights from Playful Wisdom
by Michael Mendizza featuring Bev Bos and Joseph Chilton Pearce

The only force strong enough to save us and all the other species tittering on the edge is love. But all the children of all the species can’t love by themselves. They catch love and develop the capacity to love by relating with those who love, what Joseph Chilton Pearce calls “the model imperative.” Every capacity, and love is at the top, must have a model that awakens and develops that capacity in relationship. Today we are pushed against the wall. More fear is suicidal. Comparison is fear. Jealousy, greed, me and mine, the entire ego structure, politics, mainstream media, and wars are all fear. Humanity’s fear, not love, is the cause of our crisis. If you want to do something about the global crisis, show your children what love is, with its implicit intelligence. Show them that love is infinitely stronger than fear, in all your relationships, every day. That and only that will meet and negate the crisis at its root. Buddhists describe having compassion for all sentient beings. That is my goal, to help parents and those who car for children help them identify with life, all of it, as the native cultures have done for centuries. My wish for every child is that they feel so safe, so secure, and so engaged with life that he or she don’t need to armor themselves, protect themselves with an image, that they can play with and care for life in all its forms with boundless affection—bunnies, trees, and grumpy old men with scratchy beards.

Having a sense of humor is really, really important. A sense of humor. Not put down humor. Not sarcasm. But the ability for human beings to just guffaw. And when you think about the last time you ever heard anybody do that, people don’t just guffaw. Kids do. They just laugh. I remember laughing as a kid and my mother saying for us to stop it because it was way out of hand and you’re crying, you’re laughing, you’re trying not to laugh. It’s that kind of wonderful humor that has to exist in our world. The ability to laugh at ourselves. The ability to just guffaw. One my best stories about kids doing something like this is you know little kids don’t understand jokes. They just don’t get it. This little boy said, we were doing a concert and I said does anybody know any jokes? And I always say this and somebody always does. They always run up on the stage. So I put the microphone down like this and he stood there and stood there and stood there and I can hang on a long time. I can wait a long time. Finally I did look down at him and he said, “How does it start?” And I said knock, knock, and he said, “oh yeah, knock, knock.” Just wonderful stuff, that ability to have a sense of humor. The important thing is that sarcasm is really a horrible thing and I think very often that’s the kind of humor we use on children. We had an incident in an airport where a man was talking to another man, they didn’t know each other, but one of the men had his son with him and he said, “My son is going to be an astronaut,” and the other man said, “Oh yeah,” and the little boy kind of looked up and the father said, “Yes, he’s in school taking up space.” Now that is such a horrible thing to say to a child. Kids never forget things like that. They don’t quite even understand the whole thing but I think that why would we be more concerned about entertaining another adult then taking care of our kid? But a sense of humor, the ability to laugh. And I think one of the things about our country is we simply have forgotten how to do that a little bit, how to just think that things are just absolutely just so funny, just about nothing. And I love it when Michael and I do workshops, that’s a great part of it. We just are weird and we even tell wonderful jokes. So I think that sense of humor is really important.