As someone who keeps a feelings wheel close by to help me name my emotions, I’m a natural choice to offer a final good word on the theme of joy. According to my chart, joy is one of “the places we go when life is good.” But what about when life is hard?
“It’s hard to write jokes right now. Nothing feels funny because everything feels heavy,” I complained to my stand-up comedy teacher, Stephen Rosenfield, from The American Comedy Institute.
“Everything is funny,” he said, unfazed. “You got to sit with it until you find the funny.”
Stephen and I recently connected during my Louisville Institute-funded and congregation-supported sabbatical exploring stand-up comedy. I had long sensed that stand-up comedians, who engage a diverse audience of strangers, have something to teach preachers proclaiming the good news. The best comedians can talk about hard things in disarming and insightful ways. Sure, they make you laugh, but they also speak truth. Comedians bring complete strangers into one joyful community united by laughter. They find the funny even when everything feels hard.
At the time that I was grumbling to Stephen, someone had just made an assassination attempt on a presidential candidate. As I write today, the world feels just as heavy: catastrophic floods, raging fires, endless wars, political division, crushing burnout, unequal justice and churches uncertain about what the future holds. As you read this, something will likely try to steal your joy. The comedy critic Jesse David Fox echoed Mr. Rogers when he said, “If it’s mockable, it’s manageable.”
Laughter has that kind of power. It can disarm tyrants by exposing their insecurities and giving others the courage to speak out. Laughter and tears often go together with the power to heal. It is always a special moment when a family gathers at the bedside of a dying loved one and, through their tears, someone shares, “Remember how Grandpa always used to quote Monty Python? I can hear him now, ‘I’m not dead yet!’” (True story.) Comedy’s power is its ability to hold joy and sorrow, to invite us to sit in their midst and find the funny without dismissing or demeaning what is hard.
Frederick Buechner said both our hope and hopelessness bring us to church on Sunday mornings and that “any preacher who, whatever else he speaks, does not speak to that hopelessness might as well save his breath.” We can find the funny when we bring our hope and hopelessness before God. As I share my sabbatical experience with my congregation, I’ve discovered that people need permission to laugh at church. We are good at sitting with what’s hard, but we have a long way to go to find the funny.
I’m not the only Presbyterian who needs a feelings wheel. Our tendency to choose head over heart led the late Peter Gomes to quip that Presbyterians do things so “decently and in order [that] they prescribe joy as a command, joy as a duty” in the Westminster Catechism. Did you hear that, Presbyterians? It’s your God-ordained duty to laugh!
Laughter heals, creates community and makes joy contagious. You see it in the knowing nods and laughs of those gathered. People lean over to complete strangers to tell them, “That’s so true!” The good news of finding the funny is not that it fixes everything but that whatever is hard or heavy in life can be faced and is never final in Christ.
