“Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.” – Mark Twain
A good sense of humor transubstantiates the world. It dethrones the emperor in the mind while revealing he’s not even wearing any clothes. By maintaining a healthy sense of humor we avoid the stultifying situation of being in total control of ourselves, and the equally fruitless situation of losing control altogether.
Let us not be serious. Let us simply be sincere. Like Swami Beyondananda said, “It’s time to take humor seriously and seriousness humorously.” A certain infusion of laughter, even in its least popular form, is a prodigious help towards bearing the hardships of life. Self-seriousness gets us nowhere but closer to a denial of reality. Humor, on the other hand, gets us everywhere closer to a self-actualization of reality.
