THE IMPORTANCE OF A SENSE OF HUMOR

Excerpts from the book The Importance Of Living By Lin Yutang

For who have started wars for us? The ambitious, the able, the clever, the scheming, the cautious, the sagacious, the haughty, the over-patriotic, the people inspired with the desire to ‘serve’ mankind, people who have a ‘career’ to carve and an ‘impression’ to make on the world, who expect and hope to look down the ages from the eyes of a bronze figure sitting on a bronze horse in some square. Curiously, the able, the clever, and the ambitious and haughty are at the same time most cowardly and muddle-headed, lacking in the courage and depth and subtlety of the humorists. They are forever dealing with trivialities, while the humorists with their greater sweep of mind can envisage larger things. As it is, a diplomat who does not whisper in a low voice and look properly scared and intimidated and correct and cautious is no diplomat at all….. But we don’t even have to have a conference of international humorists to save the world. There is a sufficient stock of this desirable commodity called a sense of humor in all of us.
When Europe seems to be on the brink of a catastrophic war, we may still send to the conferences our worst diplomats, the most ‘experienced’ and self assured, the most ambitious, the most whispering, most intimidated and correct and properly scared, even the most anxious to ‘serve’ mankind. If it be required that at the opening of every morning and afternoon session, ten minutes be devoted to the showing of a Mickey Mouse picture, at which all the diplomats are compelled to be present, any war can be averted.
This I conceive to be the chemical functions of humor to change the character of our thought. I rather think that it goes to the very root of culture, and opens a way to the coming of the Reasonable Age in the future of human world. For humanity I can visualize no greater ideal than that of the Reasonable Age. For that after all is the only important thing, the arrival of a race of men imbued with a greater reasonable spirit, with greater prevalence of good sense, simple thinking, a peaceable temper and a cultured outlook. The ideal world for mankind will not be a rational world, nor a perfect world in any sense, but a world in which imperfections are readily perceived and quarrels reasonably settled. For mankind, that is frankly the best we can hope for and the noblest dream that we can reasonably expect to come true. This seems to imply several things: a simplicity of thinking, a gaiety in philosophy and a subtle common sense, which will make this reasonable culture possible. Now it happens that subtle common sense, gaiety of philosophy and simplicity of thinking are characteristic of humor and must arise from it.

It is difficult to imagine this kind of new world because our present world is so different. On the whole our life is too complex, our scholarship too serious, our philosophy too sombre, and our thoughts too involved. The seriousness and this involved complexity of our thought and scholarship make the present world such an unhappy one today.

Now it must be taken for granted that simplicity of life and thought is the highest and sanest ideal for civilization and culture, that when a civilization loses simplicity and the sophisticated do not return to the unsophistication, civilization becomes increasingly full of troubles and degenerates. Man then becomes the slave of the ideas, thoughts, ambitions and social systems that are his own products. Mankind, overburdened with this load of ideas and ambitions and social systems, seems unable to rise above them. Luckily, however, there is a power of the human mind that can transcend all these ideas, thoughts and ambitions and treat them with a smile, and this power is the subtlety of the humorist. Humorists handle thoughts and ideas as golf or billiard champions handle their balls, or as cowboy champions handle their lariats. There is an ease, a sureness, a lightness of touch, that comes from mastery. After all, only he who handles his ideas lightly is master of his ideas, and only he who is master of his ideas is not enslaved by them. Seriousness, after all, is only a sign of effort, and effort is a sign of imperfect mastery. A serious writer is awkward and ill at ease in the realm of ideas as a nouveau riche is awkward, ill at ease and self-conscious in society. He is serious because he has not come to feel at home with his ideas.

Simplicity, then paradoxically is the outward sign and symbol of depth of thought. It seems to me simplicity is about the most difficult thing to achieve in scholarship and writing. How difficult is clarity of thought, and yet it is only as thought becomes clear that simplicity is possible. When we see a writer belabouring an idea, we may be sure that the idea is belabouring him.

This is proved by the general fact that the lectures of a young college instructor, freshly graduated with high honors, are generally abstruse and involved, and true simplicity of thought and ease of expression are to be found only in the words of the older professors. When a young professor does not talk in pedantic language , he is then positively brilliant and much may be expected of him. What is involved in the process from technicality to simplicity, from the specialist to the thinker, is essentially a process of digestion of knowledge, a process that I compare strictly to metabolism. No learned scholar can present to us his specialized knowledge in simple human terms until he has digested that knowledge himself and brought it into relation with his observations of life. Between the hours of his arduous pursuit of knowledge (let us say the psychological knowledge of William James), I feel there is many a ‘pause that refreshes’ like a cool drink after a fatiguing journey. In that pause many a truly human specialist will ask himself the all important question” What on earth am I talking about?” Simplicity presupposes digestion and the maturity: as we grow older our thoughts become clearer, insignificant and perhaps false aspects of a question are lopped off and cease to disturb us, ideas take on more definite shapes and long train of thought gradually shape themselves into a convenient formula which suggests itself to us one fine morning, and we arrive at that true luminosity of knowledge which is called wisdom. There is no longer a sense of effort, and truth becomes simple to understand as it becomes clear, and the reader gets that supreme pleasure of feeling that truth itself is simple and its formulation natural.

Now it is natural that the sense of humor nourishes this simplicity of thinking. Generally, a humorist keeps closer touch with facts, while a theorist dwells more on ideas, and it is only when one is dealing with ideas in themselves that his thoughts get incredibly complex. The humorist, on the other hand, indulges in flashes of common sense or wit, which show up the contradictions of our ideas with reality with lightning speed thus greatly simplifying matters. Constant contact with reality gives the humorist a bounce and also a lightness and subtlety. All forms of pose, sham, learned nonsense, academic stupidity and social humbug are politely and effectively shown the door. Man becomes wise because man becomes subtle and witty. All is simple. All is clear. It is for this reason that I believe a sane and reasonable spirit, characterized by simplicity of living and thinking, can be achieved only when there is a very much greater prevalence of humorous thinking.