The Comic and the Cosmic: Improvisation, Comedy, and the Way of Wisdom, Love, and Beauty

This is a philosophical smile for the work of Katie Goodman. Katie does improv workshops that you should probably consider signing up for—if you happen to want to liberate your mind into the space of breakthroughs, learn a lot about yourself and the nature of human behavior, and have a blast in the process.

In the spirit of such potentials, we might take a moment to consider why both the comedic and the improvisational express the essence of LoveWisdom, and this in turn will adumbrate the importance of Katie’s work for helping people get in touch with the beginner’s mind of Zen renown, and to potentially leap into the Cosmic Punchline. The potentials unfold in accord with how we handle them, so we do right in contemplating the philosophical ground a bit. 

This is a nuanced subject, and we can only do a little chicken scratching here, but it’s vital stuff, worth reflecting on as you think about Katie’s work and how to bring her in to your organization or how to get yourself to one of her workshops or retreats. 

What comes to mind as a place to begin is the day a fellow philosopher asked me to name some of my favorite comedians. Without the slightest thought or hesitation, I said, “Jesus and the Buddha.” That answer might not make a ton of sense at first, but we can at least note the profound fact that rib-bursting laughter often comes on the heels of, or simply altogether with, ego-bursting insights. And we can note another profound fact: Whether it comes with spiritual insight or not, a moment of laughter is a moment of thorough letting-go, a fleeting suspension in the flowing unstuckness of life, and those who begin to swim in that flow—the spiritual comedians and sacred soul comics like Jesus and the Buddha—shine with the light of a joyful heart, mind, body, soul. If Jesus and the Buddha ever met in the bardo, in heaven, or elsewhere in the cosmic playground, they would surely share a lot of smiles and laughter. 

Spiritual traditions around the world agree: Once we get the Cosmic Jokes, we lighten up. That’s what enlightenment means, and it’s why Buddha gets depicted so often with a smile. The Path of LoveWisdom is, after all, the Path of Joy. When we get in touch with the basic feel of life, it makes us smile . . . and when we smile, we draw close to the basic feel of life. If we properly ready the mind, we might find our smile breaking us through into insight. At that point, the smile might have already given way to laughter, or tears—or laughtears. 

A moment of laughter can create a temporary rift in our habitual mind, a rift in what the Buddhist philosophers call samsara, which is our overarching habit of actively misknowing the nature of self and reality. Meditation practices allow us to calm the mind enough to be able to see the nature of mind and the nature of reality, and it’s a powerful and empowering approach. But some philosophers in the Buddhist tradition have done various things to try and create that rift directly, so to speak, in order for the nature of mind to reveal itself in the rift. They might go out into wild places, get naked, and start running, jumping, shouting, and anything else they could do to create a rift in the habitual mind. Sometimes they might move their body vigorously, in the manner of a high-intensity exercise session, then suddenly STOP and LOOK. We can think of it as getting the habitual mind drunk while our awareness remains sober. The small states of mind get too tipsy to drive us around, and the true nature of mind gets to show itself as the designated driver. All we have to do is LOOK, really attend in a relaxed and open way. 

Oddly enough, some practitioners have tried to do this with alcohol. It doesn’t work very well. But there are three other circumstances traditionally acknowledged as direct openings to the nature of mind: Sleeping, dying, and making love. We can reasonably add another: Laughing your ass off. We could call it the liminal space of laughter.

Each of these circumstances can allow the nature of mind and reality to reveal itself, but they are not easy to handle. For instance, how many times have you fallen asleep? Of those, how many times have you remained aware enough to watch the process all the way down into dreaming and then into dreamless sleep? The delightful book In Love with the World, written by one of the happiest people in the world, gives some inside glimpses into an advanced philosopher’s practice of sleeping and even of dying. It’s a wonderful thing to read, like treating yourself to a box of wisdom donuts, and it gives a feel for how demanding these practices are, gentle and unforced as they may be. 

I don’t know of any such book on the practice of laughing, even though we can find many philosophers around the world who show an engaging sense of humor. Socrates had his irony that must have in some way embodied that dark chocolate truffle of a line attributed to Voltaire: “God is a comedian playing to an audience afraid to laugh.” The ancient Athenians were so afraid to laugh in the spirit of wisdom that they killed the comic (the wisest comics run that risk, but part of Buddha’s comic legacy is that, where Socrates—in a Rodney Dangerfield/Chris Rock/Lilly Tomlin sort of moment—demanded free meals in exchange for his philosophizing, and then got the death sentence, Buddha actually got the free meals . . . Nowadays, the dominant culture remains stuck with the notion of “there’s no free lunch,” while Socrates and Buddha continue to chuckle). 

Nietzsche has moments of comedy and satire (from the Horatian to the decidedly Juvenalian), and he seems to genuinely have admired people who can laugh well. Perhaps most importantly, he called for a Science of Joy to replace the dismal science that mostly lords over our lives, at least in practice. Imagine if, when asked to name the funniest and most joyful people you know, you first thought of philosophers and scientists. 

Of living philosophers, we should surely acknowledge the Dalai Lama, who goes about with such cheer and playfulness that his presence warms and opens the heart (more effectively than a bottle of brandy, and without the hangover). Would His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama shy away from making a fart joke? Perhaps incredibly, he wouldn’t! (I know you want to hear the Dalai Lama make a fart joke. This video is a few minutes long, but really worth watching—and be sure to watch to the end . . . you’ll thank me, and you’ll share it like comedic candy for the soul—or paleo, gluten-free superfood for the soul.) 

Of the literary philosophers, Vonnegut, who probably imbibed rather deeply at Nietzsche’s well, achieves comedy precisely because he achieves philosophy. Robert Heinlein, too, deserves recognition for expressing the interwovenness of the Cosmic and the Comic. His character Valentine Michael Smith is a human born and raised on Mars by Martians. The Martians send him to Earth in order for them to understand humans—for if Smith can understand them, the Martians will too, via psychic connection. 

Smith spends most of the novel not fully understanding humans. But he also spends most of the novel unable to laugh. His breakthrough insight into humanity comes when he is able to laugh for the first time—and he sort of laughs at samsara, which, though somewhat ambiguously described in the novel, usually means entrance into the Cosmic Punchline. Smith announces after a fit of laughter that he finally groks humans, and he also finally groks love (the latter clearly a mark in favor of Smith as Cosmic Comedian). Incidentally, the word “grok,” signifying an intimate and profound understanding, was coined by Heinlein in writing that novel. The word often feels apt to express arriving at an intimate understanding of things in part because it sounds kind of silly. Spoken by a native Martian, it probably sounds like a burp. 

Who can resist reference to Vonnegut at a moment like this? All this talk of Martians, brings to mind Vonnegut’s warnings about Plutonians: 

You may have noticed that more and more people are rising to the top of our society who are not only indifferent to the arts, but to jokes and cheerful sex, and to all sorts of human playfulness. I have noticed this, too. And this is what has led me to believe that flying saucer creatures from Pluto have invaded us.  

. . . . We would perhaps welcome them, if it weren’t for their humorlessness and pitilessness, and their blather about national honor—and for their love of war. 

. . . . We could try to beat them politically. But Plutonians engage in power politics and nothing but power politics from junior high school on. What Earthling could do that? Let us face it: an Earthling’s sense of humor and fascination with sex makes it impossible for him or her to concentrate seriously on anything, even his or her survival, for more than an hour at a time. 

Our best hope, it seems to me, lies in our banding together in order to be proud of being Earthlings. The Plutonians, like all invaders, want the natives to be ashamed of their own ideals and dreams. We might choose as our motto: “Earthlings are beautiful.” 

Obviously, I’m a fan of Vonnegut, but the whole speech is worth reading. Vonnegut makes an important point: We Earthlings need to appreciate ourselves in a deep and sincere way . . . and improving our ability to attend might in fact help with that. Part of the basic philosophical prescription for a healthy life: Attend better, appreciate better, know better, feel better. It goes altogether, framed by an ethical way of living. 

The Buddha taught a path of joy (and he said, “It is to one that feels that I teach . . . not to one that does not feel”). He realized that a joyful mind has a well-put-togetherness, an inherent capacity to attend, because joy becomes self-stabilizing. This is why, if you go to one of Katie’s workshops, you will find it easy to pay attention. The mind of comedy and the mind of improv are the mind of beauty that opens the door to wisdom and love. 

To check his students’ understanding of reality (i.e. their understanding of true joy), Buddha walked out one day to an audience patiently waiting for serious teachings, teachings to save the soul, teachings to save the world. He walked out to this assembly of seekers and, instead of pontificating, he held up a flower. One guy cracked a smile. Everyone else remained too afraid to laugh. Buddha looked over at the smiling guy and knew he had found his successor. (Then maybe he looked up at God and said, “I know just how you feel.”) 

Perhaps unsurprisingly then, one of the ultimate archetypes of the interplay of the Cosmic and the Comic can be found in the Buddhist traditions. Coyote is spectacular. Raven is marvelous. We could name a lot of incredible figures who walk the razor’s edge of humor. But the Laughing Buddha, also known as Hotei, deserves as much respect as the best of them. His big, soft belly reminds us of his boundless heart, a heart abundant in tolerance/inclusiveness and limitless in generosity. He carries around a magic sack, and when he reaches into it, you get just the thing you need to lighten you up at that very moment . . . a piece of chocolate for one person at one time, a flower for another person at another time, a sex toy for yet another, a cup of tea here, a whack on the head over there. 

The archetype of Hotei is shockingly embodied at certain moments in the history of LoveWisdom, such as when the philosophical sage Yunmen was asked, “What is Buddha?” and he instantly replied, “A sh#t stick.” (Before toilet paper, the cleaning implement of choice was, in some contexts, a stick.) 

That line may seem uncouth for the present context too, since we are professionals with an ego to uphold. But humor in the philosophical traditions often illustrates the need for a sacred kind of anarchy (wise, not merely defiant), a skillful challenge to rigidity and stuffy decorum, a need to remember and even appreciate our fallibility and folly, the need to loosen up and blow the cobwebs out of our minds, the need to yank ourselves out of the groove of habit. 

Habit . . . that’s an important topic in LoveWisdom, and we touched on it above because of its relevance for understanding the relation of the Cosmic, the Comic, and the Jazz. We have perhaps heard that the essence of the comic has to do with setting up or triggering an expectation, and then defying it. In other words: Lull us into some form of habit energy, then suddenly pull the rug out, reminding us of the groundlessness no one escapes, the groundlessness that is the mystery itself. 

Humor gestures toward the mystery, while our habit energy ordinarily runs the show in a way that covers over the mystery. But in the tug-of-war between mastery and mystery, mystery will always win. Comedy reminds us of that. Those who seek mastery would do well to instead align with mystery. They will achieve even higher levels of performance while keeping more friends, and realizing much more of their potential as total human beings. 

If we could characterize the mind of wisdom, love, and beauty—not easy to do, since it defies description—we might characterize it as spontaneous and clear. This clarity is sometimes referred to as luminosity, which does not mean a literal “light” in the mind, but the unity of openness and knowing. This knowing is not the “knowledge” we are used to, since it hasn’t gotten fragmented into a knower and a known. The clarity and spontaneity relate to the unobstructed nature of our mind. The nature of mind is so unobstructed that it can even manifest our obstructions, our hang-ups, our habits. If you are getting a little confused, that’s good. We aren’t seeking obfuscation here, but the nature of mind defies the conventions of the mind we habitually get hooked on (in other words, we should discern a difference between mind on the one hand, and the nature of mind on the other). 

In any case, the point is that the essence of mind is more like jazz than like anything pre-scripted (hence one of the problems with every attempt at so-called artificial intelligence so far: computers get faster, and by brute force methods they can out-maneuver living minds in certain contexts, but they arguably fail to show genuine intelligence because they do not yet possess spontaneity). The spontaneity of mind gives us the move from reptile to hummingbird, from mammal to human being. For those who think of that as a statement of poetic license, let us recall that Gregory Bateson made a convincing argument in his Mind and Nature that evolution is a mental process—a surprising notion to many in the dominant culture. 

The mind of jazz is the mind of the moment. Any time we enter the improvisational soul of life, we have to attend, get more present (not the best term, but it functions okay). We start to feel how much more alive and alove we can be, how much of our own life and the lives of others we leave unfulfilled in our habitual way of living. 

So . . . does all this mean that, if you take Katie’s workshops you’ll be enlightened? Maybe! There’s no reason to reject the possibility out of hand, and I actively wish it for you. However, if things were as simple as that, the cast of Whose Line Is It Anyway would be a council of sages, and jazz musicians would all be buddhas and saints (well, there is a St. John William Coltrane Church in San Francisco, and for all I know the cast of Whose Line is at one with the divine, but on the whole, aside from rare exceptions, there’s no great track record of profound spiritual awakening through comedy or jazz as such). 

This sort of fits the old notion of, “all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares.” The awakened heart-mind-body-world is the mind of jazz, the mind of laughing buddhas and saints, but not every laugh or every jazz state of mind is fully awakened. Or, as Freud might have put it, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar (and many a shaman would, with big smiles and warm but sadly ironic laughter, heartily agree with him). 

But laughter and an improvisational mindset have incredible things to offer us. What they demand from us in order for us to realize their wondrous potentials is a spiritual framework. Approach Katie’s workshops with some genuine rootedness in wisdom, love, and beauty—which means concrete, daily practice and a healthy relationship with a venerable tradition, whether Christian, Hasidic, Sufic, Platonic, Daoist, Buddhist, Indigenous, or whatever—and you open up more of their potential to help you grow. 

By all means, take Katie’s workshops—because she is a creative, intelligent, skillful, sensitive, and insightful person, because you will have loads of fun, and because these workshops offer so much potential for transformational insight. And thus, it behooves you to give yourself permission to get the most out of them, and that in turn invites you into the practice of LoveWisdom—any authentic practice you feel drawn to, from Advaita, Bahá?í, and Christianity, to Yoga, Yoruba, and Zen. Practice deeply enough, and the laughter you experience with Katie’s skillful guidance could liberate you in unexpected ways. From what I gather, unexpected insights happen a lot in Katie’s workshops, and we speak here of deepening and broadening those potentials. If you’re going to go, maximize the impact on your own soul and the soul of the world—but without getting precious about it. That’ll take the fun out. 

For those who cannot attend such workshops, the improvisational mind can be practiced at home, even alone (though, community is ultimately essential). One of the best families of practice for entering the jazz state of mind is the family of Zen arts, including tea ceremony, flower arranging, and, perhaps most especially, the simple brushing of an enso or “Zen circle”. 

Why might the enso be a pinnacle of improvisational art (and, often enough, of comedy too)? Because you will know exactly what is going to happen, and yet have no idea what is going to happen. You know you will brush a circle . . . but you will have to improvise every single millimeter of it, and the circle may come out funny, sad, wobbling, singing. The slightest exit from the present moment will show up in the brushwork, and the opportunity will remain for you to get out of the way, let the mind rest, allow the nature of mind to express itself directly. Knowing the general idea of what should happen, you find yourself free to forget yourself, and enter into the mystery of the unfolding of the cosmos. Forgetting the self, you discover the essence of the laughing, improvisational dance of life. 

We can recall here that, in the liner notes to Kind of Blue, one of the greatest Jazz albums of all time, Bill Evans wrote about Zen brushwork. And if any doubt remains about the interwovenness of the Cosmic, the Comic, and the Mind of Jazz, we can remind ourselves that the divine so loves the inherently improvisational nature of reality that one of Sophia’s favorite punchlines comes as some variation of, “But . . . I had plans!” (Sophia can be thought of as the feminine aspect of the divine, the manifestation of divine wisdom, or the feminine name for the nondual divine. In any case, She is the Beloved of every philo/sopher.) 

If you decide to give any art form a try, please do so as ethically as possible. For instance, in the case of Zen brush practice, you can easily find bamboo brushes online, as well as natural pigments (you will need black pigment at minimum, and gum arabic for a fixative). Avoid plastic bottles of pre-mixed ink, plastic brushes, etc. Use sustainable papers. As the artist and sage Chogyam Trungpa put it, “The question is: How are we going to organize our life so that we can afford to produce beautiful things, not at the expense or the suffering of others?” He also said, “Genuine art . . . is simply the activity of non-aggression.” Given all the competitiveness, atomization, and aggression we sometimes see in our culture, that’s a good punchline to end on. 

For more about Katie Goodman, visit her website. For more about the interplay of the Cosmic, the Comic, and the Improvisational, visit the present moment.