How We Can Learn to Laugh Again

It’s official. Humor is dead.

I had my suspicions. Comedians became too cautious. Politics became off-limits.

But the Super Bowl clinched it. The commercials were horrible. How do I know? I didn’t laugh.

What was once the breeding ground for a wellspring of jokes throughout the year (Wuzzup, anyone?) has become a serious and glum affair. Instead of challenging me to LOL, the advertisers took their turns trying to convince me about the moral superiority of the organization that was trying to sell me something. I really don’t need civics lectures from automobile companies.

I am not an overly serious person. At least I don’t take myself too seriously. I am aware of political correctness and pay attention to social norms. But that doesn’t mean I’m dead on the inside.

Sometimes I need to laugh at others. Sometimes I need to laugh at myself. Sometimes, a human being just needs well-orchestrated slapstick. But I may as well be searching for the Holy Grail these days.

Laughter is now a sin against the secular religion. Laughter is cruel. Laughter is derisive. What I gain through LOLs, someone else must be losing through embarrassment or debasement. At least that is the lesson taught by societal arbiters who have gone far off base.

But it’s not too late. We can save laughter. Humor may be dead, but it can be resurrected. How?

Through honesty. Honesty with ourselves and honesty with others. The great comics of the past were honest insofar as they pointed out real-life situations with inherent irony. And we laughed on reflex- without reflecting first on whether we’d lose a friendship.

Can we get there again (if we even want to get there again)? I believe so. Honesty is not a lost art. It's inside each of us.

The first step is understanding your own frailty – and allowing yourself to chuckle about it. That’s right – your weakness is not something to protect in bubble wrap. It's something to embrace as an ironic part of the human condition.

What’s the post-modern irony? The fact that we are creating machines with artificial intelligence - and trying to instill them with the ability to emote – while at the same time, trying to quash our own ability to be emotional creatures. We are trying to design the perfect logical creatures who react on straight facts and data. And we’re creating robots too. It won’t work. Logic is a luxury – not a necessity for a human condition. And pure, sterile logic is dull and lifeless.

Maybe science fiction enthusiasts love that kind of future. It seems advanced yet anodyne. But my ideal future is closer to the image of a five million dollar robot slipping on a banana peel. You can’t beat the classics. 

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Paul Eder, PhD is a Lead Consultant at The Center for Organizational Excellence, Inc. and the co-author of FIRESTARTERS: How Innovators, Instigators, and Initiators Can Inspire You to Ignite Your Own Life.