Laughing at the Unlaughable

This post was originally posted on The Liberation Comedy Project website.

How did I get here?

When I first set out to breakthrough my resistance to public speaking, I forced myself to sign up for an open mic and I put myself down as a comedian. When looking back, I see how choosing the last thing I would be good at served me in the long run. I completely bombed. I don't think I got a single laugh. But, one woman did say my enema joke was disgusting. That's got to count for something.

After that first performance, I would have never thought that I would be doing standup again or that I'd be directing a project aimed at bringing people together through laughter. But, here I am after taking the most circuitous detour one could imagine.

Funny, Not Funny

I used to be pretty serious. And I guess I probably still am. Part of that is because I was a pretty conservative Christian for half my life. But then I realized that to create humans, God must have a sense of humor. So, I started trying to find mine. I noticed that most of the time that people laughed at something I said, it was when I wasn't even trying to be funny. It was when I was making random observations about just being human in general or it would be when I was telling a story about something ridiculous that happened to me or some situation that my neurodivergent brain got me into. I didn't think it was funny but other people did. And ironically, the things I actually thought were funny like how someone could confuse quadrature phase shift keying with binary phase shift keying modulation, were not funny to other people. Go figure.

Seeing this pattern emerging, I decided to say less about what I thought was funny since no one laughed and instead started saying things that I didn't think were funny. And guess what, people laughed. And eventually, I started laughing with them. Weird right? But, I still wasn't ready to take it on the road. It was just something I kept in my back pocket. Just in case I needed it.

Holy Hilarity

Fast forward a bunch of years and I have gone from being naturally unfunny to getting paid to not be funny. I became a pastor. Even though, I had long stopped expressing my faith in terms of a hell avoidance plan or post life real estate speculation service, I still felt like humanity was in shambles and that I had to let people know what they could do to ameliorate suffering. That meant I was always reading depressing things and trying to figure out how to get people to care enough to change their habits. Spoiler alert. Telling people these things is rarely motivating. Especially, if you're not threatening them with eternal damnation. I needed to be a little more inspiring. Fortunately, there are no short supply of folks in church ready to educate a new young pastor on how they can improve.

"Well Rev. I have to tell you. Those were two of the most thoughtful sermons I've heard in quite some time." said the man in a three piece suit in response to the ONE sermon I just gave. That was his way of telling me I had gone on too long. Hilarious.

"Also," he continued, "if you're going to have me this depressed, can you at least start the sermon off with a few jokes or maybe drop a couple of funny stories somewhere else in the service. I expect two laughs per service. I'll be counting." And count them he did. Every time I preached, he would sit right up front looking right at me waiting for his two laughs. One. Two. And when I would hit them, he would give me the slightest nod to let me know that I could go back to depressing people. The only thing was, I started enjoying it when people laughed. So, on those few Sundays when there wasn't a major catastrophe and no one was sick or actively dying, I would try to give him three, four, or maybe even five laughs. And just like that, I became the funny pastor.

How Am I?

The downside of getting a better personality is that, if you're honest, you can look back and see why, even though you were always trying to do the "right thing" and be a "good person", people punched you in the face or why your girlfriend broke up with you for that hilarious philandering drug dealer. Or is that just me?

Realizing these things, really changed how I approached life and other people. I started to see that the binaries that I categorized much of life into were more yin yangy than I had previously assumed. And I also realized that being human is hard and laughter is a gift to lighten the load. So, I decided that rather than put so much of my energy into trying to get people to see how messed up things were and what they needed to do to make it better, I could be of greater service just being with people and inviting them into greater possibilities of how to see the raw material of life in such a way that they see it as more malleable than we may have previously believed.

Static is Tragic

As you can probably tell from this post and the previous one, The Alchemy of Laughter , I have changed a lot over the years. Sometimes, I can hardly believe that the other version of me existed. But, the beauty of all of these transformations is that it has me convinced, like Rocky Balboa from Rocky 4 , that anyone can change.

During this fight, I've seen a lot of changing, in the way you feel about me, and in the way I feel about you. In here, there were two guys killing each other, but I guess that's better than twenty million. I guess what I'm trying to say, is that if I can change, and you can change, everybody can change!

What the World Needs Now

We are going through a lot right now. As a former serious person, I wouldn't blame a soul if they decided to simplify their lives by categorizing everything as Black or White, Left or Right, Right or Wrong. But, I am here to tell you that hyper-simplification is not going to save anybody. More than anything, we have to get better at embracing complexity, taking ourselves less seriously, and acknowledging the fragility that is an inherent part of being human. I think that when we are able to do that, we'll be more open to embracing each other in our common humanity instead of embarrassing ourselves because of it.

One of the toughest things for me to laugh about is my mother's dementia. Being someone that I always experienced as sharp, seeing her decline has been tough. A part of what made it tough was my concern that it may happen to me too. But, when I sat with the fact that part of what makes us human is embracing our vulnerability, not the denial of it, I realized that shared laughter was healing and in some ways brought me back into the present moment with it. Below is an example of Liberation Comedy where I take something that is a very human that folks in every walk of life contend with and I invite us to fully show up in all of the complexities.

One of the biggest lessons I learned from being a pastor was that much of the human experience is learning to hold grief in one hand and joy in the other. In so many ways they are complementary rather than oppositional states of being. When they are both embraced as part of holistic human experience, they provide harmony to the emotional dimension of being embodied. I hope that in this post and in this clip you feel permission to show up as fully as you possibly can in all of your moments.

Originally posted on LiberationComedy.org .