Is humor still possible?

What I learned from my breakfast with the Dalai Lama.

When I was a student at Middlebury College back in the mid-seventies, the religion department invited me to breakfast with a Tibetan monk. I was editor of the student newspaper, and the department chair presumably hoped that the invitation would lead to an article. Preferring to sleep in, I asked my news editor, Stan, to take my place. “It’s tomorrow at eight,” I told him. “You get up early anyway.”

Stan looked up from his typewriter. (Yes, it was that long ago. But it was an electric typewriter.) “Who did you say it was?”

“His name is Dolly something.” I looked down at the invitation. “It says he’s a lama, with one l.” And for a moment I thought this might be some kind of joke.

“The Dalai Lama?” Stan, who was much more cued into the universe than I—he went on to become a leading geneticist—grabbed the invitation from my hand. He read it and nodded. “You have to go. He’s, like, the leader of a whole branch of Buddhism. The holiest of holy men. I think the Tibetans even consider him some kind of god.” So I went, mostly to see what a god eats for breakfast.

In my defense, the Dalai Lama was not quite the international celebrity he is today. (And Google did not exist back then, children.) At age twenty-four, the monk had fled Tibet in fear for his life after calling for independence from the Chinese government. When I met him, he was forty years old, head of state of the Tibetan government in exile, and on a tour of the United States.

I showed up late in a dining hall. The Dalai Lama was sitting at a table with the religion professor and an interpreter. He wore drapey red robes and aviator glasses. He had a crew cut. I can’t recall what I asked him, or what we talked about. All I remember is that the man giggled the entire time. I was unimpressed. After breakfast, I banged out a paragraph on the Buddhist monk who visited campus and forgot about the whole thing.

About a decade later, I was working in Washington, D.C., and someone in the office mentioned that the Dalai Lama was coming to town. I said, “The guy from Tibet? I had breakfast with him.”

Dead silence. It was as if I had name-dropped the Buddha himself, which made it all the more embarrassing that I could recall almost nothing about the encounter. He was just this giggling little man who seemed to have nothing memorable to say.

In the years since, though, I’ve thought a lot about why the man laughed so much. Maybe he was amused by a clueless student editor. But it was probably more than that. Buddhist friends tell me that some monks do laugh a lot.

Was he laughing at me or at the universe?

The Dalai Lama had every reason not to laugh. He had lost his homeland. The CIA had had to help extract him from Tibet. He was the spiritual leader of millions, and the head of a government. Yet here he was sitting at a table in a small college’s dining hall, laughing. I’ve since come to realize that his laughter may be some kind of achievement.

Humor is one of rhetoric’s chief strategies; nearly every great rhetorician wrote about it, and for good reason. Make people laugh, and you control the pathos, the audience’s emotion and its willingness to be persuaded. Make yourself laugh, and the world seems almost tolerable.

I was thinking of this after a subscriber commented on a previous post:

“I wish I could be humorous in these times.”

It’s certainly hard to laugh when you read the news. But the Dalai Lama didn’t have to read the news. He was the news. And somehow he kept laughing. Why?

Let’s start by looking at people who don’t laugh. An old sexist joke goes like this:

Q: How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: That’s not funny.

The joke isn’t just a slur against feminists, it’s also extremely inaccurate. My funniest friends are feminists. One of them, Regina Barreca, happens to be the only Ph.D. ever elected to the legendary Friar’s Club of professional comedians. Her books include They Used to Call Me Snow White But I Drifted and I’m with Stupid. She’s a woman, a feminist, and an English professor for God’s sake, a combination that would make your average sexist envision Oliver Cromwell in drag.

Which couldn’t be farther from the truth.

When I was working at Dartmouth College in the early nineties, I invited Gina to a panel discussion titled “Is Humor Still Possible?” The other panelists included a historian, an anthropologist, and a right-wing cartoonist for the San Diego Union. I don’t recall any of the other panelists saying a thing. Gina killed, earning herself a standing ovation in the packed auditorium. Humor still possible? Affirmative. (Here’s a link to the story by Bob Sullivan, a senior editor at Sports Illustrated.)

Of course there are many feminists and other denizens of the left who aren’t the least bit funny. But they certainly don’t outnumber those on the right wing. I doubt that a person’s belief determines their ability to laugh. It’s more a matter of how tightly screwed they are to that faith.

Idealogues are not funny.

Purists are not funny.

And ideological purists…

How many ideologues does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A pure doctrine has no room for humor. The more passionate a person is for a particular ideology, and the more judgmental that person is toward someone who shares that passion, the more that person is bound to be unbearably, even dangerously humorless.

Does that mean we have to laugh to prove our sense of humor? Of course not. If you think Andrew Tate isn’t funny, bless you, that’s an indication of maturity, not humorlessness. None of us should have to take a joke, any more than Tate should have to take a punch. Successful humor depends on the audience and the occasion, which in turns depends on—wait for it—timing. And on the audience itself. (See my posts on exigence, kairos and decorum.)

Besides, the most healing humor seems to come from a broad perspective, an ability to laugh at this strange planet and its hilariously naked apes. Take the penis…please. From a broad perspective, and let’s not see a pun there, this organ is ridiculous. From a much narrower perspective, it’s not the least bit funny.

Okay, there’s a pun there.

In my next post I’ll cover Mark Twain’s mastery of the two funniest tropes, and why we need more broadminded humor than ever.