Humor--the Measure of the Mind

“It takes courage to live,” said Jerome Fleishman, “⎯courage and strength and hope and humor.” Certainly humor has relieved much pressure, has saved many people, has served many purposes. “With the fearful strain that is on me night and day,” said Abraham Lincoln, “if I did not laugh I should die.” “In my belief,” said Winston Churchill, “you cannot deal with the most serious things in the world, unless you also understand the most amusing.” But along with the saving wholesome side of humor, there is also the inconsiderate, the perverted, and the overdone side. “Take heed of jesting,” said Thomas Fuller, “many have been ruined by it.⎯It is hard to jest, and not sometimes jeer too, which often sinks deeper than we had intended….”

“Everything if funny,” said Will Rogers, “as long as it is happening to somebody else.” In all humor we should put ourselves in another person’s place.

Among the most misguided and offensive kinds of humor is that which suggests unwholesome, unsavory situations. Humor based on low-minded stories, on immorality, on evil intent is a gross misuse of a great gift. Evil is bad enough when it appears on the serious side, but evil that seeks acceptance by working its way in with a laugh, by insinuating itself on the supposedly funny side, is viciously deceitful.

Low-minded humor is all the more insidious because it says, in a sense, that what is filthy is funny. Whenever we fail to recognize the real face of evil, and let it masquerade as something acceptable, whenever we accept what is evil-minded as amusing, we have prostituted a great gift. Always we must distinguish between what is funny and what is merely filthy, and never give the credentials of humor to what is low-minded or immoral.

Humor that cuts, humor that embarrasses, humor that hurts or that harms; humor based on indecent situations cannot in good conscience be considered acceptable.

How wonderful to have a sincere, sensitive, discriminating sense of humor, but how unfortunate is a crude insensitive, inconsiderate, or unsafe sense of humor.

What amuses, what a man laughs at, may be the measure of his mind.