Humor in the time of Coronavirus?
“Absolute seriousness is never without a dash of humor.”
This is one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite theologians. Dietrich Bonhoeffer knew a thing or two about living in solemn times, spending his last days in a Nazi concentration camp before his death for trying to “drive a spoke into the wheel” of Hitler’s cruel regime.
When I arrived in Equatorial Guinea, I remember a Brazilian missionary telling me, “If you don’t learn to laugh, you’ll end up crying.” The trials and travails of living in Central Africa called forth not only the harder edges of your character (courage, grit, resiliency) but also the softer edges, particularly the ability to laugh. On the face of it, Africa, which often sits on the hot-seat of human suffering, would not seem poised to be a place of joviality and laughter. Yet visitors to Sub-Saharan Africa are consistently caught off-guard and taken aback by the joviality and laughter of its peoples, diverse as they are.
We Floridians are peculiar people, too. We often have a birds-eye view of the most devastating effects of hurricanes, yet, at the same time, we have an ability to make endless jokes and devastatingly funny memes while the cone of uncertainty barrels its way towards our houses and communities.
What gives?
Of course, I raise the question because our nation is now mimicking the response of Floridians to hurricanes, as my social media feed bounces back and forth between absolute seriousness and light-hearted humor in response to the novel coronavirus.
What gives?
Maybe humor is truly cathartic. It seems like humor is acting like a gigantic stress-reliever in the midst of our collective anxiety.
Maybe humor soothes our fears. If we can laugh at something, then perhaps we are freed from living in its shackles or in its debilitating prison of fear.
Maybe humor is hopeful, which communicates a certain type of defiance in the midst of our trials and sufferings.
From time to time, I’ve reflected on my own pilgrimage with humor. I feel like I returned at 24 years of age, after a year in Central Africa, a genuinely more jovial person. Yet, I undoubtedly saw more extreme poverty and kept my heart closer to human suffering during that year than ever before in my life.
What I do know is this: the range of our human emotions is a gift from God.
A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones. ~ Proverbs 17:22
Even in laughter the heart may ache,
and the end of joy may be grief.~ Proverbs 14:13A happy heart makes the face cheerful,
but heartache crushes the spirit. ~ Proverbs 15:13All the days of the oppressed are wretched,
but the cheerful heart has a continual feast. ~ Prov. 15:15
