Finding God Through Humor

woman laughingApril is National Humor Month, so that provides a reason to notice that God can be found through humor and laughter too, as these posts and excerpts remind us.

Humor and Spiritual WisdomListen to an interview with Nikolaas Sintobin, SJ, author of Jesuits Telling Jokes.

A Spirituality of the Present MomentThis excerpt from Jesuits Telling Jokes starts with a joke.

Fruits of the SpiritBecky Eldredge shares a humorous exchange with one of her children.

Encounter in an AirportJane Knuth finds a reason to laugh while she waits at the airport.

Finally, Jake Martin, SJ, is a Jesuit comedian and author of What’s So Funny about Faith? He writes:

I’d come up in a tradition of comedy that believed in unflinching truth: I believed that humor did not have to be manufactured or invented but rather came from our honest appraisals of our own lives and the lives of those around us. Being a Jesuit was such a huge component of who I was that it seemed uncomfortable to talk around it. Still, my announcement that I was studying to be a priest had met with some pretty lukewarm responses from audiences in the past. Heading to New York that weekend, I was resolute that I would not mention it, that I was a comic like everyone else, and that, just as many of them never mentioned their day jobs in their acts, neither did I have to mention mine, however enormous and consuming that “day job” might be.

. . . As the emcee called my name, I still had very little idea of what exactly I’d do. But I did say a little prayer as I walked toward the stage, a very little prayer. “Help me,” said a very small voice deep from within. And as I began my set, it occurred to me that like everything else with comedy, it was not what you said but how you said it that made all the difference. It all depended on timing and delivery.

If I said my set was perfect, I’d be lying. It was too sloppy for me. I rushed through the last minute because I had such a good response to my talking about being a Jesuit—but comedy is not math and is not entirely reliant on precision. It is the most pragmatic of art forms, and at the end of the day the only thing that matters is if the audience laughed. I told the truth, the whole truth, and they laughed. They laughed!

Find a good excuse to laugh today and share the joy.

2 COMMENTS

  1. Like the time last week when I accidentally dropped the basket of my coffee maker into the compost bin while attempting to dump the grounds, getting distracted ( look! A squirrel!) and then forgetting to take it out of the bin, moving it to curb side and yeah- now we have no coffee maker. It was a bean grinding coffee maker too. Sigh.

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