Comedians in Heaven

The late Johnny Carson regaled audiences for three decades with his wry sense of humor. I'm not certain about this, but if I picked up the right vibes from watching his show, Jack Benny was his favorite comedian. Carson used Benny's famous stare to good effect. I'd like to think that somewhere in the Capitol City of Heaven, Carson now joined by Ed McMahon, is still doing his show. I'd like to think that Jack Benny is a frequent guest on that show. If you are thinking of searching for God within yourself, I can't think of a better place to start than with humor. In my opinion, being able to laugh at yourself is the portal to true self-understanding. If you take yourself too seriously, you are probably hiding something, and you are surely missing something about yourself; something important. Humor is a solvent. It dissolves pretensions, and eliminates arrogance and self-pity. Biting humor can work like a surgeon's knife to cut out the less desirable parts of ourselves. Wielded by an expert such as Carson or Benny, we learn to see ourselves as we really are, not as we think that we are. The point of this posting is to posit a truism. Without humor, religion is joyless. Humorless people tend to pass off God as a tyrant who wants nothing more than to punish you for your misdeeds. On the other hand, humor and love, like a great comedy team, sell the idea of God as something wonderful, positive, and worth looking into. In my last posting, I suggested that world has a strain of insanity. This insanity leads to war, riots, murder, starvation in the midst of plenty, and other awful results. These horrors do not come from God, they come from us denying God. When you look at a tyrant killing people to keep himself in power, you are looking at a man who has no laughter in his soul. When you look at a leader using his power to destroy rather than build, he has no real sense of humor; just sarcasm. Laughter from the heart brings us all together. The final point is a simple one. God wants us to join with Him in creating a world in which we all can live together as one people. If we are going to create this world we must bring to it all of our best points. Laughter is close to the top of the list. When I pass on, one of the things that I am looking forward to is seeing Johnny again. I hope that Jack Benny is on his show when the time comes.