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Funny business dealing with people with no apparent sense of humour. I am sure that 100% of people admit to having a sense of humour – and I defend those who are said to have none. Everyone has a funny bone. We just need to get close enough to tickle them – and there’s the problem. How to break through the barriers. Is it a problem of taking our? Is it about letting ourselves go? Is it a case of use it or lose it?
Thank God for comedy. If humour is about being ticklably close to people it becomes understandable how comedy and compassion so often come together. Look at Comic Relief.
Sr Maria Burke talks about the spirituality of humour and refers to the film Amadeus and the tragic Saleri.
Humour takes us outside ourselves; comedy is truth telling; laughter is a form of self detachment. For example, the wonderful film Amadeus can be viewed as the story of the vocation of Antonio Selieri, court composer to Joseph II of Austria. Selieri could not understand how God could gift Mozart with such talent when he did nothing to merit it and very little to nurture it. Seleri ends by attempting suicide and is placed in a mental institution. In the final scene he confesses his jealousy of Mozart and his anger at God; then he is rolled through the halls of the institute which are lined with other inmates in tragic states of mental breakdown. Selieri draws himself up as if he were the Pope being borne on the sedea gestitore, and blesses the people he passes, saying, “Mediocrities of the world, I absolve you.”
Grits and Grains 