A Language We Haven’t Learned to Speak

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"A Language We Haven't Learned to Speak" by Rev. Mary McKinnon Ganz.  June 21, 2009

     My father was a funny guy, the kind of father who made up silly songs. We had a squash-faced boxer dog named Joe, and my dad would put on an imaginary straw hat, lift an imaginary cane and pretend he was the barker:

     Step right up! Come see Joe, Joe, the dogface boy, who neither eats, drinks nor sleeps underwater. He is very fond of peanuts. Often in the night he can be heard to call out to his mate: gonk gonk ginny gonk.

     I know it’s not so funny now, but when you’re four and you want nothing more than for a grownup to pay you some attention, it’s hilarious – at least for the first 350 times you hear it.

     I would giggle, and Joe would wag his little stub of a tail … uproariously. Joe adored my father, and laughed at all his jokes. Didn’t matter a bit to Joe if he happened to be the butt of them.

     Do you have stories like this from your own childhood? Stories that make you smile and also wince a little bit, because your grownup self can see the pain and struggle of that small being you were. Perhaps you remember the characters with affection, perhaps also with judgment – a father, a mother, a relative who was always ready for fun, but in a way that wasn’t totally safe. Remembering the complex of your own feelings in that moment, the happiness and the excitement. I imagine the little boy waltzing with his papa in the poem Rev. Michael read, clinging to his shirt and giggling hysterically, feeling the father beat out the rhythm on his head, painful and not painful. I know that giggle – happiness mixed with fear. Is that what laughter is?

     A confession: I chose this sermon topic thinking that on the first day of summer, the longest day of the year, on a Sunday after our congregation’s annual meeting – which was … great! and also … long …  that on such a Sunday, it would be good to laugh, maybe even get silly together.  But what I’ve found is that laughter is a damn serious topic. Deadly serious. So if you came this Sunday morning thinking it was going to be Saturday Night Live, you are very mixed up, but besides that, I have to disabuse you of the notion that there’s anything funny at all about laughter.

     Well, I suppose it’s funny when somebody laughs so hard that milk comes out of their nose.

     Laughter has been studied down through the centuries by philosophers and, more recently, by scientists. It turns out that apes laugh, and you can find some great videos on you-tube of chimpanzees giggling. Rats, too. Google “laughing rats” and you will find a scientist discussing very seriously how he makes rats chirp with laughter by tickling the backs of their necks, at the very spot that rats nibble each other when they play together. The rats like this tickling – you can tell by how they follow the scientists’ hand around the cage, as if to say, “Do it again!”

     In chimpanzees, it’s been observed that baby chimps initiate play with their mothers by biting them. Mothers respond with tickling their babies, and the babies laugh. Laughter elicits more tickling, and also signals the mother that the tickling is pleasurable, “just about right.” It’s a complex social interaction in which the baby chimp calls the shots.

     I want to stop here and say thanks to Keo Miller, a member of this congregation who wrote a paper for the Bowen Center that pulled together this scientific research to examine the social function and evolution of laughter, especially within an emotional system like a family.  The scientists and most of the philosophers agree that laughter is inherently social; it is rare for an individual to laugh much in a room alone by her or himself. Infants develop laughter about the same time as they begin to be aware that they are separate beings from their caregivers. Laughter is social. The purpose of laughter, however, is a matter about which philosophers disagree.

     Plato, Aristotle, Henri Bergson in the 19th century and F.W. Buckley in the 21st think laughter is always in some measure a means of social control. Some of them see it as always establishing a power relationship, laughter as a tool for one-upping and setting the social rank or pecking order within or between groups. I resist this dark view of laughter. What about that laughing baby that 85 million people have watched on You-Tube? What about any laughing baby? What does that joy have to do with social control?

     Well, what do you do when you make a face at a baby and the baby laughs? You do it again, don’t you? I do – I want to hear that sound as much as I can, and I’ll keep on making faces until I notice that the baby’s laughter is beginning sound a little frayed, maybe even a little tearful, which signals me that the baby is tiring of this game. So who’s in charge here? The baby, in social-science language, is controlling my behavior, first by laughing, then by the quality of his laughing.

     But I differ with Plato and with Buckley, particularly, who says that laughter always implies power over somebody, always involves a sense of superiority, and in fact creates that superiority.

     In his book, “The Morality of Laughter,” Buckley explains this as game theory: two against one, a wit and a listener who align themselves against the butt of a joke. Or sometimes it’s whole groups of people who share a joke against other groups, the way my Scottish ancestors may have told jokes on my Irish ancestors and vice versa, or residents in one city neighborhood tell stories about the residents of a different neighborhood.

     This is where it gets dangerous, isn’t it? We all know that jokes and laughter can be vicious. What we laugh at and what we don’t laugh at tell a lot about who we are. Do we summon our courage and object when someone in our midst makes a homophobic joke, or a racist or sexist one – take your pick? Do we at least refuse to ally ourselves with the person making an offensive joke, by not giving them the satisfaction of our laughter? The complex of emotions at such a moment testifies to the power of laughter, of silence, and of speaking up.

     Where does empathy come in? In such a situation, I definitely have empathy for the laughed-at group, but I also may feel sorry for the benighted person who made the racist joke. I may not want to embarrass them by calling them on their loutishness. I may not want to endure what I fear will be their judgment on me, probably a defensive judgment, for being “politically correct.” Such a moment is a true test of values. How will I respond?

     There’s a lot more to say about political correctness, but that’s a different sermon. I bring it up here because we can’t ignore the role of ethnic humor in building solidarity among one group at the expense of another. How does the equation change, I wonder, when it is a relatively disempowered group in society or system, poking fun at a relatively powerful group? Certainly one of the funny things in life is upending the expected order of things. We love to laugh, say, when a highly dignified minister puts on a funny nose or a funny hat. Is it okay, then, to make a joke that serves the purpose of evening out power, if only in the instant of our laughter? These are questions that are unsettled in our midst, and we may laugh, but it will be nervous laughter, and we will be looking around to see who is laughing and who is not.

       I made a joke on Facebook the other day about being white. In his “I Believe” statement last week, Gary Bogle encouraged those of us who are white to affirm our racial identity, and so when one of my colleagues jokingly called me a wild commie pinko radical on Facebook, I flashed back with, no, I’m a WHITE commie pinko radical or something like that, because I was promoting a program to wear white knotted ribbons in support of marriage equality … but then I thought, omigod, will somebody think that’s a white supremacist statement? These questions are not settled, and so we are sometimes scared of our humor.

      What about laughing at ourselves? How does that figure in the power equation? Buckley says this too is about power, and also about solidarity. If you get the joke, you’re “in,” one of us.  I get annoyed sometimes at Garrison Keillor’s jokes about Unitarian Universalists, but then I go tell them myself, on ourselves.

      How many UUs does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

      There are many answers to this question; you may choose your own. That’s funny, and it’s not even the punchline. Some of the punchlines to this joke are not appropriate for a worship service. Here’s one that might play pretty well on the Sunday after the annual meeting:

      How many UUs does it take to screw in a lightbulb? 300 - 12 to sit on the board which appoints the nominating and personnel committee. - 5 to sit on the nominating and personnel committee which appoints the House committtee. - 8 to sit on the house committtee which appoints the light bulb changing committee. - 4 to sit on the light bulb changing committee which chooses who will screw in the light bulb. Those 4 then give their own opinion of "screwing in methods" while the one actually does the installation. After completion it takes 100 individuals to complain about the method of installation, another 177 to debate the ecological impact of using the light bulb at all, and at least one to insist that back in her day - the lit chalice was quite enough.

      Back to being serious for a moment though. I might be able to agree with Buckley’s analysis that laughter is always about power if I did not disagree so heartily with his analysis of what power is. Buckley claims that love and power have nothing to do with one another; that a person must in fact surrender power to experience love, and I have learned to believe, following Martin Luther King, that love without power is sentimental and anemic, just as power without love is reckless and abusive. No, I think Buckley is right this far: one has to be able to let go of power to experience love, but it is the letting go of a juggler, opening one’s hand to receive, not holding on, but using power to keep the balls moving.    

      Buckley drops the ball because he fails to explain the laughter that Sufi poet Hafiz speaks of:

(Laughter)
is happiness applauding itself and then taking flight
To embrace everyone and everything in this world.

O what is laughter, Hafiz?
What is this precious love and laughter
Budding in our hearts?

It is the glorious sound
Of a soul waking up!

      Or in the words of the contemporary American poet, Galway Kinnell: Laughter is our stuttering in a language we have not learned to speak yet.

      Stuttering in a language we have not learned to speak yet.

      I believe there is a laughter beyond power over another, beyond fear -- a laughter of pure joy, life affirming life. As even Buckley says, “only joy answers the fundamental question of existence” – that big question of what is life for, what is it’s purpose, what does it mean that we live – “only joy answers” that fundamental question, “since it stills the question. An explosion of laughter, like the dance …, destroys philosophic doubts and gives us the confidence to know that we are worthy of life and do not wholly die.”

     And I would add, all of us, all are worthy, nobody is left out.  We can know that we are worthy of life, and not at anyone else’s expense. That is the glorious sound of a soul waking up, that laughter that does not assert power over anyone, laughter that sees that all of us belong, every one. That is the language we have not learned to speak yet. But we’re learning. In beloved community, we are learning.