Loud Laughter, Reality, and Gallows Humor

One of the more curious aspects of the temple ceremony was the charge to avoid “loud laughter.” [Note, I originally spoke in the present tense, but evidently it has been removed–with all the recent changes I somehow missed that]. It’s like only eating meat during the winter, one of those things that was indisputably, canonically there but virtually nobody, no matter how conservative, made a point of it. 

However, I get the concept even if I’m a little fuzzy on the operationalization: avoid frivolity and light mindedness because reality with all its pain and suffering–and glory–is essentially and fundamentally serious. The other day I was reading through a Wikipedia article on the Russian Famine of 1921 (good hell those people have gone through a lot), and it had a picture of human meat displays, possibly from the human meat markets that sprung up during this time (obviously huge content warning). During this and other times in their history such as the Siege of Leningrad it was a real-life Eli Roth film; you had to be careful about letting your kids out of your apartment less roving bands kidnap and eat them. (And if you were Jewish, much of history was a real-life Purge film, where people could just kill you in.a pogrom [another big CW] if they wanted). 

You can see why the Russians aren’t known for their comedy. Life gets so gritty that frivolity almost seems like an affront to reality. Of course sometimes a sort of super-dark, cynical humor helps one survive; Yad Veshem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial organization, published the book Without Humor We Would Have Committed Suicide where they interviewed Holocaust survivors about humor in the camps as a coping mechanism. 

Still, there’s a reason that outside of these very particular coping cases one treads lightly with Holocaust and related humor. Obviously a lot of ink has been spilled about the lines of appropriateness and who can say what when dealing with different topics, but whatever the exact lines it hearkens back to the same concept that misplaced humor has the potential to inappropriately make light of something deadly serious. 

And by extension, life and existence is deadly serious, even if some frivolity and humor is okay and even necessary in our day-to-day. However, there is a kind of superficiality that those of us  in clean-cut, relatively easy environments can get into. I alluded to this in my post on R-rated movies, where we are at risk for consuming saccharine, didactic content as if it is deeply profound, and I think there is an equivalent in our day-to-day paradigms. For example, while our youth are rightly encouraged to keep journals, for most of us they simply serve as painful reminders of how seriously we took the dumbest things in our teenage years. As you become older and experience more children in hospitals, chronic pain, and unpaid credit card bills, the superficial dross burns away. (On a related note, it is fascinating to watch people near the end of life and to take note of what they focus on.) You can tell a lot about how much life people have lived by what things they get stressed out about. In a Church context, how many people show up to your mission farewell or whether you ever get a leadership calling (Or, in this space, what Elder so-and-so or this or that influencer thinks about what you write).  

So I don’t know where the exact balance is. On one hand life is deadly serious, on the other hand we sometimes need the illusion of a silly, comical, not-serious existence, and humor itself enriches life. (It is intriguing to me that the Greek playwrights separated everything into comedy and tragedy, as if the cosmic order of things naturally fell into those two categories.) Plus if we just sat in constant awareness of all the horror we would not be able to sleep at night, so some suspension of disbelief and redirection of thoughts is necessary to be a functional human being that isn’t a nervous wreck. 

Joseph Smith was open about his own struggles with this point when talking about how he had been “guilty of levity, and sometimes associated with jovial company, etc., not consistent with that character which ought to be maintained by one who was called of God as I had been.” But on the other hand also mentioning that if he kept his mind (bow) strung up all the time it would lose its spring, so in the end I think the day-to-day balance is one of those “I know it when I see it,” spiritually discerned things.Comedy aside, one of the central messages of the gospel is that even with all that the light outweighs the darkness, poignantly described by Mormon when he’s describing his own scenes of rape and cannibalism: “may not the things which I have written grieve thee, to weigh thee down unto death; but may Christ lift thee up,”