Taking Laughter Seriously

Tom Mullen begins his book, Laughing Out Loud and Other Religious

Experiences with this story. An engineer, a psychologist, and a theologian

were hunting in the wilds of Northern Canada. They came across a isolated

cabin, and decided to check it out. When no one answered their knocks, they

tried the door and found it open. It was a simple two room cabin with a

minimum of furniture. Nothing was surprising about the cabin except the

stove. It was a typical pot bellied cast ironed stove, but it was suspended in

mid air by wires attached to the ceiling beams.

The psychologist was the first to speculate on this strange location for a

stove. He said, "It is obvious that this lonely trapper, isolated from humanity,

has elevated his stove so he can curl up under it and vicariously experience a

return to the womb." "Nonsense!" Replied the engineer. "The man is

clearly practicing laws of thermodynamics. By elevating his stove he has

discovered a way to distribute the heat more evenly throughout the cabin."

"With all due respect," interrupted the theologian, "I'm sure that hanging his

stove from the ceiling has religious meaning. Fire lifted up has been a

religious symbol for centuries."

As the three debated their theories, the trapper returned, and they asked

him immediately why he hung his stove by wires from the ceiling. He said,

"Because I had plenty of wire, but not much stove pipe." The answer to many

mysteries is much simpler than we think.

Reading commentaries on the book of Ecclesiastes is often like listening to

those three hunters speculate about the stove. They come up with complex

and confusing theories to explain this book, and the theories are more

difficult to grasp than the book itself. The simple and obvious, and

commonsense approach is the best. All we have to do is recognize that

Solomon is simply telling us how he really felt. He is not saying he should feel

this way, or that it is good to feel this way, but that it is how he really felt.

He had himself a ball, and laughed his head off, and then he examined the

experience afterward, and he concluded that laughter, like the rest of the

pleasures of life, is of no use.

You do not need any complex theory to explain this. It is simple. He is

depressed because laughter and pleasure are merely passing experiences, and

they are not permanent, and so they do not fill the human need for the

eternal. The merry monarch found his mirth of little worth, and it left him melancholy.

This is no surprise, for we have all had that kind of experience

where after a good time we become to some degree depressed simply because

the laughter doesn't last, and the pleasure of it does not persist.

This is a universal experience, and that is why it is in the Bible. It good

for all of us to know that even the man with everything goes through the same

experience we do. This releases us from the burden of envy where we think

we could escape this type of feeling if only we were somebody else, especially

somebody with everything life can offer. It also releases us from the burden

of loneliness when we feel we have emotions that the rest of the human race

does not have. Paul said in I Cor. 10:13, "No temptation has seized except

what is common to man."

What the Bible teaches is that the common man is the only kind of man

there is. Solomon was so great, wise, and unique in many ways, but he was

still a common man. That was the kind of man Jesus became as well, for there

is no other kind, and he entered into the same temptations and the same

feelings that we all experience. "He was tempted in all points like as we are,

yet without sin." Jesus understood what Solomon was saying in this book. He

had plenty of good times and laughter, but he also knew its limitations, and he

endured the experience of depression, and was a man of sorrows and

acquainted with grief.

Solomon was right, for laughter is not enough to give life ultimate

meaning. But it is, nevertheless, a vital part of the meaningful life. Solomon is

himself one of the key authorities in the Bible for supporting the value of

laughter. Why then, if he sees the worth of mirth, does he stress the

worthlessness of it here? It is because, like all other values of life, if they are

sought as goal of life, and one becomes as obsessed with them that they push

God into a secondary position, they become sources of sickness rather than

health, when this happens, as it did with him, then it is true as he says in 7:3,