Have You Had Your Daily Chuckle?

Two of the things I most enjoy doing are laughing and making others laugh. I am even willing to embarass myself for the sake of bringing laughter to others; just ask anyone who knows how I shattered my kneecap. (Incidentally, I shattered it by tripping over a couch. Seriously.) Laughter is vital to our continued mental health. Laughter is caused by finding something funny (in most cases... people who laugh for other reasons have their own problems). Finding things funny happens because of a sense of humour. People with no sense of humour suck.

Before I begin, let me assure you that I'm not going to talk about how society focuses on tragedy, and that focus saps people of their ability to enjoy shit. In fact, there have been humourless people since we were able to reason. My favourite example comes from the pen of the great writer Jonathan Swift.

In Ireland in 1729, the people were suffering from an extreme famine. Not the Potato Famine of 1845, that came almost 120 years later: there was just too many people, and not enough food and money. It was getting to the point where parents were incapable of feeding their infants and children.

Swift looked at the situation, and saw a topic ripe for satire. He sat down and wrote an essay called A Modest Proposal, in which he outlined a quick and easy solution to all of Ireland's problems at once: eat the children. He included phony research about their nutritional value, provided statistics and numbers, and even included, by some accounts, recipes for the proper preparation of various infant dishes.

Imagine his surprise when the Irish government officials took his suggestion seriously and fucking voted on it! I find it hard to imagine how anyone with a healthy sense of humour could possibly not realize the essay was a joke, but here were a bunch of supposedly intelligent assholes actually considering passing the eating of babies in to law.

My favourite group of humourless people is some (not all) Christians. Even money says I lose readers for my following explanation of why I think Jesus is awesome.

According to the Christian Bible (which is of course 100% accurate because it says it is), Jesus lived his life for his fellow man. He lived so much for his fellow man that he was willing to die for their sins. How did the people repay him? By betraying him to the Romans for painful death by crucifiction. (As an aside, if there's anyone who should have a sense of humour it's someone whose religious symbol is a dude with long hair who's nailed to two pieces of wood.)

Three days after Jesus died, he came back from the dead, just like he said he would. At the last supper he was saying things like "Eat this bread, and think of it as my body. Drink this wine, and think of it as my blood" (paraphrasing). The only way for Jesus to attain the respect he deserved was to come back from the fucking dead. I believe Jesus came back to ensure his message was remembered. That message?

Bite me.

Anyone who has the balls to come back from the grave to tell the whole fucking world to kiss his ass is okay in my book.

Jesus SMASH!

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