Laugh Away Your Anger

Does anyone remember laughter? -- Robert Plant

Sometimes I laugh at the most inconvenient times. Sometimes I laugh at the most inappropriate things. Sometimes I laugh so I don’t cry. Sometimes the thing I am laughing about will cause my wife to furl her brow at me, as stern a warning needed for me to turn off my internal laugh track. But I also know a secret about her, she can't laugh at the things I say when we run together. She has to stop and tell me "Don't make me laugh." Then she gets a little mad because she stopped running because of me.

The thing that I have noticed is that when I laugh, I do not feel angry. The two are mutually exclusive to each other. Like pouring water on a campfire, laughter extinguishes the flames of angry immediately. With a hiss, all the meanness of your thoughts turn to white smoke and steam.

I have also noticed that laughter—genuine laughter—can quiet shouting voices in a room. Other people upset with you tend to be rendered speechless by a face cackling with laughter. Truly speechless. I have witnessed the jaws go slack and the bile of their words literally dry their throats so they can't make any noise.

Being a storyteller myself (or shameless exaggerator according to the wife), I love to tell tales with laughter in them. It doesn’t matter if the stupid joke is on me or not as long as the words generate laughter. It allows me to look back on my experiences and re-live them and also laugh about them at the same time. Take the many frustrations of my life and weave them into the part of the story that will allow me to laugh about it.

“Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.” said the great satirist and author Kurt Vonnegut. I take strength from these words especially coming from someone who suffered much with some of the heaviest of matters throughout his life. So I am going to try to keep laughing to try and keep from crying.

So a Rabbi, a Priest and President Obama walk into a bar. The bartender looks up and with disgust says, “What is this, some kind of joke?”

Did you feel any anger after reading this joke? Even if you didn't laugh.