"A good joke is a way to laugh"

Humor – Humor and frivolity are often linked together. British historians even tracked down the world's oldest joke, a fart joke from 1900 B.C. Humor is the tendency of experiences to bring out laughter from people and to provide amusement. Aristophanes in Olden Greek Times , around 425 B.C.E. even wrote plays that revolved around comedy and humor. He used many of the same jokes that people have been laughing about for over 4,000 years. We laugh about our animals and our sex lives, or bodily functions, and share these small stories with rare abandon to the delight of our friends and family. Humor is a brain tickle, an unexpected way to perceive the world. It sneaks up on us and then WHAP!, we get hit with the punch line, totally out of the blue. Laughter comes up as we realize the humor of the story; if it really makes us laugh, we want to then share it with some other unsuspecting person to let them feel the sudden and not expected twist. Our brains love predictability. The duality of our thinking process enjoys putting everything into two categories, right and wrong, black and white, funny and NOT funny! Funny feels good, so we keep it around in our brain lists of associations so we can recall feeling good and funny any time we want.

I appreciate humor as much as the next person or homo sapiens. A good joke is a way to laugh and feel spirits get lifted. I just can't tell a joke, much less remember them. I've never had the timing to pull off a good joke. When Latin interpreted Humor to mean something moist, I find myself as dry as burnt toast. This attribute is not in my list of gifts. But Frivolity – now there's a party happening that I am well familiar with. During my growing up years, frivolity seemed to me to be an adult label for childhood play. My nephew's daughter loves to put on her different hats, and suddenly she is different people. This all happens in the mere change of a tiara or a headband with rabbit ears or bobbing hearts; she becomes a totally different person and can act goofy with no adult trying to get her to behave. It's a marvelous feeling of being able to suddenly be transported to the Queen's garden party or a Rabbit's hole of a home, and she gets to, then, talk to her identified characters in strange voices and with strange gestures. She is not the least bit serious or sensible. She is just acting out a clown and laughing at her own antics. As she takes her princess wand, she can anoint dogs, cats, and Aunties with new titles in her imaginary kingdom.

It's precisely that frivolity that many in the adult world would perceive as having no value or purpose, that is the organizing activity of childhood. It is her job to be silly and to try out different roles in her world, and to find the fun of play-acting out different scenarios. It’s her job to be silly and to try out new behaviors in that pretend world. Her playfulness is all fluff and clowning, and yet it's appealing to the adults as our own childhoods are triggered and remembered. Children give us an opportunity to feel frivolous and silly . Most adults only get that sense of frivolity when consuming alcohol in copious amounts, or participating in cultural events like Mardi Gras. It's hard to admit to being silly, so children are a safe and ego secure way to express it. Seeing a child running around with arms flying gives me giggles and smiles come to my face, and I remember dressing my own cats up in doll clothes and running with them in a baby buggy.

This frivolity and clowning around is the work of childhood and it implants within us a symbolic valve that can be opened when we need to stop being so serious, when we need a laugh or giggle or guffaw that lightens our mood and may bring humor to our day. We all need to remember how to play with rare abandon and to laugh, for no reason other than it feels good – belly laughs that cause you to fall over and hold your sides while the dog comes and licks your face; that's the kind of laughter that heals the soul. I think it takes a frivolous child in our world to help us remember our own childhood and times we were totally frivolous – our totally UN-serious laughing and clowning around. Wearing a red hat with purple clothes – or running down a sand dune so fast that you fall over and slide to the bottom on the shifting sand, or – well, you remember your own times of total frivolity….

Frivolity may have lost its value and significance in the serious adult world, but through the eyes of the child, this IS life itself.