The Lens of Humor

How to Find Humor & Happiness in the Midst of Anxiety, Stress & Sadness

I was all of eight-years old, outside raking leaves with my parents and 6-year old brother, when I grabbed my dad’s glasses off his face. I perched them on my nose, hoping to get a laugh out of him. When I tipped my face up to the sky, trying to keep the glasses from falling off, I saw something. “Look!” I said. “A plane!”

My brother looked up and said, “So what?”

His snarky voice didn’t dampen my enthusiasm. “I’ve never seen a plane in the sky. I mean you can hear them, but you can’t see them,” I explained.

“Sure, you can,” my dad said, “can’t you?” My dad scrunched his nose and took his glasses off my face. “How about now?” And that’s how I found myself at our local ophthalmologist’s office the next day…

How does one know what you can’t see? What you can’t hear? What you can’t smell or taste? We assume that our experience is everyone’s experience. At eight-years old, it never occurred to me that there might be more out there than what I was seeing. That thought still hasn’t occurred to many who are 10 times that age.

Recently I posted a piece about humor during the pandemic. A reader shared that there was no humor at her work, in her life, or in the pandemic —…