Humour is a Serious Business

... our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.

- C. S. Lewis, from the essay The Weight of Glory

Merriment can be had between people who take each other seriously, and I believe the same is the case with merriment about things: you cannot laugh at something until at first you took it seriously; it wouldn't seem absurd otherwise.

The quote struck me when I first read it. I have always felt that really wise, serious people are the ones who are most funny. It doesn't surprise me, but I realise how ironic it may seem. I think of it as like Christ turning everything upside down; the last shall be first and all that. But it is no contradiction.

People who really understand how things are can see the humour best. Cynical people (whom we often call serious or some other such word) are not understanding, though they really think they are. Not being able to see the good is not 'understanding'. Yet, there is bad in life, and being blind to it will not help you laugh at life.

The merriment and humour I mean I will lamely call the good humour. I don't care for cheap humour, where people are trying to get attention in any way, and don't care about the joke that much. These people, especially in more apparently-prudish times, might use other than crass humour, but now it is very common to be crass. I know many people do it because others do it, at this point, but I suspect it is a kind of Inner Ring thing, where you desire to be in and so you do what everyone else is doing (I think Lewis has an essay on that in The Weight of Glory, which is where The Weight of Glory essay comes from. How confusing.).

Those people who have been really fun to listen to, and knew how to enjoy the absurdities of life, have often gone through the worst in life. It doesn't surprise me - perhaps a sign of my numbness - but it is amazing, beautiful, anyway. Meeting people like this, seeing this, lifts my mood more than most things can. There is nothing like seeing the formed pearl, the purified silver.