When life can be taken very lightly, we can laugh at it. But what allows us to be able to laugh at some things, and get very serious and bent out of shape with other things? In other words, what is humour? And what gives us our sense of humour?
"Humour or humor is the tendency of particular cognitive experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement." The definition alone points to the fact that humour is nothing more than a very high sense of acceptance. You know this from your own experience. If perceiving something alone can give us pleasure and amusement, we must really accept and enjoy the fact that it exists or occurs.
The fact that everyone does not laugh at life in the same way shows us that some people have higher acceptance of some things in life than others. They see things differently. This is why what you think is funny is called a 'sense.' Your perspective is a sense. A sense of humour is purely your perspective. This can be proven in your very own past experience.
There have been times in life when you may have had to go through a 'tough' situation. Later on, the very same situation may be looked back on fondly as humourous. We've all heard the saying, "We'll look back on this and laugh." But if the situation did not change, what changed? Our perspective. Life is all about perspective.
The more space we are able to put around any life situation, the funnier or easy to accept it becomes. By putting space around it, I mean adding perspective or taking a step back. Having an ere of detachment from it relieves any resistance to it. Often we allow ourselves to add this space through the passage of time. It is easier for the ego to become detached over longer periods of time. Since time is an illusion though, we can realize that we will be able to accept and find humour in things immediately if we are detached enough. We can add the space right now if we are not caught in ego perspective.
A sense of humour is a precious thing. The more you enhance this sense, the more enjoyable your perspective (or vice-versa). Life isn't that serious unless the ego is overly involved.
Live, laugh, love. The more we do of one, the more we do of them all. Live it up. Laugh it up. Love it up.
RICKY GERVAIS ON HUMOUR
"What was I thinking?" he asks, looking down at a black T-shirt, black pants and black shoes. "It's got to be 90 degrees out here and I'm looking like this. I'm a putz."
Perhaps, but that putz has become one of Hollywood's hottest comedic commodities. And he's found stardom by picking primarily on one fall guy: himself.
"I don't think of myself as a typical comedian," he says over lunch at the Four Seasons hotel, where the heat has turned his shirt into a moist rag. "I'm just a normal bloke who says things he observes. I don't even really tell jokes with punch lines. But people seem to connect."
Including some big people in Hollywood. Since Gervais left his job as a middle office manager in England a decade ago, his self-deprecating humor has lured scads of seemingly serious stars, from Kate Winslet to Patrick Stewart to David Bowie, to adopt the same tone.
He persuaded Winslet to rail on his show Extras against the motion picture academy for denying her an Oscar. (It must have worked; she won it this year.) He cajoled Patrick Stewart into playing himself — with an obsession with breasts. He even got David Bowie to write a ditty about Gervais: "Pathetic little fat man," went one lyric, "no one is bloody laughing."
Actually, they are. And Gervais hopes to have them chuckling again with The Invention of Lying, which opens today. The movie, which Gervais co-directed with Matthew Robinson, portrays a world in which humans are incapable of lying, except for Gervais.
Like the comedian, the movie teems with contradictions. It poses as a comedy but takes some serious looks, and swipes, at sacred cows, including the church. Gervais' first lie, which turns him into a modern-day Moses and comforts his dying mother, is that heaven exists — and he has the admission pass.
Gervais, too, can deceive. On camera, he is all cocksure ineptitude: the boss with the bad jokes, the movie extra who can't break from being Hollywood background noise.
In person, he's more subdued, a 48-year-old atheist fond of talking religion or the art of comedy.
"We all need humor; it's like a shot of morphine," he says. "But I don't do things to get attention or be controversial. I just look at the world a little differently. People say drama is real life with the boring parts taken out. I like to put them in. Real life can be pretty funny."
dont watch the invention of lying, it really crap and not funny
ReplyDeletelucas