Because as soon as you laugh, all your muscular tension disappears.
And so that's so cool, when you laugh, you can't fight.
You can't fight when you're laughing.
So how much laughing should we be doing?
It depends on how much fighting we want to do.
And maybe if we didn't want to do any fighting, we'd be laughing all the time.
I did a series on Genesis that became quite popular
and one of the stories I analysed was the story of Abraham's.
Very cool story.
Because Abraham's like 80 years old, living in his father's tent, talk about failure to
launch.
And God shows up one day and says "you have to leave everything you know and
journey out into the unknown."
And you think "well, what is that?"
Oh, that's the call to adventure.
That's what it is.
And so, and what happens to Abraham, this is a bloody catastrophe, like the first
thing he runs into is a war and then he goes into a totalitarian state,
Egypt, and they try to steal his wife, and it's like, man he's thinking "things were
pretty good in that tent."
But, well, he goes on this tremendous adventure and then he's the forefather of,
biblically speaking, half the people on the planet.
He has this tremendous adventure.
Think, well, what do you set against the suffering of your life?
Well, the adventure of your life.
That's what you set against it, it's not safety.
Forget about that.
There's no safety for mortals, that's for sure.
And besides, safety?
That's what you want?
You don't want that.
You want adventure.
So then, the question is where's adventure to be found?
"In exploitation."
Well, try it and see.
Hell is to be found exploitation.
There's an old idea that Jung elaborated on that God rules with two hands, mercy and justice.
And the mercy is "well, let's let everyone flourish and welcome people and forgive them,
all of that."
But justice is more "yeah, but let's do the right thing and leave what's wrong behind."
And that requires judgement, judiciousness.
I talked to Jimmy Carr about how he prepared for his comedy tour.
And he said, "stand up comedy is the most dialogical of artistic enterprises."
And I thought, "well, what do you mean because you're just talking,
like I do on lectures and everything..."
But I'm listening to the audience all the time.
To make contact with them, watching how they're reacting.
I'm listening.
Carr said, "well, I do 100 shows before I go out on tour and I try out new material."
So he generates new material, a lot of it, that's the creativity part,
and then he goes and tries it out on audiences, and they either laugh or they don't.
And because he's brave and listens, he notices when he's not funny and he stops being not
funny.
And so, the audience just tells him what's funny and then he collects that across 100
instances.
And then that's funny and verified by the audience and he goes out and tells those jokes.
And so, that's dialogical and redemptive as well, it's like, what jokes need to be told?
Well, our culture has some sacred cows, those are idols.
The idols that the Israelites worshipped in the desert, the golden calf, sacred cows.
They need to be punctured.
Why?
Because they're impeding our progress.
Well, how do we puncture them?
Well, one way is we show that we can transcend them.
And comedians are doing that all the time.
"Here's something we can't laugh about."
Let's laugh about it.
Everybody breaks down, everybody cracks up.
You know, it's so cool when people laugh, they can't fight.
I used to go work out with Jim Keller, this chip designer, and we did this for years,
and one of our jokes was we'd be striving to bench press whatever we were managing at
the time, 175lbs, like really straining, and then we'd
crack a joke and that was always funny, we spotted him of course, Because as soon
as you laugh, all your muscular tension disappears.
And so that's so cool, when you laugh, you can't fight.
You can't fight when you're laughing.
So how much laughing should we be doing?
It depends on how much fighting we want to do.
And maybe if we didn't want to do any fighting, we'd be laughing all the time.
That's how you said, that cements your group of comrades together.
Well, you're not fighting, what are you doing instead?
Playing.
Well, that's what we need to do man, it's we need to play.
All of us.