Thursday, 1 March 2012
Choice of profession
THE ROLE OF HUMOUR IN LIFE
All seriousness and no joke make a miserable boy smile, laughter, jesting ; they are the sauce of lie –Life is a grim business- Struggle for existence become bitter unless seasoned with the cause of humour – The faculty of seeing the inconsistencies of life is a part of the rational faculty –Man should the inconsistencies of life is a part of the whole world laughs with you –Weep and you weep alone –Great personalities have been subtle humorists too –Mental rigidity makes a man stern and unbending –Such persons find life unpleasant-Humour’ is a safety valve-When pent-up feelings seek outlet we might either cry in pain, or seek to lighten it by laughing it away-in the various literatures of the world, humours writers have found for themselves a place of honours-George Bernard Shaw was a brilliant humorist. He said very serious things in a very humours way; that harmed none, but benefited many. Humour is the salt of life.
By temperament some persons are humorous. By temperament some persons are serious. To be able to make a joke, does not possess. Some people are excessively serious. It is their nature to be so. They can hardly help it. Others are by nature frivolous is not the same thing as being humorous. One is seeing things upside down. A humorous person cannot be at the same time a dull or stupid person. ‘Humour’ is the faculty of intellect. It involves (1) thinking (2) Feeling (3) and a sense of enjoyment, for the sake of enjoyment only. It may be called aesthetic faculty, and the expression of ‘frivolity.’
The excessively serious man is the opposite of the humours man. The humorous man is not always earnest, nor always decided and always earnest. But both may be dishonest, The humorous man can cheat himself and cheat others too. The serious man too can indulge in self-deception and fraud. Only where they are concerned as persons with some pronounced attitude, they are different. Otherwise not. The puritan is the type of the serious man-you may expect no mercy from him. The comedian similarly is the type of the humorous man-he will not only laugh himself but make others laugh too.
In Shakespear’s play, The Merchant of Venice, Antonio has been described as the picture of the puritan : serious, earnest, glum and shy of gaiety. In the same play there is also another character known as Gratiano is the frivolous chatterbox. He is a joker who make everybody laugh and feel easy. Similarly Shylock is a puritan but Bassanio is a humorist. In another play of Shakespeare there is a character Falstaff by name . The fellow was the very genius of humour. Prince Henry liked him very much. Falstaff never missed an opportunity to cut a joke. His words full of wit and humour would blow up even the most serious person. Charles Lamb was a noted humorist whose book The essay of Elia delighted a whole generation of English readers.
Mahatma Gandhi, most serious of men, possessed subtle sense of humour. The only fellow who did not understand humour was Hitler of Germany. Maybe, there are thousands of non-humorous Hitler lurking here and here and there, but they do not account for the number of humours persons in the world is much greater than that of non-humorous persons. But why thank heaven at all ? Do we benefit any more by being humorous, or by being serious ?- That is the question to be asked.
It is generally seen that humour-making comes easily to those who are not burdened with immediate or serious- responsibility of life. Grave and serious duties make a man grave and silent. When a man is comparatively free to indulge in jokes, when he has no grave relaxing. So, humour-making is in a sense yielding to the mood of relaxation. When one likes to amuse oneself or amuse others then is born the mood of humour. It is, by and large, a social product- a fashionable practice that civilization has thrown up as the safety valve of pent-up feelings.
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