Humour and joy and ending suffering and insight

Okay, this might be off-the-wall, but I thought it was worth a try as a subject for discussion.

If the dharma is about both insight and ending suffering, how does humour and/or developing a sense of humour apply?

I'm certainly not suffering when I'm laughing or amused. And, often, the reason I'm laughing is because of some insight into my own or other's behavior just strikes me as funny.

Plus, joking with friends, family, co-workers, as well as enjoying funny movies, tv shows, comedians, etc. are a big part of my life anyway, I can't imagine life without humour, you know?

However, a lot of humour is mean spirited, isn't it? And, often the pleasure derived is from laughing at other people and pointing out their shortcomings -- which I think would go against the precepts/eight-fold path. So, even though I may be laughing now, I may still, depending on my intent, suffer later on for enjoying the joke.

Yeah this's a great topic Mike! I've noticed there seems to be different processes going on in light hearted humor and in mean spirited humor. I am tempted to say they are two completely different things, phenomenologically (from the inside out) but share similar (but not identical) behavioral manifestations so are often considered to be the same. You seem to be hinting at this. Think back to the living experiences of light hearted vs mean spirited humor: do you think it's possible they're actually two completely different things that just have some superficial similarities? And if so, what might the differences be? I'm curious what you think.

I have noticed a general tendency not to find certain things as funny that I used to find funny - like Bill Maher's rants about society, for example, which used to have me on the floor laughing, but now seem too mean spirited. Mel Brooks still keeps me rolling on the floor though.

But I do hate to see people get "spiritual" and lose all sense of humor or sense of the ridiculous and become like prim church ladies. Heck, my own life is full of hilariously ridiculous moments - often when I realize what an idiot I've been about something, but just at bad jokes, plays on words, slapstick, teasing friends, etc. It's good to be able to laugh at our foibles, mistakes, idiocies and so on. And then there's also the delighted laughter like babies offer when they hear a funny sound or you make a silly face at them. That's good too.

I worried once that I might laugh during a service at a buddhist center (I had once at a different place, just stifling my laughing for nearly twenty minutes during a very solemn meditation; nothing was funny except the solemnity of 20 people all meditating with such intensity.). The guy next to me said not to worry, happens all the time. People fall off their cushions laughing sometimes. That was a nice attitude to hear. I didn't end up laughing anyway, but it was refreshing to be told that.

I wonder if maybe 'irony/surprise' isn't a phenomenon with two poles: unanticipated freedom and unforeseen dead end/trap. And the lighthearted laughter is the response to unanticipated freedom; the mean-spirited, bitter laughter is recognition of someone getting their comeuppance, usually someone who seems to deserve it. And that dubious pleasure gets progressively undermined by a growing insight into how anyone else could be so-- stupid, selfish, greedy, or whatever-- how it could just as easily be me. Kinda takes the zing out of schadenfreude.

And renders a lot of what passes for 'comedy' these days fairly distasteful. Maybe that's not so new: I can remember, as a kid, not 'getting' Jackie Gleason's corpulent blowhard schtick.

Yeah, Kate, I think that's a good stab in the direction of the difference I was asking about. I definitely have the sense that light-hearted humor has that surprise quality, suddenly dropping the expectation of a certain outcome and opening out into the unexpected "punch line". But the notion that mean spirited humor could be a mirror image, stumbling into a semantic cul de sac, that's very interesting. But it makes sense. Mean spirited humor includes a real sense of knowing "what" someone or something is, like the sense that they "deserved" it. Very interesting. And the connection between practice and losing interest in the second kind of humor might be due to the fact that the FIRST kind of humor is a lot like meditation practice in the dropping expectations and being surprised bit. How many times have you had a sudden insight whether sitting or in daily life practice-- only to break out laughing at the fact it was right in front of you all along but you had been too distracted by some opinion or belief to notice it?