"So many tangles in life are ultimately hopeless that we have no appropriate sword other than laughter. I venture to say that no person is in good health unless he can laugh at himself."          (Gordon W. Allport)

"What is a sense of humor? . . . a residing feeling of one's own absurdity. It is the ability to understand a joke--and that the joke is oneself." (Clifton Fadiman)

Oscar Wilde once offered a valuable insight about the way we live our lives when he said that "Life is too important to be taken seriously." What do you think he meant by this? I don't think he meant you don't have to take your responsibilities, promises, work, etc. seriously. He didn't mean that it's OK to live life with no integrity. I think he meant that the quality of our life suffers when we approach everything in a serious manner. We lose the aliveness, joy and spontaneity we had when we were kids when we take everything so seriously--especially when we take ourselves so seriously.

I think the key here is to take your work and your responsibilities seriously, but take yourself lightly in the process. When you take yourself seriously all the time, you lose the many coping benefits that a playful attitude and humor have to offer.

There's a liberating quality that most people experience when they get to the point that they can laugh at themselves. We get so caught up in our anxieties, embarrassments, frustrations and upsets that we carry them around with us throughout the day. But when we find a way to laugh at them, they lose their emotional grip on us and recede into the background. We feel at peace with the incident, even though it was very embarrassing at the moment.

Sometimes it is a physical characteristic or behavior that causes you to lose your sense of humor. It may be your weight, wrinkles, a nose that's not perfect, or an inability to remember things the way you used to. A boy I grew up with stuttered a lot. He was terribly embarrassed by this, and others also felt awkward in talking to him. He eventually learned to master some of his own anxiety about talking (the anxiety made the stuttering worse), and also put those around him at ease, by saying things like "Hey, is there an echo in here?"

A fellow professional speaker I know (W. Mitchell) had a terrible accident while riding his motorcycle. In the accident, the cap on the gas tank came off and the gas spilled on him. Sparks caused a fire which burned most of his face off and left mere stubs where his fingers and thumbs used to be. He describes the first point at which he was able to laugh at himself after the accident as a turning point is his life.

A few weeks after the accident, a plastic surgeon came to his hospital room and said, "Your face has been burned off by the fire. We're going to have to give you a new one. What did you look like before the fire?"

When he showed the surgeon his driver's license photo, the doctor looked at it, hesitated and said, "Well, I know we can do better than this!" Mitchell, who had remained immobile throughout the conversation, because it was too painful to move, could not help but laugh. The laughter opened his eyes, taking him out of his self-pity. It made him realize that the fire hadn't really destroyed his life, although it had damaged his body. The ability of the surgeon to help him see a light side of his terrible ordeal led him to seek out a career speaking to others about coping with the unfair and unjust things that sometimes happen in our lives. The focus of his talks is, "It's not what happens to you, it's what you do a bout it." Humor can play just as powerful a role in your own life.

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