Social Shamans

Lucille Ball

Lucille Ball requires no introduction. This funny woman of stage and screen, along with Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Bob Hope gave rise to an applause forever since known as the Hollywood laugh. 

Charlie Chaplin

There's something about these fun loving wisecrackers that roused a certain fondness, intimacy, and endearment toward them and their brand of humor. 

Buster Keaton

Their zest for life, friendliness, and proclivity for creating pleasure out of the mundane and ordinary bewitched an audience who became adoring fans. 

Bob Hope

Their charity, goodwill, and benevolence inspired in their audiences a fondness for humanity. While watching their antics, audiences felt closer to one another. Feelings like loneliness, sadness, and despair magically and effortlessly disappeared in their presence. Their romance with comedy and compassion toward the lighthearted allowed others to revel in it. 

No doubt, they were all handsome entertainers, but just what was it that made them so alluring, even endearing? 

They made the world laugh. While such a seemingly inconsequential thing, laughter can turn into a love affair with good humor. An instant kindliness toward charity and goodwill which results in instinctive expressions of lively amusement we affectionately call laughter. 

In notably distinct and unique ways, they all shared a penchant for adopting the underdog. An ability to delight even the most downtrodden individual on a real level that connected people in the most basic attributes of being human. 

In turn, we naturally attributed affectionate qualities toward them. This experience is what makes comedy feel personal. These social shamans had access to that part within us all where we feel most alive and an talent for bringing it out of even the most reluctant individual.

Ed Wynn was quoted as saying, "A comic says funny things; a comedian says things funny." The distinction being in the feeling that follows. An empty, nervous, or courteous laugh leaves audiences feeling entertained but not feeling good about themselves and the world. Whereas a hearty, spontaneous, lighthearted experience leaves audiences feeling relaxed, congenial, and sometimes even transcended. 

Laughter turns life upside down. Laughing allows us to forget about our problems. And then somehow, as if by magic, laughter reminds us that there's so much more to life than worrying. Problems get solved when we work together to solve them. There's no need to make ourselves feel badly along the way. 

The social shamans that inspired laughter throughout Hollywood and beyond, gave rise to a new wave of offbeat, experimental comedy. As a result, today's comedy is more observational and topical with strong political and cultural undertones. Fondness for yesterday's comics has grown into a friendly respect for those individuals who can break the spell of seriousness, inspiring us to do the same for others. With a little more laughter in the world, we could change the way millions of people experience life. 

Tina Fey

Jimmy Fallon

Changing the world...

one laugh at a time.

(✿◠‿◠)♫♪

That's A Good One, Plato

Even wit is educated insolence, thought Aristotle, Plato's student. During Aristotle's time, comedy was less vulgar and obscene than the comedy which disgusted Plato. 

Aristotle considered this comedy play or amusement. "Life includes rest as well as activity," he said in the Nicomachean Ethics, "and in this included leisure and amusement." 

Aristotle believed that we needed leisure and amusement because we cannot devote ourselves entirely to work and seriousness. The value of humor for Plato, in his Poetics, was such: 

Comedy...is in imitation of people who are worse than average. Their badness, however, is not of every kind. The ridiculous, rather, is a species of the ugly; it may be defined as a mistake or unseemliness that is not painful or destructive. The comic mask, for example, is unseemly and distorted but does not cause pain. 

Aristotle considered an overindulgence in humor, as well as the inability to engage in it, as a vice: 

Those who carry humor to excess are thought to be vulgar buffoons, striving after humor at all costs, and aiming more at raising a laugh than at saying what is becoming and at avoiding pain to the object of their fun; while those who can neither make a joke themselves nor put up with those who do are thought to be boorish and unpolished. 

According to aristotle, you have eutrapelia or ready-wittedness, if you engage in humor to the right degree, and at the right time and place. You don't have to be a comedian to know that timing is everything.