Ask Auntie Leila: What is this sense of humor you speak of?

Get better friends; be better!

The School for Housewives brings you short, practical, and thoughtful messages to inspire you to make your home. If you’re new here, go to the homepage for the previous Lessons; the categories are arranged in the menu bar at the top.

Dear Auntie Leila,

And how do you keep this all-important sense of humor???

From,

Perennially Too Serious

Dear Perennially,

As Chesterton says, “… [Humour] is a term which not only refuses to be defined, but in a sense boasts of being indefinable; and it would commonly be regarded as a deficiency in humour to search for a definition of humour.”

He goes on, nevertheless, to remark, “the word has come to be used more and more … of a rather deep and delicate appreciation of the absurdities of others.”

Jane Austen has her Mr. Bennet note the reciprocity of this faculty: “For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?”

Mr Bennet almost rises here to that which is the most endearing, charming quality in a friend, I have noticed.

It is the one to endeavor to cultivate: the virtue of being able to laugh at oneself. “But humour always has in it some idea of the humorist himself being at a disadvantage and caught in the entanglements and contradictions of human life.”

Find such friends. Try to imitate them. Avoid surrounding yourself with gloom-and-doomers, other than as objects of your charity and light-hearted efforts to raise them from their sad fate.

The trick for oneself is to turn that disadvantage Chesterton speaks of into a feature of self-knowledge and thus, humility. The most wonderful effect of humility is that it reconciles us to God’s view; pride on the other hand makes us so unhappy. A kitten or a child has no pride, and also is very, very funny. This is how God sees us, whereas we do not take ourselves so lightly.

“… [It is] so essential a virtue of humour; the virtue of proportion… it is itself the chief antidote to pride; and has been, ever since the time of the Book of Proverbs, the hammer of fools.”

We will never live up to our own conception of ourselves! But God’s conception (i.e. the right one) is wonderfully consoling. “Humour corresponds to the human virtue of humility and is only more divine because it has, for the moment, more sense of the mysteries.”

But it is essential to wit that he should bear the sword with ease; that for the wit the weapon should be light if the blow be heavy; that there should be no question of his being encumbered with his instrument or laying open his guard.

All the quotes other than the Austen one are from G. K. Chesterton’s essay on Humour from The Spice of Life and Other Essays

As with everything here at the SFH, the best thing is for you to take my ideas, coming from my experience of 45 years of marriage and raising seven children, and apply them to your situation with discernment, prudence, and confidence — and a sense of humor!

Be happy at home! Could you become a free or paid subscriber? That way you won’t miss anything!

Subscribed

If you don’t wish to subscribe just now, I understand! How about…

For the longer version:

My book on how to live with the Liturgical Year: The Little Oratory