Learning To Be Funny
In modern times the concept of learning is exclusively referenced as something that makes you a better and more valuable person. But does everything called learning actually achieve this? Better and valuable to whom? Does all learning contribute to your life in the ways you care about? Does any learning contribute to life, or just complicate it?
In other words, can some learning be destructive to your own life? If so, shouldn’t there be another word for that? Without that other word we’re all susceptible to confusing learning with something unerringly constructive.
This is a little easier to understand in the context of humor. Can you learn to be funny? Most of us intuitively know the answer is no, as evidenced by the fact that there are no “universities of funny”, humor masterclasses, or “comedy coaches” roaming the internet in search of students. Even the suggestion that “funny” is a teachable thing likely strikes most of us as whimsical at best, and deceptive at worst. But what other aspects of life have we become convinced are available through learning that likewise can never be taught? Is “happy” one of those?
We all somehow know that humor rises from deep inside us. It is already there in all of us, and is always present. The only trick to “being funny” is to discover that part of ourselves and give it a voice. There is no language for this; no formula or “steps to” for us to learn. There is only discovering what is already there. That discovery is the opposite of learning.
In other words, the only reason that we are not funny is that we have learned not to be. We have learned that being funny is unreasonable, immature, shameful, risky or any number of other logically justifiable conclusions, and adopted them as objective truth. And the previous 2 sentences will hold equally true by swapping the word “funny” with “happy”. We are not happy because we have learned not to be.
I had a rough start in life; my childhood was the household version of a war zone. By the time I was able to come up for intellectual air, I knew that I wanted to clear my life of the residual damage and realize my full potential as a human. It’s true that my experience may not be a universal one, but the baggage of internal despair and loneliness, and the desire to rise above it, is far more common than the specifics of their source.
Starting with the emphasis society puts on education, I was taught that the primary strategy for accomplishing anything in life is learning. That is a dictum that is continually reinforced from every corner. So, I learned. I read, I listened, and modeled. I (literally and figuratively) sat at the feet of masters. Yet, for all of this, my life was still stuck in a place of internal despair. How could this be? Why didn’t learning make good on its promise of “better”.
The distinction is this: What I had learned was “true” in the logical sense, but “false” in the experiential one. What, then, is the value of truth when it doesn’t elevate the quality of your experience? In all the acclaim heaped upon the notion of learning, this question is never answered, or even asked.
Realize that the idea of learning and the idea of truth are tightly and commonly intertwined. The unspoken reality of learning is that there is both an objective version of “truth”, and a personal one. So, as with learning, our language desperately needs a new word for this alternate version of truth as well. The failure to distinguish personal truth from objective truth (that which is true only to you, but no less true) lies at the center of whether “learning” is the constructive pursuit of its promise.
Only your own personal experience can reveal whether learning is false in the experiential sense; actually destructive to the cause of loving your life. The greater possibility is that loving your life — like funny and happy — cannot be taught at all for the simple reason that it cannot be learned at all.
But that isn’t stopping so many of our current crop of self-annointed teachers — psychologists, self-help gurus, personal development consultants, life-coaches, thought-leaders, etc. — from promising “happy”. And, as many of you know from my previous writings, it even includes teachers of health, fitness, and nutrition. All of these pursuits have one thing in common: the promise of a better life.
It is only through a failure to distinguish objective vs personal truth that we believe a better experience of life is acquired through learning. This failure results in us continuing to struggle with confusion, depression, limitation, and loneliness despite, or perhaps because of, our learning. If we accept all teaching as constructive to life, we will ultimately find it has mostly been a distraction from, rather than a path to, what we seek.
Can you allow yourself to conceive of “not knowing” as a crucial component of happiness? If that sounds oxymoronic and more than a little irrational that’s because it is. But only logically. The very nature of humor, happiness, and life itself, is irrational and unjustifiable in any logical sense, but empirical truth in the experiential version.
Now, we have only to realize that “how to love your life” is the equivalent of “how to be funny” in its teachability. Loving the act of living is always and only an act of discovery. It is the universal goal of being a human, and what most of us hope to achieve through “learning’. But it will never be found there. Most of what we learn in life is actually the cause of our discontent, not the solution for it.
Worth considering: not knowing is every bit the equal of knowing as a crucial component to the joy of living.
