Fun and humour have it in them to make many laugh, which is likely to be good for health.

You had better resist more than usual if you make it.

We should learn from nature and others in the world. We can hardly cope well unless.

Do not feel called to believe in any old claims that are gainsaid by other old claims, but keep some reserve and adjust for your own long-range good. [Link]

Skilled fun is advocated

Fun should go Selfwards, as the Self is all happiness, and good fun has to power to change much dreary and make one happy enough to make the day. Skilled fun is advocated, propriety too.

Much fun ties in with the Self-integrity and manifests it a bit. It may seem that humour and fun is unevenly distributed among gurus, but since persons are different and not all profit by the same things, maybe some gurus keep silent about how hilarous they find some things in life. There is a keenness about this higher sense of humour and fun - maybe.

One of the much revered gurus that is known for mellow, heart-warming, enabling wit, fun, and humour was Ramakrishna. Great intelligence lay behind his wit. Example:

Higher humour shows integrity, at least does not violate integrity. In simple words, when we laugh with someone and not of someone - including ourselves - high humour is there.

If humour helps, that is a good fruit of humour.

Solid humour may also help to release tensions and work at barriers in its way. It may assist the good guys to go on. There is research on humour. It is documented that kind humour helps health and longevity. (Svebak et al 2015)

Research Findings: Friendly humour prolongs the lives of many

People with a great sense of humour have greater chances of reaching retirement age than other people. A research study reveals that a sense of humour prolongs life for people under seventy. After that age, genetics and biological aging apparently get more of a say. Yet, as Professor Sven Svebak of NTNU holds, a sense of humour has a positive effect on our mental health and social life even after passing 70. "Humour will continue to be very important in everyday life [even then]. Mirth makes life cosier. Grandparents have an important task in teaching the young ones "friendly humour."

The professor and other researchers measured so-called friendly humour in a study of 53 500 people over a seven years period. Among those with the highest scores on a nine-step humour scale, only half as many died than among those who scored lowest. Even when the researchers divided the 53 500 persons into only two broad groups, the half with the best humour scored, showed to have 20 percent lower mortality than the other half. Also, when the researchers checked people with serious illnesses like cancer, diabetes, heart and coronary diseases, those who scored high on sense of humour, lived longer (in average) than others.

A further check revealed that a good sense of humour worked just as well for those who felt that their health was not top as among those who felt healthy.

"A great sense of humour is probably what explains the lower mortality," Svebak sums up, and the findings are found to be valid for the population at large. Now it is documented that a sense of humour prolongs life, and that is clear, says Sven Svebak. [1]

Giselinde Kuipers on Humour and Jokes

Professor Kuipers of Belgium writes in her book Good Humor, Bad Taste (2015):

The importance of a shared sense of humor is made obvious by its absence. (Chap 1: "Introduction: Jokes, humor, and taste".)

People who don't laugh when others do, or who laugh when others are silent, expose themselves as outsiders: they reveal their lack of awareness of codes, habits, and rules. They do not belong. (Ibid.)

Certain people welcome jokes with great enthusiasm while others reject the telling of a joke with demonstrative silence, and may even consider joke telling tasteless and vulgar. (Ibid.)

Jokes are amusement more than anything else, usually without pretensions or profound aims: they are meant to make people laugh and no more. (Ibid.)

Jokes - like all humor - are meant to amuse . . . Ever since antiquity, many thinkers have reflected on humor, offering widely different levels of insight [and] they all agree: humor is a pleasant experience, often (but by no means always) accompanied by laughter. (Chap. 1, "Jokes and humor")

The joke is but one form of humor. (Ibid.)

The joke [is] one of the most widely distributed and most recognizable humorous genres in the Netherlands, and throughout the world. The joke is a short humorous text with an unexpected turn or dénouement at its end, the punch line.(Ibid.)

The connection between humor and taste - has hardly been investigated.(Ibid.)

Cultural differences in sense of humor are connected with culturally determined differences in style. For instance, the difference between British and American humor has been summarized as the contrast between understatement and overstatement. (Chap. 1, "Humor and taste")

Not only among cultures but also within any given culture, huge differences exist in what people find funny. Within the Netherlands there is, for instance, a cultural difference between city and countryside, between people of different social class backgrounds and between young and old. These cultural differences are reflected in humor. (Ibid)

Over the past few centuries, the genre of the "short humorous story" has undergone many changes. The genre has become more pointed and concise, it has had to conform to new standards of content and the punch line has become a necessary ingredient. (Chap. 2, "The status of the joke")

Orally transmitted genres are increasingly connected with groups having little status or power: with "the folk" . . . oral literature, folklore. This (not completely accurate) association with not particularly dominant groups demonstrates that orally transmitted genres do not count as very important or respectable. (Ibid.)

The joke has a double status problem: not only are jokes orally transmitted but the joke is also a humorous genre. Humor has always had a somewhat doubtful status: everyone loves its but no one sees it as completely respectable. . . . In the arts, comic forms . . . have less prestige than tragic ones. (Ibid.)

The association of food with humor has diminished with time but the carnivals of the Middle Ages, much of whose symbolism was food-related, were occasions both to laugh and to gorge oneself sick (Pleij 1979). The association of humor with alcohol is undiminished and taken for granted and the pub still counts as the most natural environment for the joke and the guffaw. Humor is a frivolous, easy and particularly physical type of amusement. (Ibid.)

High humor increasingly distinguished itself from low humor in three ways that are still in evidence today. Humor can escape the epithet "low" by becoming humor with a message or moralizing humor, humor with an aesthetically responsible design or refined humor, or humor restrained in its exuberance or civilized humor. (Ibid.)

In the eighteenth century, one more criterion for good humor was added [to the three in the above paragraph]: authenticity through personal inventiveness. [The jokes were to be self-made for the sake of some alleged spark of life.] (Chap 2, "High and low humor")

During the second half of the twentieth century, th[e] ideal of individual authenticity and self-expression became increasingly central to people's understanding of personhood. This growing attachment to authenticity as a criterion of personal worth is often seen as a symptom of wider processes of individualization. (Ibid.)

Until the middle of the twentieth century, a joke could quite easily be "civilized": maybe not chic but not exclusively vulgar either. (Ibid.)

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Bubbling Bliss and Adequate Humour ☼

There are many sorts of humour. Find the ones that work for you, those you should be able to profit from.

1. A delicate sense of art may help some fun on and up.

On a mundane plane, solid research documents that friendly humour helps health and prolongs life. The findings legitimate the psychoanalytic view that health depends on the natural id (libido, zest, joy of living), called the Child in Eric Berne's Transactional Analysis, TA. Thus, a jester, buffoon, clown, and joker may reach some facet of your inner Child through heart-warming humour that sustains higher sense, even common sense, and thus give relief and perhaps help in liberating your Child (id) frivolity more or less. For the lack of ample id, much in life loses savour. That normally comes soon enough after retirement age to too many. We need to sustain natural libido at work, to regain health and preserve it too.

A good sense of humour is not just of "those rare individuals", for example a former female pope, a favourite with common people. She was much talked and guessed about in earlier centuries, after her story appeared at the end of the 1200s. Here is a condensed retelling:

Pope Joan was born in Mainz, of English origin. She disguised herself as a man to follow her lover, who went for studies. She then studied for some time, and was warmly welcomed and admired in Rome, where she in due time was elected pope. The reason she was found out, was that she gave birth during a papal procession from the Vatican to the Church of St. John the Lateran in Rome.

Faced with a female pope - attractive enough to be someone's lover in some circles - one may have to clear the air, and that is what lightning flashes are found to do too, in their way. Otherwise, to peep beneath the robes of popes is ordinarily thought to be all too rude and offensive. Besides, an able humour-lover par excellence delights in self-respect.

To be offensively humorous may seem good, as it is much self-motivated, but is it delicate enough? Does it laugh with Pope Joan or of her; with the papacy or of it?

Funny and fair ones may be fun to be with, and certain forms of fun help self-motivated activity - that is one reason why entertaining Norse myths of Thor may be told at pupils at certain age levels in Scandinavian schools. Many Norse myths are marked by a gruff, yet entertaining humour.

A certain frankness and directness may also be involved in humour. It depends on what is highlighted. ◇

If humour exposes what usually goes unmentioned, or something hidden, great tact may be called for to carry it off.

Humour and fun "comes out of" those who are not all bogged down in all respects, and may likewise help others who are not hopeless.

2. Different kinds of humour have their own charms, possibly

Fun can be built up by evoking some tenseness that gets much relief, for example by ripping a mask off. Much entertainment in our days exploits difficulties and common problem fields in certain stiff ways - there should be little doubt of that to one who has watched hordes of sitcoms. In some cases gladness and fun shows good home life. Fun helps information exchanges to the degree it is to the point somehow, is not much offensive, and strengthens id.

Good play is fun, and may thereby give vent to careful domestic nurturing.

Solid humour may only rarely be reckless to work well.

A good sense of humour may indicate fitness for one's work - that one is being jolly good at handling things, as opposed to being cornered. it also indicates one is able to balance between haughtiness and servility some way or other.

A solid benefit from a quick-witted repartee is not to be made a laughing-stock.

Love of pretty possessions may become the cause of great pains. Some kinds of humour may teach against it.

Handy pranks may have their own charms.

Fun and humour may both function as piloting agents at times, disarming some, helping the sensitive, and may serve as a means to find good friends who understand you - who like the wavelengths you play upon, so to speak. ◇

Bubbling humour could be a sign that you are smart, almost in any case.

3. Some sound balance regained can make jolly humour worth while

Fun in play and humour should tend to some rewarding balance. That is one where those involved may profit.

Gurus may apply humour to deal with low desires, and not to cause downfalls by telling things too starkly.

So

A sense of art may find many outlets, for example into many sorts of humour. And jolly good humour helps many regain some sund balance in the id system, resulting in longer lives, and more fun too.