"Laughter is an Instant Holiday" Blog by Neil Mancor
/“Laughter is an instant holiday.” Milton Berle.
My mother taught me the importance of maintaining a sense of humour in all circumstances. She found the humour in the things we got up to as kids, even the little disasters. She never laughed at us, but she always laughed with us. Like the time I licked the stamps when I was two and got them stuck on my tongue. We would go shopping at Woodward’s Food Floor after school on Fridays and get malted milks and then go around with brain freeze and laugh. Playing games with her was a lot of fun except she would get over involved and want to win. But she did teach me canasta and cribbage when I was at the right age. I vividly recall the time in Grade 4 when I had to learn baseball, but I was hopeless with a ball and bat. So my father enlisted the whole family and out in the garden we practiced and practiced. I was so terrible even Mrs. Buchanan next door watching from her kitchen window had to yell out some advice. Finally my mother took her turn at the bat. My father threw the ball and she hit it right out of the yard. She ran around the bases which included one flower pot, the cherry tree and the swing set before sliding into home. How she laughed.
She would often find quirky ways of disciplining us when we went astray. For some teenage infraction on the part of my sister, she made her join the junior choir at Church as a penance. I never knew why. But there was my sister sitting in the choir stall behind mine giving me her best teenage glare. I think it was some kind of funny revenge on my mother’s part. That’s how she did things. I grew up in a family and community which valued a slightly off-beat kind of sense of humour and there was always a great deal of laughter all around. Even in my mother’s later years after suffering a stroke, whilst she lost her ability to speak, she did not lose her ability to laugh. She often found humour in things that went on in the residence she lived in her final years. She thought the Hawaiian themed evenings were hilarious.
I hope I have passed that onto my kids and raised them in the same tradition. A good sense of humour can help one out of many a sticky situation, and can bring a sense of perspective to life. I think parenting with a sense of humour is a great way to enjoy all the different phases of your kids’ lives. There is as much humour in playing with a one-year old as there is in a bunch of zonked out teenagers sprawled around your living room. A few years ago there were a bunch of teenagers sprawled around my living room waiting for me to make pizza. I had nipped outside for something and slid off a step and sprained my ankle (don’t get me started on ankles). I then dropped the pizza in the hot oven which caught on fire and had to be hastily put out with the fire extinguisher all the while I was limping around in agony. “Hey Mr. Mancor,” they said, “do you think you could hurry up with the pizza, we’ve got a party to go to.” I thought that was the funniest thing and later sat down and had a belly laugh. Over a large glass of wine, mind you.
For all the challenges of the time in which we find ourselves, I hope we can still find time to laugh with one other. Whether it’s because we all seem to spend our time in a version of the Brady Bunch opening credits, or the latest in fashion masks, we can encourage one other and lift our spirits by finding joy and humour in the very real humanness of our lives, even in lockdown. Not laughing at each other lets laugh with each other when we can. For a good laugh is powerful way to connect with others. John Cleese said
“Laughter connects you to people. It’s almost impossible to maintain any kind of distance…when you are howling with laughter.”
So here’s my last story. Two weeks ago I was in the operating room at the Lakeshore and the team was prepping me for the epidural and sedation. They rolled me over on my side to get ready to put the epidural in and as they were doing that the anesthesiologist and the nurse anesthesiologist noticed that I had a couple of tattoos on my side over my ribs and started commenting on them. “Hey, cool tattoos” one of them said, “what do they mean?” I told them, lying there rolled over having an epidural put in. Somehow having a conversation like that at that moment seemed so absurd to me that it gave me the biggest laugh. Until suddenly everything went wonderfully relaxed….
