Humor as a Spiritual Practice

Spiritual books are, on the whole, very serious. They talk about suffering and transformation and the nature of the self. They use words like "profound" and "sacred" and "awakening." They do not, as a rule, make you laugh.

I think this is a problem.

Not because suffering isn't real, or transformation isn't profound, or the self isn't worth examining. But because humor is one of the most powerful tools available to a human being, and leaving it out of the spiritual toolkit seems like a significant oversight.

Let me be clear about what I mean by humor. I don't mean jokes as a way of avoiding difficult things. I don't mean sarcasm, which is usually just hostility wearing a costume. I don't mean the kind of relentless cheerfulness that's actually a form of denial.

I mean the capacity to see the absurdity in your own situation. To notice when you're taking yourself too seriously. To find, in the middle of something genuinely hard, a moment of lightness that doesn't minimize the hardness but makes it survivable.

That's a spiritual skill. And like all spiritual skills, it can be cultivated.

Here's something I've noticed over fifty years of practice: the moments when I'm most stuck, most miserable, most convinced that my suffering is uniquely terrible and that no one has ever faced what I'm facing — those are also the moments when I'm most self-important.

Humor punctures self-importance. It says: you're not the center of the universe. Your problems, while real, are also kind of funny from the right angle. The universe is not conspiring against you specifically; it's just doing what it does, and you happen to be in the way.

That's not dismissive. It's liberating. When you can laugh at yourself — really laugh, not perform laughing — something loosens. The grip of the story you're telling about yourself relaxes a little. And in that relaxation, there's room to move.

My wife and I have been through a lot together. Her MS. My depression. The ordinary chaos of raising children and building a life and getting older. There have been moments that were genuinely terrible.

And we have laughed through a lot of them. Not because they weren't terrible, but because laughter was available and we chose to use it.

I remember a particularly bad day — one of those days when everything was going wrong at once, the medical stuff and the financial stuff and the relationship stuff all colliding — and we looked at each other and just started laughing. Not at the problems. At ourselves. At the absurdity of being human, of trying so hard, of caring so much about things that were, in the grand scheme, pretty small.

That laughter didn't solve anything. But it changed the atmosphere. It reminded us that we were on the same side. It gave us enough distance from the situation to see it more clearly.

One of the things that surprised me about Nichiren Buddhism, when I first encountered it, was how much it emphasized joy. Not the serene, detached contentment you might associate with some Buddhist traditions — actual, energetic, engaged joy.

Daisaku Ikeda wrote about this often. The idea that a life of Buddhist practice should be a life of increasing vitality, creativity, and happiness. Not happiness as the absence of difficulty, but happiness as the capacity to engage fully with life — including the difficult parts.

Humor, I think, is one of the expressions of that vitality. It's a sign that you haven't been crushed by your circumstances. That you still have enough perspective to see the comedy in the human condition. That you're still, fundamentally, alive.

So how do you cultivate humor as a spiritual practice? I don't have a formal method. But a few things have helped me.

Don't take your suffering personally. Suffering is universal. Your particular version of it is not a sign that you've been singled out. When you can see your suffering as part of the human condition rather than a personal affront, it becomes easier to find the absurdity in it.

Notice when you're being self-important. This is the hardest one. Self-importance is invisible from the inside. But if you pay attention, you can catch yourself in the act — the moment when you're more invested in being right than in being happy, or more committed to your story about yourself than to what's actually happening.

Spend time with people who make you laugh. This sounds obvious, but it's easy to let it slip. Laughter is contagious and it's nourishing. Protect the relationships that bring it into your life.

Read funny things. I'm serious. The world is full of writers who have found the comedy in the human condition. Let them in.

Life is genuinely hard. It's also genuinely funny. Both things are true, and holding both of them at once is, I think, one of the marks of a mature spiritual life.

This post is adapted from themes in my book Fifty Years of Buddhist Practice, available to read free as a flipbook. No sign-up required.