Thought For The Day - 16 March 2007

Here it is. March 16. The big one. Red Nose Day, when all around you, in schools, businesses, buses and streets people will be casting inhibitions aside and doing strange things to cheer you up in the best possible cause - cheering other people who have all too little to cheer about: those suffering poverty in Africa and here in Britain.

What a lovely idea Comic Relief is, using humour to heighten our humanity; laughter to drive away people's tears; and smiles to heal some of the pain of our all too injured world.

I once wrote a book to cheer myself up after the death of my father - and incidentally to do something for my mum who kept asking me when I was going to write something she could understand. To my amazement it became the favourite book of many of our holocaust survivors. And one of them told me this story.

He was in Auschwitz. And he knew that if, even once he despaired, he'd lose the will to live. So he and a friend made an agreement. Every day they'd look for and find something in the middle of that nightmare that they could laugh about. And they did. How, I don't know. But he told me, almost 60 years later, that humour saved his life. And he was being absolutely serious.

There is something spiritual about humour. I think it's the fact that if we can laugh at something, we can't be intimidated by it. It's our refusal to be defined by others. That's why the best humour always comes from persecuted peoples, and why the ability to laugh so often keeps the spirit of freedom alive in totalitarian societies. Humour is the opening of freedom in the prison wall of fate. It's a close relative of hope.

And it's also a signal of transcendence. On the day of the funeral of a man I much admired, the late Cardinal Basil Hume, his chaplain said to me: He was a man who took God so seriously that he didn't need to take himself seriously at all. I like that definition. In fact the best way of telling the difference between those two opposites - righteousness and self-righteousness - is that righteousness has a sense of humour. Self righteousness never does.

So go out there and make someone smile. Laughter opens hearts. Open hearts mean open pockets. And they can open possibilities for those who have all too few. Humour and humanity really do belong together.

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