Laughter is the best medicine

by Colin Jones in January 2012 - What on Earth?

On a recent train journey, I had the misfortune of travelling on a ‘gospel train’. It all started innocently enough. The preacher began by pacing the carriage. He was a slight distraction which I was prepared to tolerate as I read my book. But he was only warming up. He soon launched into a sermon, which summarised, warned: “I, the Lord your God, brought you into this world and I will take you out!” I’ve preached a couple of sermons in my time and I’m pretty good at determining the potential length of a preachment. It was going to be one long, high decibel journey and I was having none of it.

Having failed through quiet diplomacy, I made my view public that nowhere on my train ticket did it say “False Bay to Salt River return: Sermon included.” I managed to rouse some support from my fellow commuters. However, nothing could quell the zeal of our preacher who fastidiously ignored me. As I alighted, my preacher took the opportunity to point me out as a perfect example of the type God would be dispatching to the fires of hell. Train preacher and former preacher parted ways in less than Christian fashion as I quoted as my passing shot the scriptural reference to “booming gongs and clanging symbols” - and a few others which I made up. I left behind a gob-smacked evangelist and a carriage of commuters impressed by my biblical references much of which, I now confess, was based on an old Marty Feldman comic skit about a nutter pretending to be God while trying to get people to part with a few bob.

Some years ago, on a visit to Sweden, I had the privilege of having dinner with the Israeli writer; Amos Oz. Oz is the author of many books including a short work entitled ‘How to cure a fanatic.’ Over dinner, we discussed the chaos and damage caused by fanaticism and extremism in the course of human history.

His book set out to explain the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as, in essence, a property dispute. The problem had to do with fanatics on both sides who complicated the process by taking extreme positions on issues not central to the actual issue. “Fanaticism is a fallacy,” said Oz. The trouble is that it is often difficult, if not impossible, to reason with people who hold such positions because both they and their arguments lack reason. We have all met unreasonable people. We have sometimes been unreasonable and extreme ourselves.

I was recently reminded of that conversion while re-reading ‘The Eisenhower Essays’, a collection of articles published during the US president’s retirement in the 1960s. In one essay entitled “We must avoid the perils of extremism,” Eisenhower quotes a colleague, John W. Gardner: “Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world’s ills and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all. Such extremism comes easily to men who have duped themselves with delusions of unblemished virtue and the rascality of others.”

That’s a very reasonable definition of a very unreasonable phenomenon. Extremism has many forms and fanatics get fanatical about almost anything. Music, sport, religion, politics and celebrities are but a few things on a long list people get fanatical about. I remind myself that the term ‘fan’ is an abbreviation for ‘fanatic’. Some people even get fanatical about work. Fanaticism is often dressed up as ‘passion’. The fact that ‘passion’ derives from the Latin ‘passio’ meaning ‘suffering’ speaks to my experience of having to put up with some passionate people.

Fanaticism in an individual can mostly be put down to, at best, a personal idiosyncrasy. At worst, it’s plain lunacy. Fanaticism in numbers is another matter altogether. This is when it gets to become down-right dangerous.

Being named ‘Jones’ means being associated with those with whom the rest are supposed to keep up. It also has another unfortunate association, namely, with a fanatical cult leader named Jones, who created a community (in some state I forget), in the US. He narcissistically named the community Jonestown. Such was the loyalty to and faith in my namesake that, on his instruction, every man, woman and child committed suicide along with him, although the children were most likely innocent victims in this harrowing tale. America and the rest of the world were left confounded as to how people could allow themselves to be beguiled and deluded to follow this genocidal lunatic.

We, South Africans are a long-suffering bunch. There are many things wrong about where we are heading. We feel passionate about our hard-fought battles for liberties, about poor leadership and corruption. We are clearly far from being the promised united rainbow nation. In both this national and personal mental state, it is easy to fall into the trap of making an “excessively simple diagnosis of our ills” and to find “identifiable villains back of it all,” to dupe ourselves “into delusions of our own unblemished virtue and the rascality of others.” By definition, we could ourselves become fanatics.

Marty Feldman put my train ride into perspective for me. His skit was a reminder that humour has great redemptive power. I left the train realizing that I had been in danger of engaging in a biblical slanging match and that I had been ‘saved’ by the memory of that very funny skit made in the ‘Goon Show’ era. I left laughing and promised that next time I engage with an extremist of any kind, rather than argue, I’m going to cure them with the best medicine there is. Laughter. At least one of us rascals will be left feeling better.