I'm taking in the scenery from the seat of my bike. One foot is still clipped in to a peddle, the other is holding the bike and me up as I stand here in the middle of everywhere. The middle of everywhere, I should explain, is my term for what others like to call the middle of nowhere. It's funny how frequently these " scenery stops " come around now that I'm a cyclist of a certain age. They often happen on steep sections like this one. That has to be a coincidence. All of a sudden a whirlwind of mirth arrives. A pack of pinion jays lands in a nearby juniper, squawking, and mewing, and laughing. They're not there for long. This tree has gotten boring already. They're off instantly, just as loud as the came. They're diving for another tree where they'll keep the party going, and on and on from tree to tree for the rest of their lives. The party never stops.
But ,were they really laughing? That's probably just me imposing my anthropomorphic view of things on every thing else in the universe. Can animals really laugh? Do they have a sense of humor? I don't know, but I'm willing to think about it for the rest of the day. Here's what I came up with, all of course subject to revision when I come up with something better.
Even if the day to day struggle of being a jay to eat, to reproduce, to work out their place in the pecking order ,doesn't lend itself to humor, we can't exclude the possibility that they find humor in observing us. We've been surrounded by other animals for as long as we've existed. They even knew us at our earliest stages of development. A million or so years ago we were already peculiar among animals. We were the ones least likely to succeed. We were naked, without thick fur or feathers to protect soft flesh. We had neither claws nor fangs. We were small and weak. We scavenged the kills of more powerful predators, we looked for fruits, and seeds, and insects, lizards, and fish to eat. And yet in our helplessness, our lack of speciality, and most of all in our adaptability ,we found strength. Over the course of a hundreds of thousands of years we exploited every small advantage thrown to us and grasped for ever more .Eventually we managed to reach the point of overall dominance of whatever environment we found ourselves inhabiting. Clever us, poor them. It's a story unique to humans, full of missteps, full of irony, tragedy, and humor.
I can't help but take the more orthodox scientific view that among our fellow creatures with whome we share so much ,we are maybe alone in this. We may be the only beings truly in on the joke, in on any jokes at all. We may be the only creatures capable of humor. The joke is on us, the joke is us, and nothing else out there can appreciate the farce, or needs to.
Shakespeare wrote many plays. Some are categorized as comedies, some as tragedies. His comedies contain some tragedy. His tragedies contain some humor. They are mixed because human life is mixed, sometimes tragedy, sometimes comedy, sometimes both at once. His plays live today because he was one of the greatest observers and expositors of the human condition ,more insightful than Freud or any of the mind scientists that followed him. To Shakespeare we were still as frail and preposterous a creature as once walked the African savannah of a million years ago. The same fears stimulate us, the same striving animates us. We're a patchwork of old and new, cruel, generous, noble and ridiculous. Add to that millennia of conditioning, millennia of advancement and culture, ingenuity, blindness, presumption, a thousand other contrivensess and you have modern mankind. Shakespeare got the joke and used it to his advantage.
A Mormon leader whose lecture I attended in my youth said that God certainly has a sense of humor, " If you doubt it, take a look around you ". We all did,. We all shared a good laugh. Is there any other way to get through a day, a year or a lifetime sanely as human beings? Humor is imperative. It's lack in us, not properly turned inward, as well as outward, condemns us, freezing evolution in its path. We are the animal that laughs at itself. And that makes all the difference.
Even little human babies laugh. Four and five year olds are masters at it. They remind me of a certain bird of the Painted desert.
But ,were they really laughing? That's probably just me imposing my anthropomorphic view of things on every thing else in the universe. Can animals really laugh? Do they have a sense of humor? I don't know, but I'm willing to think about it for the rest of the day. Here's what I came up with, all of course subject to revision when I come up with something better.
Even if the day to day struggle of being a jay to eat, to reproduce, to work out their place in the pecking order ,doesn't lend itself to humor, we can't exclude the possibility that they find humor in observing us. We've been surrounded by other animals for as long as we've existed. They even knew us at our earliest stages of development. A million or so years ago we were already peculiar among animals. We were the ones least likely to succeed. We were naked, without thick fur or feathers to protect soft flesh. We had neither claws nor fangs. We were small and weak. We scavenged the kills of more powerful predators, we looked for fruits, and seeds, and insects, lizards, and fish to eat. And yet in our helplessness, our lack of speciality, and most of all in our adaptability ,we found strength. Over the course of a hundreds of thousands of years we exploited every small advantage thrown to us and grasped for ever more .Eventually we managed to reach the point of overall dominance of whatever environment we found ourselves inhabiting. Clever us, poor them. It's a story unique to humans, full of missteps, full of irony, tragedy, and humor.
I can't help but take the more orthodox scientific view that among our fellow creatures with whome we share so much ,we are maybe alone in this. We may be the only beings truly in on the joke, in on any jokes at all. We may be the only creatures capable of humor. The joke is on us, the joke is us, and nothing else out there can appreciate the farce, or needs to.
Shakespeare wrote many plays. Some are categorized as comedies, some as tragedies. His comedies contain some tragedy. His tragedies contain some humor. They are mixed because human life is mixed, sometimes tragedy, sometimes comedy, sometimes both at once. His plays live today because he was one of the greatest observers and expositors of the human condition ,more insightful than Freud or any of the mind scientists that followed him. To Shakespeare we were still as frail and preposterous a creature as once walked the African savannah of a million years ago. The same fears stimulate us, the same striving animates us. We're a patchwork of old and new, cruel, generous, noble and ridiculous. Add to that millennia of conditioning, millennia of advancement and culture, ingenuity, blindness, presumption, a thousand other contrivensess and you have modern mankind. Shakespeare got the joke and used it to his advantage.
A Mormon leader whose lecture I attended in my youth said that God certainly has a sense of humor, " If you doubt it, take a look around you ". We all did,. We all shared a good laugh. Is there any other way to get through a day, a year or a lifetime sanely as human beings? Humor is imperative. It's lack in us, not properly turned inward, as well as outward, condemns us, freezing evolution in its path. We are the animal that laughs at itself. And that makes all the difference.
Even little human babies laugh. Four and five year olds are masters at it. They remind me of a certain bird of the Painted desert.
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