Humor as a Tool for Survival (audio)

Lily Percy, Krista Tippett (OnBeing.org); Ashley Wells, Dhr. Seven, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly

Anthony Weiner (Piraro/bizarro.com)

Humor lifts us up, but it also underscores what’s already great.

It connects us with others and also brings us home to ourselves.

And like everything meaningful, it’s complex and nuanced: It can be fortifying or damaging, depending on how we wield it.

But as a tool for survival, humor is elemental.

On Being explores this idea with a rabbi who started out in drag, comedians, an NPR host, writers of sci-fi/fantasy, social commentary, and the TV show Veep.

What is humor? Truth in real life? (French comic artist Emma/theguardian.com)

INTERVIEW
Transcript (onbeing.org/programs)

Stealing? (GregPalast.com)

Host Krista Tippett: If there’s one thing we can perhaps all agree on in our struggles and in the everyday mundane, it’s our need for the release and balm of laughter.

Humor lifts us up...This was the animating idea On Being’s Lily Percy had for a shorter-form podcast we’ve just launched [called COOL, "Creating Our Own Lives"].

This is a glorious taste of the voices she captured this hour, ranging from a rabbi who started out in drag, comedians, an NPR host, writers of sci-fi/fantasy, social commentary, and even the TV show Veep.
 
Lily Percy: The idea of humor as a tool for survival is so personal to me, I wanted to start by talking to someone that I knew and admired, reporter and former NPR Politics Podcast co-host Sam Sanders.

Sam has a very dry sense of humor. If you follow him on Twitter, you know that already. But what makes his voice unique is the thoughtfulness and warmth that go hand in hand with his jokes.
 

"We cats didn't invent the Internet to share it with this." (P. Byrnes/The New Yorker)

 
Ms. Percy: You grew up in Texas, and you know what it’s like to be surrounded by difference. I mean politically, religiously, socially, culturally -- every kind of difference. And you also grew up in the church. And I wonder how much those things have really influenced the way you cover right now and the way you see things.
 
Sam Sanders: Yeah, I mean I think that there were things that I kind of feel affected my worldview. One, I was raised in the San Antonio, Texas area. San Antonio is a city that is majority Latino.
 
Ms. Percy: What, what? [laughs]
 
Mr. Sanders: Yeah. Oh yeah. [laughs] More + AUDIO

• David Sedaris: Why aren't you laughing?

In Defense of the Trumpian "Julius Caesar" (newyorker.com/culture)