Laughter and Freedom
Day 16
Buechner tells another story about Maya Angelou.
“Another thing [Maya Angelou] said that I loved was that on certain plantations during slavery days there was a rule against laughter amongst slaves. Slaves were not supposed to laugh, which is fascinating. I never heard that before, but I can see why there might’ve been such a rule. If you’re enslaving somebody, you don’t want them laughing, do you? It’s harder to make a slave out of a laughing person. The danger I suppose always is they might laugh at you, they might laugh at slavery, who knows. But she said the slaves could not live without laughing, so they devised something which they called the laughter barrel. They kept a barrel somewhere and when the impulse to laugh became overpowering they would simply lean into it, as if to get something out of the barrel, and let it all go. It’s a wonderful picture.
“Then she recalled for everyone the really marvelous high church Episcopal service that took place before our lectures began—there was incense and there was chanting and there were vestments—and Maya said, ‘I just looked at that service, and you Episcopalians do it so well. Those gorgeous vestments you wear and those candles and the singing. And there was that man who came in holding that great silver cross with this look of great serenity on his face. And I thought to myself, what you should have right off the vestry is a laughter room. You parade around with all these wonderful things, and every once in a while you go in there and ha ha ha!, and then you come out of the laughter room and you pick up the cross and keep going.’”
Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, p50.
To help you reflect…
You may like to watch this video of Buechner telling a version of this story.
In what areas of your life is laughter censored (either by others or yourself)? How might a “laughter room” be a help to you in these areas of life?
When did you last “let it all go” with laughter? Free yourself with laughter today.
