Humor,
picture taken by: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:B%C3%B6hringer
and the profound.
ffffound.com
Not long ago a friend said to me, “Zane, you can go from laugh out loud funny to convincing me we (humans) are the smallest thing in the universe.” Immediately something stirred inside me, what he said made sense in a very personal (dare I say profound?) way. He put into words something I’ve always felt. One of my tendencies is to bounce between humor and the profound. From funny to deep, lighthearted to insightful, carefree to philosophical.
I took his comment as a notice. It encouraged me to do some thinking about how I think. And things only got better from there…
What is humor? What is profound?
Humor. A cognitive state often accompanied by laughter and amusement.
Profound. Something deep and vast which induces speechlessness and awe.
What does this mean for cloudthinking?
I think we want a healthy dose of both in our lives. And that’s where cloudthinking is headed. Here are the rest of my thoughts on this subject.
In ancient Greece humor translated literally as “bodily fluid.” No joke.
The word humor derives from the humoral medicine of the ancient Greeks. They believed that four bodily fluids, called the humors, would wax and wane within the human body. Effecting our health and temperament.
Bodily fluids aside, humor is very hard to explain, especially when we try.
Lover of dachshunds and Pulitzer Prize winning author E.B. White once said, “Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.”
What he is referring to is the study of humor. A lot of research has been done, and here is my shortlist:
Humor is good for your health, many people have tried to explain it, many other people have tried to prove them wrong, the explanations are boring considering the subject, it has been trans-culturally defined as a spiritual element, and a mystical gift, but most notably, through this whole process of documented thought, it remains undeniably profound.
Humor is profound. It is as vast and deep as the ocean of the mind.
This post stops here for now. But I will be mixing elements of humor and the profound into the content on this blog. Come back again next Friday for another post, or enter your email in the sidebar to subscribe.
-Zane
cloudthinkingdotme.wordpress.com 
humour can be profound and the profound can also bring out a humour. Personally I think they exist in the same world. Meaningful INTERACTION is the only truly observable subject, because it blurs the subject with the objectionable.
Great insight. I think they live in the same world as well, kind of like opposite sides of the same coin. What eventually is described as humorous or profound is a matter of perspective.
Love the subject. For me, humor is a reflection on inner confident and secret wisdom, the silent kind. As i see it, the more we experience life, with all the tragedies, little and big, that enforced and written into our personal narrative, the only choice we have to get out of this life alive is to have the ability to filter as more as we can from the happenings in our lives through humor.
When we’re kids we laugh a lot. Then we get older and buy all fake stuff, success today means money, when what it should really mean is not how much money you made today dad, but have you or haven’t you read bedtime story to your child.
My father always read the bedtime stories, and invented them, so madly.. These are the things we remember eventually. We remember a great laugh, a dumb moment; personally, I don’t have a special memory of my father funding my studies (though he did) or buying me the first car (my mum did and I picked my father from the bus station and told him it belongs to my then girlfriend… he half believed me), but I remember our laughs, and there were a lot of them.
This post is great. Too long maybe. What? I didn’t said nothing. Oh what do I know about anything anyway? I’m good at changing my outfits three times a day, and it’s quite an accomplish for a guy present himself as “humble”.. Let’s just make one thing clear: you can freefall down your highway of philosophical argument here, be the poet, the intellectual, whatever, as long as you agree that I’m the pretty face in this joint. Clueless, but oh so pretty..
Americq.
Thanks for sharing Americq. Things have changed a lot since childhood, when humor and the profound seemed to always be right around the corner. But there still is plenty of both left in adulthood, we just have to let ourselves be aware- be like a child. It’s easier said than accomplished. But trying to see the world like a child, even for a little while each day, can have a huge affect on the rest of the day.