The Book of Joy

wrong. My weaponry, if you can call it that, was almost always to use
humor, and especially self-denigrating humor, where you are laughing at
yourself.
“We came to a township just outside of Johannesburg, where the
apartheid forces had provided weapons to one group, and they had killed
quite a number of people. We were having a meeting of bishops close by,
and I was part of those leading the funeral of the victims of that
massacre. The people were obviously extremely angry, and I remembered
a story that had been told about how at the beginning of creation, God
molded us out of clay and then put us into a kiln, like you do with bricks.
God put one lot in and then got busy with other things and forgot about
those he had put into the kiln. And after a while he remembered and
rushed to the kiln, where the whole lot was burned to cinders. They say
this is how we black people came about. Everyone laughed a little. And
then I said, ‘Next, God put in a second lot, and this time he was
overanxious and opened the oven too quickly, and this second lot that
came out was underdone. And that’s how white people came about.’” The
Archbishop finished with a little laugh and then that cackle that climbs up
the flagpole and back down.
“We tend to want to blow ourselves up, inflate ourselves because most
of us have tended to have a poor self-image. When you’re in a situation
such as the one in South Africa where you were discriminated against, it
was very easy to lose your sense of self, and humor seems to do
something for people. Humor certainly did one good thing: it deflated,
defused a particularly tense situation.”
The Archbishop had visited Rwanda shortly after the genocide and
was asked to give a talk to the Hutus and the Tutsis. How does one talk
about a wound that is so fresh in the soul of a people? The Archbishop’s
solution, as it so often is, was to speak truth to power—through humor.
He began telling a story about the big-nose people and the small-nose
people and how the big-nose people were excluding the small-nose
people. The people in the audience were laughing, and as they were
laughing they suddenly realized what he was talking about: the
ridiculousness of prejudice and hatred, whether in his country or theirs.