The Joke Is the Teaching

I want to explain something about humor that is often misunderstood. Humor, in the tradition I come from, is not decoration. It is not what you do to make difficult things more palatable. It is the teaching itself.

The mind defends itself against instruction. When you tell someone something true and important directly, they can reject it, argue with it, find reasons why it does not apply to them. The defended mind is a formidable adversary.

The laugh bypasses the defense. You are laughing, your guard is down, and in that opening something true slips through that argument never could have delivered. The story about Nasreddin riding the donkey backward does not explain why we should question convention — it simply makes the question live for a moment in the reader's body. The body got there before the mind could object.

This is why I do not explain my jokes. The explanation restores the defense. The unexplained joke leaves the person in a different relationship to their own laughter — uncertain about what just happened, which is exactly where learning begins.