“Laugh: It’s Christmas!” Reflections by Nick Chui, a Catholic Educator

So for the new school year, educator Nick Chui encourages teachers to laugh with their students. Crack jokes. Don’t worry if they don’t always laugh back. Or if they roll their eyes and go “lame”. They will eventually. And they will thank you for it. And you will thank yourself.
Because your “Hope is built on nothing less than Jesus Christ and righteousness.”
Because failure is not the last word because of Christmas.

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They say that one of the tools to “surviving” as an educator is to have a sense of humor. Lately, my students have been sharing that they have found me funny, by laughing at my jokes in class and by saying so during Teachers’ Day. (I take that as a sign from God that I will likely have a relatively long lifespan in the education industry!)

Cue music “I will survive…”

But how do we define humour and the funny? Fr Robert Barron suggests that “The essence of comedy is the coming together of opposites, the juxtaposition of incongruous things”. Imagine for a moment a typical scene from Mr Bean. He bows deeply in a show of reverence to the Queen as part of the royal entourage. When he gets up he accidentally knocks the Queen with his head. As the Queen falls, he panics and flails about, causing other members of the entourage to fall. In the chaos, the audience laughs, and Mr Bean entertains yet again.

If this is humour, then the incarnation, i.e the birth of the second member of the Blessed Trinity is humour par excellence. God, the creator of the Universe, chooses to become a human baby born of a virgin. And the chosen couple, Mary and Joseph, had to obey an earthly emperor and run back to Bethlehem for a census. When Mary gives birth, she does it in a stable. Angels visit to say hello but the same angels don’t seem strong enough to fend off Herod and his minions, leaving them to flee as refugees into Egypt while other babies under the age of two in Bethlehem were murdered.

When I reread these passages during Advent, I often catch myself imagining Joseph saying to himself, “Me, the foster father of the Son of God, and running away like a refugee? What a joke man!”

But the good news of Christmas and by extension the entire Christian story is that the joke will be eventually be on the Herods of the world. Herod dies, Joseph comes back and settles down in Nazareth. Jesus dies on the cross, his enemies thought it was game over, he rises again on the third day.

Our recalcitrant student one day comes up to us and says “thank you for not giving up on me”, stunning you with a mixture of shock and surprise.

So for the new school year, laugh with your students. Crack jokes. Don’t worry if they don’t always laugh back. Or if they roll their eyes and go “lame”. They will eventually. And they will thank you for it. And you will thank yourself.

Because your “Hope is built on nothing less than Jesus Christ and righteousness.”

Because failure is not the last word because of Christmas.

And because to see it, we need a sense of (Divine) humour.