Humor in the Family

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Apr 4, 1912

Humor in the Family

GOOD humor is rightly reckoned a most valuable aid to happy home life. An equally good and useful faculty is a sense of humor, or the capacity to have a little amusement along with the humdrum cares and work of life. We all know how it brightens up things generally to have a lively, witty companion who can turn an annoyance into an occasion for laughter. It does a great deal better to laugh over some domestic mishaps than to cry or scold over them. Many homes and lives are dull because they are allowed to become so deeply impressed with a sense of the cares and responsibilities of life as not to recognize its bright, and especially its mirthful side. Into such a household, good but dull, the advent of a humorous friend is like sunshine on a cloudy day. It is well to turn off an impatient question sometimes and regard it from a humorous point of view, instead of becoming irritated about it.

“Wife, what is the reason I can never find a clean shirt?” exclaimed a good, but rather impatient husband, after rummaging all through the wrong drawer. His wife looked at him steadily for a moment, half inclined to be provoked, then, with a comical look, she said: “I never could guess conundrums,” and then

she felt happy; and so what might have been an occasion for unkind feelings and hard words became just the contrary, all through the little vein of humor that cropped out.

Some children have a peculiar faculty for giving a humorous turn to things when they are reproved. It is just as well, oftentimes, to laugh things off as to scold them off. Laughter is better than tears. Let us have a little more of it at home.—The Lutheran.