On a completely different tack - How Top Bloggers Earn Money.  The 100 or so blogs that actually make some cash, rather than the 100,000,000 that languish in obscurity!

Saw this explanation of "writing funny" from The Dilbert Blog.

Made me wonder - how well do spirituality and being funny go together?  If "being funny" is a skill - and thus has it's own line of development - can you be 2nd tier funny?  Enlightened funny?

Dilbert points out six essential elements of humor:

Clever
Cute
Bizarre
Cruel
Naughty
Recognizable


The cute, cruel and bizarre elements - a bunny with a bazooka, is the example.   Not really apropos for spiritual discussion. (Prove me wrong here - someone write a deeply wise spiritual story about a bunny and a bazooka!  Please?)

Most of the spiritual teachers I have met actually are good-hearted people who love laughing.  But they weren't really that funny - cute and clever, at the best.

But the rip-roaring comedy seems to stem from two parts smart-@ss, mixed with the elements above.

And smart-@ssery isn't usually a very spiritual thing - usually it's the 'lesser developed' narcissistic aspects of one's personality that is the smart'@ass. 

Stuart Davis seems to be the best representative of 2nd tier smart-@ssery we have so far -and he does it great, in my opinion.  Of course, at the same time, he's a total narcissist exhibitionist.  BUT - tt does seem most of the time though, he manages to be a total narcissistic exhibitionist, while being a fully relational human being and not a complete introvert, despite his claims. (you have to scroll down in this entry, past a lot to get to his frank admittance, but it's worth it, because it's a great blogpost.)

To be fully human, and fully enlightened, I do think "true" humor (not the fake stuff/fake laughs we do to paper over wounds) is one of the most valuable gifts we get from others, and one of the most integral/whole.