This Is Where The Fun Begins
Anakin Skywalker, Viktor Frankl & the magic of humor
Humor was another of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation
- Viktor Frankl
Ahsoka Tano takes things a bit too seriously in comparison to Anakin Skywalker. The Jedi Knight we know from the Star Wars prequels and The Clone Wars animate series was a prolific jokester on and off the battlefield, always making light of the situation. Sometimes this drew a glare or roll of the eyes from his master, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and sometimes the two Jedi would enjoy the laugh together.
“This is where the fun begins” nicely sums up Anakin’s attitude to messy situations.
In the TV series, Ahsoka, Anakin’s former Padawan has journeyed back in time in a vision to her experience fighting in the Clone Wars. She is surrounded by death and despair. Ahsoka is sickened and tired.
In the body of her 14-year-old self, Ahsoka is overcome by despair as she holds the hand of a dying Clone Trooper. As a Jedi, she was making decisions on the battlefield that resulted in life-or-death for these soldiers. Nothing about this situation was okay to her.
Then there’s Anakin. Fighting. Leading. Smiling. Joking?!
Her master approaches to try and encourage Ahsoka.
“This isn’t what I trained for,” Ahsoka says.
“We must adjust to the times…I have to teach you to be a soldier,” answers Anakin.
“Is that all I’ll have to teach my own Padawan one day? How to fight?”
And Anakin’s jokes begin…..
Anakin grins, “Do you even want a Padawan? You know…teaching isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
The indignant student lashes out. “REALLY?! What makes you say that?!”
Anakin makes himself clear, “I’m joking.”
“You’re joking?? How can you joke at a time like this?” Ahsoka gasps.
Anakin looks at her solemnly, knowing she is just a child. “What would you prefer?”
Humor has a special kind of power. When we’re with people with love and trust, it’s often easier to conjure up, but even with strangers in a grim situation, we often see solidarity expressed with jokes.
Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search For Meaning, wrote of his time in languishing in the Nazi death camps of the Holocaust….
It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.
He describes a pact with a few of his friends within Auschwitz, that they’d invent at least one amusing story daily about their future lives after surviving. They chuckled, in the shadow of a chimney billowing out the ashes of human remains, about how they’d one day behave at restaurant dinner tables at the sight of hot soup.
The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of trick learned while mastering the art of living. Yet it is possible to practice the art of living even in a concentration camp, although suffering is omnipresent.
While nothing compared to Frankl’s experience, I’m reminded of my time doing Scout trips as a boy. When you’re a kid, some of those trips (hiking, camping, eating Spam for dinner) felt like the worst days of my life. They were hard, relative to what I’d experienced before. I remember sitting with my friend, Will, eating lukewarm soup in the rain by a fire being extinguished by the weather. Cold, hungry, and laughing at the absurdity of it all.
Friends become closest in solidarity through bad situations: Like the bully who torments you both at school…..The horrendous teacher who scolds your classroom and hands out F’s like Halloween candy….The car breaks down in the middle of nowhere right as bad weather is rolling in.
If we’re at our best, we laugh. We joke!
Ahsoka needed to hear that, and only Anakin Skywalker could have delivered that answer as perfectly as he did.
What would you prefer? More seriousness? No. Life hands us quite enough of that. We need a bit of laughter.
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