Purim - The Last Laugh

[Music] [Applause] [Music] when sir donald wolfit the last of the great english actor managers was lying on his deathbed one of his young actors said to him sir donald after life so filled with success and fame dying must be hard to which saddam replied dying is easy comedy is hard they say a coward dies many times the same must also be true for comedians any actor who stood in front of an audience and watched the line that he's practiced for weeks clang helplessly to the floor to roars of silence will appreciate so donald sentiment comedy is hard because we don't really understand what makes people laugh we know what's funny because we laugh at it but trying to distill the essence of comedy into a set of principles that's not so easy one of the basic elements of comedy is incongruity a bank manager wearing a clown's red nose is funny a clown wearing a red nose is now underlying incongruity is a deeper idea absurdity you see we expect the world to have a certain natural order of events and when these events are suddenly turned upside down the result is comic one of the most notable aspects of the purim story is sudden reversal homan hayman has his gallows ready to hang mordechai the letters decreeing the final solution of the jewish people have been sent out in all 127 languages to the far corners of the persian empire yet in a split second everything turns upside down the only difference between tragedy and comedy is the ending jews i've always been known for their humor it's as though the world recognizes that there's something particularly jewish about humor and that humor is part of the essence of being a jew but behind every jewish joke there's a jewish tear a wry bittersweet feeling of two thousand years of exile tears of sadness tears of hope in the psalm of shia ma lot that we sing after a festive meal there's a line that yearns for the coming of meshiach the messiah it says then will our mouths be filled with laughter the coming of meshiach of the messiah is compared to a birth the tragedies of our era of our people are his birth pangs in birth great pain is suddenly and instantly turned to enormous joy and similarly when the mashiach comes all the pain of the jewish people will be reversed to joy in an instant just as in the purim story he will come in crisis in catastrophic reversal in hippuh he will come in the darkest hour just before the dawn and only then our mouths will be filled with laughter a laughter of discovery a laughter of total realization and then we'll see how all the pieces in this comedy of the absurd that we call life they all fit into place then we will laugh the last life