Osho on laughter

Osho - Hotei lived a totally different life from an ordinary religious man. His whole life was nothing but a continuous laughter. It is said about Hotei that even sometimes in sleep he would start laughing. He had a big belly, and the belly would shake.

Sardar Gurdayal Singh would have enjoyed meeting him, and Hotei would have enjoyed Sardar Gurdayal Singh. People would ask him, "Why are you laughing? and even in sleep!" Laughter was so natural to him that any and everything would help him to laugh. Then the w hole life, awake or asleep, is a comedy.

You have turned life into a tragedy. You have made a tragic mess of your life. Even when you laugh, you don't laugh. Even when you pretend to laugh, the laughter is just forced, manipulated, managed. It is not coming from the heart, not at all from the belly.

It is not something coming from your center; it is just something painted on the periphery. You laugh for reasons -- which have nothing to do with laughter.

I have heard: In a small office, the boss was telling some old stale anecdote, which he had told many times. And everybody was laughing -- one has to laugh! They were all bored by it, but the boss is the boss, and when the boss tells a joke you have to laugh -- it is part of duty. Just one woman typist was not laughing, was sitting straight, serious. The boss said, "What is the matter with you? Why are you not laughing?"

She said, "I am leaving this month" -- then there is no point!

It happened: Mulla Nasrudin listened very attentively while a stranger told a long story in the coffee-house. But the man spoke so indistinctly and muffed his punchline so badly that the story was not funny at all, and except for the Mulla no one laughed. But the Mulla laughed heartily.

"Why did you laugh, Nasrudin?" I asked him afterwards when the stranger had left.
"I always do," replied Nasrudin. "If you don't laugh, there is always the danger of their telling it over again."