So perhaps all peoples take themselves too seriously, too often.  This is where our faith comes in and its helpful to recall that God seems to have baked humor and laughter into his creation.  ‘Alone among the animals, man is shaken with that beautiful madness called laughter,’ said Chesterton, ‘as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself.’  We laugh when things are not as they seem. Every joke, at its core, is about mismatched expectations.  This in turn reflects life itself, which contains so many mismatched expectations about who we are, who God is and what’s the point of all this.  Reinhold Niebuhr, arguably America’s greatest theologian made the connection between humor and faith explicit writing, ‘Humor is, in fact, a prelude to faith; and laughter is the beginning of prayer.’  Neiburh is not saying to take God less seriously, he’s saying unless we take ourselves less seriously, we can’t even begin to know God.