Victor Borge once said, “Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.” It’s even more than that. Laughter is healing, a balm for the soul. I recently attended the graduation and performance of a friend who was graduating from Comedy School. Although I knew of her natural humor, the performance was heart opening. I laughed heartily at jokes that told in some cases familiar stories. The jokes were indeed funny, but it was the obvious desire to bring joy to the audience that struck me. Performance is play, and those who play well and often have the best chance of being authentic. Other budding comedians performed as well. The ones who connected most with the audience were those who showed up authentically, not trying too hard to be something outside themselves. Humor is a special connection with our spiritual center. It reveals a passion for creativity and connection. Creative in its emergence, humor surprises us with its ability to open the gates of joy within us. So often, humor highlights mistakes or points to desires, but the “distance between two people” is shortened when a person invites us to see the challenges or frustrations in life as mere stories. We laugh and we are relieved, because we recognize the story as our own. Humor spotlights the challenges we face in life, so that we see them as conditions, not the reality of our lives. We no longer feel shame or embarrassment for what we want or who we are. When the veil is lifted from our hidden desires or perceived imperfections and embedded in the stories, we can accept the moral of the story without moralizing. Terence, a 13th century Ethiopian playwright and poet once said, “I am a human being. Nothing human is alien from me.” We are all in this life together. Humor encourages us rightfully to laugh about it, because our lives are stories.