My Life as an Amish Electrician, viz. an Anthroposophical Comedian

by Ronald Koetzsch

First, we should to determine if you, the reader, are qualified to be reading this magazine and this article. To that end, please take the following “Rudolf Steiner Lifestyle Quiz.” For each “yes” answer, you receive one point. Five or more points is passing.

1. You do not own a television.

2. You own a television, watch it every day, but conceal thi s fact from everyone you know.

3. You own a Smartphone, but have not figured out how to turn it on yet.

4. You own two sheep fleeces. If you are a member of a Hell’s Angel’s motorcycle gang you must own thre e.

5. At a restaurant, regardless of the humiliation experienced by your children, you sing the verse “Bles sings on the blossoms …” then hold hands and say “Blessings on the meal.”

6. The last significant movie you saw was The Grad uate starring Dustin Hoffman.

7. You use only Weleda and Hauschka body care products on your skin and only on the part of the body indicated on the package.

8. You wear a scarf at all times, including in the shower.

Anthroposophy can seem very serious, even daunting. There is the vast collection of Dr. Steiner’s writings and talks, which are for the most part quite serious and not so easy to understand. And virtually all extant photos of Steiner show him tight-lipped and unsmiling.

However, according to his friends and close students, Steiner was a very humorous person. One eurythmist tells of a post- performance restaurant meal with the “Herr Doktor.” The eurythmists all ordered toast and salad, but Steiner, the last to order, asked for meat and potatoes. When Steiner noticed their surprise, he quipped, “Better to eat meat, than to think about eating meat.”

While taking a walk during a lecture tour in England,

Steiner noticed his very shy translator approaching him on the path, carrying a bouquet of flowers. Steiner plucked a flower and playfully tapped the man on his nose.

According to Steiner, humor is essential to human life and to spiritual development, and he spoke about it on many occasions. In fact, there is a 290-page book (published in 1985) by Henrich Eppinger titled Humor and Heiterkeit im Leben und Werk Rudolf Steiners (Humor and Cheerfulness in the Life and Work of Rudolf Steiner), which includes 60 pages of anecdotes about Steiner’s use of humor. More recently, eurythmist Stephanie Janisch wrote her graduation paper on Humor and Heiterkeit. The following are direct or paraphrased quotes from lectures of Dr. Steiner:

Something we cannot do without: humor

When the ‘I’ or higher self raises itself to laughter, it calls up its powers for self-liberation, for its exaltation, and for being fully contained within the world.

Oh, in laughter and weeping lie at the same time the means to educate the I and the powers of the I. Laughter on the face of a human being is the spiritual revelation that the human being strives for release, that he does not allow himself to be grasped by things not worthy of him, but rather that with a smile on his face he transcends those beings to whom he should not be enslaved.

The human being can truly rise to the spiritual only when he does not seek it with egoistic sentimentality, but only with purity of soul. This purity of soul can only come through humor.

It is easy to think that it is something terrible to satirize “holy things.” However if one wants to advance in the terms of the spiritual world view a basic requirement is that one not forget how to laugh about those things that must be laughed at in the world.

He who cannot find humor in the humorous also cannot in a true sense be serious regarding what is serious.

If you bring in humor and make children laugh that is the very best method of teaching. Teachers who are always solemn will never achieve anything with the children.

My career in humor began in third grade. My teacher had me sit in the first seat of the first row so she could keep an eye on me. This didn’t prevent me from turning around periodically and making a comment that made the other students laugh.

Finally, the teacher told me, “Ronny, go to the back of the room and read the encyclopedia!”

My comic activity developed greatly, in the mid90s, when I became an employee of AWSNA as editor of Renewal: A Journal for Waldorf Education. I served as emcee at AWSNA’s biannual teacher conferences and specialized in humorously explaining the previous day’s presentations by the featured speakers such as Peter Selg.

About the same time, as a faculty member at Rudolf Steiner College, I began to emcee at College events and festivals, trying to bring humor into them.

I developed a full one-hour-plus show called “The Beeswax Conspiracy” (the Steiner Lifestyle Quiz is part of it) and began to tour with it. For over more than two decades I performed the show (usually as a fund raiser) at schools and conferences in the United States and Canada as well as in Australia, New Zealand, Israel, the United Kingdom, South Africa, et al. In 2011, I did a standup show focusing on anthroposophy in the Great Hall of the Goetheanum.

The “Beeswax” show is basically a satire of various aspects of anthroposophy and Waldorf Education, describing, for example, the preparations parents make before the class teacher’s annual home visit. (i.e. concealing the household TV with a silk cloth). Students fifth grade and above were usually allowed to attend and they got the humor as well as the adults.

The show and I encountered only warm, heartfelt, and enthusiastic receptions everywhere we went. Audiences were happy to hear some of the salient characteristics of Waldorf Education gently poked fun at. In effect, it was an opportunity to laugh at themselves and at the very special, idiosyncratic Waldorf world in which they were living. The jokes about aspects of Waldorf Education resonated with teachers, parents, and students all over the world.

I have strived to have my humor be respectful, positive, loving, and joyful. I don’t use profanity or bathroom humor and don’t pick on members of the audience—unless they seem to deserve it. Some forms of humor, such as sarcasm, can be hurtful, and while they may evoke laughter they can create a negative energy.

A sense of humor is most likely to some degree inborn. However, it is possible to develop one’s sense of humor. I found that learning to play the piano as an adult seemed to help my sense of humor. It may have something to do with improving the communication between the left and right sides of the brain. And if you search, “How to develop your sense of humor” you will find a number of sites that promise to help you do just that. Good luck. It is worth the trouble. Saying something that brings people to laughter, whether in a small group of friends or in a large auditorium, is one of the profound joys in life.

Also, please keep in mind that at the very top of Steiner’s monumental statue, “The Representative of Humanity,” a puckish, winged being looks down with a wry smile on the cosmic drama of the Christ and the adversarial powers. This is “World Humor,” telling us that the cosmic drama is more likely a comedy than a tragedy and that, “All shall be well. All manner of things shall be well.”