research & reviews

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.”