Living Happily Ever Laughter - By Yakov Smirnoff
Published in the Daily Word, June 2006
My father, mother, and I were a close family as I was growing up in Russia. We literally lived, slept, and ate in one room of a communal apartment. Even though I had only experienced life under the restrictions of the Soviet regime, I had a sense of what true freedom was at an early age. When I was about six years old, I awoke one night to go to the bathroom down the hall and heard a strange static noise coming from the middle of our room. Then I say my father leaning forward with his ear to the radio.
"Dad, what are you listening to?" "Sh, sit down and listen," he said. "This is the Voice of America." I listened and heard the Russian translation of something that went like this: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free..."
My dad explained that these words were written on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Then he began to describe this tall lady who stands in the middle of the New York harbor, holding high a torch to welcome people who are seeking freedom in America. I instantly fell in love with this tall American lady.
In America
When I was twenty-six, my parents and I immigrated to the United States. We didn't speak English and had only a hundred dollars to sustain us. I learned English and with so many opportunities for material success, which was not an option in Russia, I began to live the American dream. Driven by what you might call primal instincts, I wanted to be safe, have a home, and eat good food. I fed my ego but not my soul.
Even as a child, I had thrived on making people laugh, which I believe is a language of God. In America I found success as a comedian and worked diligently at my career. I look back on what I was able to achieve and say, Wow! I wanted my own television series, and I did twenty-six episodes of What A Country in the '80s. I wanted to perform on The Tonight Show, and I did seven shows with Johnny Carson. I wanted to perform at the White House, and I did for three different presidents.
Then I fell in love with another tall American lady, but - unlike the Statue of Liberty - Linda did not have green skin. Linda and I married. She was everything I wanted - tall, blonde, beautiful - so very much an image of America. I wanted to do my best in marriage just as I had strived to do in my career. Linda and I had two beautiful children: Natasha and Alexander.
Our marriage was happy and full of laughter for a while, but the happiness and joy were replaced with tension. Then the laughter was gone. Trying to understand why there was so much tension, we went to marriage counseling. We had stayed true to each other. Neither one of us had abused alcohol or drugs nor had we committed any infidelities. Yet the tension between us was strong.
We became the casualties of divorce. This was one of my greatest learning experiences in life, and I went on a quest to understand how I could create laughter at the White House and in my show in Branson, in Russian or English, but could not create happiness in my marriage.
If you think about it, a performer who is in front of an audience gives what he or she hopes will make the audience happy. In return, the people laugh or clap, giving back to the performer through their appreciation. If all goes well, the audience and the performer have both given and received a gift. When this kind of giving and receiving stops in a marriage, the relationship becomes out of balance.
Vital Signs
I believe there is a direct correlation between love and laughter. Since we don't understand how to measure love, we need vital signs as we have for life. Our pulse, blood pressure, temperature, and the amount of oxygen in our blood are vital signs that tell us we're in good health. Laughter is a very important vital sign of a healthy relationship.
I have come to understand that all of us have two distinct modes: thinking, where we're in our heads, and feeling, when we're in our hearts. God has blessed us with both abilities. In today's society we sometimes forget to balance our hearts and our heads; this is the reason we stop laughing. For instance, on the average an adult laughs only five times a day, while a child laughs three hundred times each day. The reason is that children are in their hearts and adults can get stuck in their heads.
In our relationships, we experience those times of being in our hearts when we are courting or on our honeymoons. We use our heads and think about what makes our partner feel loved. When our partner feels loved, he or she laughs and giggles and hugs, and that makes our hearts fill with joy. When the honeymoon is over, we can become distracted by our work and life in general. We both get in our heads. Often we put family second to our work and getting ahead in the world.
We have a choice, however; we can both think and feel, using our heads and our hearts. We have been learning since we were children how to think - how to make money, how to buy things, how to build things. The whole education system is set up to teach us how to think, not to feel. We may have forgotten how to feel - to relax and to enjoy one another. Nobody is teaching us how to "live happily ever after" as we've heard in fairy tales.
I've been researching this for seven years, and it's difficult to summarize all this in a short article, but a couple of main parts are these: focus on your partner rather than yourself and understand that we each have a thinking mode and a feeling mode.
I teach people to recognize which mode their partners are in. For instance, if our partners are in a thinking mode, we need to ask them about their thoughts and then acknowledge that we value what they think and praise their accomplishments. If they are in the feeling mode, we need to ask them about their feelings and then let them know we understand and care about them and how they feel.
Where Laughter Lives
I believe that love and laughter can only happen when one person takes the time to think about what would cause the other person to feel good. Then because the other person feels good, he or she will naturally respond by saying something or doing something that causes the person who initiated the laughter to feel good. It's a win-win situation.
Balance is so important in our lives. I find that in our busy world, one of the greatest blessings we can give ourselves is to find a balance between thinking and feeling. One way to do this is through daily meditation. I meditate a half an hour in the morning and another half an hour in the afternoon, no matter how busy I may be. My mission statement is this: Experience happiness and teach it with passion through comedy and sensitivity.
Everybody laughs the same in every language because laughter is a universal connection. It's the shortest distance between two people. I believe that laughter is a language of God and that we can all live happily ever laughter.
I believe this is true for myself, for you, for everyone. If you find people who don't want to laugh, let me know. We have ways to make them laugh!
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