The President of Ukraine has been nominated for the Nobel Prize for Peace. We all know he was a professional comedian before elected President. I wish Canada is mature enough to pick Rick Mercer as the Governor General of Canada. We need a person like him to make us laugh at ourselves. I want him to say, “Lighten up! Take it easy. There is life outside of politics.” There is a problem if we take ourselves too seriously.
None of us know everything nor do we know what’s perfect. So we imagine such an unknown “God” or something equivalent. Swiss theologian Karl Barth created the term “Absolute Other” for what we call God. For that reason the word “atheism” does not make much sense. God is unknown. Christians made Jesus God. But that designation has been debated by different Christians forever even to the point of killing each other for many centuries. Fact is nobody knows for certain. In the movie “Conclave” Dean of the Congregation of the Cardinals was quoted as saying, “Certitude is the enemy of faith.” What I understand him saying is that no human has the right to claim to be infallible. Any one who claims to be perfect should be taken down quick. A mature politician can accept criticism and be able to laugh at oneself. It’s why I don’t trust any politician who doesn’t laugh, especially about oneself. The current President of the U.S. is one such person. I have never seen him laugh. The Canadian Leader of the Opposition Party always looks angry.
Some good politicians are comedians. The bravest and most respected political leader today is the President of Ukraine, Mr. Volodymyr Zelenskky. Another politician Mr. Bart De Wever is known as a very witty person in Europe, “who moonlights as Belgian Prime Minister” as is characterized by the weekly news magazine “Economist” on February 14th, 2026. Mr. De Wever proposed to change the European Union into “European Onion.” He must have been chuckling, making fun of his fellow Belgian citizen’s pronunciation of “eu – as “oi” like German language. “Euh-ropean Euh-nion .“ He might have wanted to change the attitude of European’s tendency to see the differences as a hindrance to unity into the layer of differences to make Europe to be like the important ingredient of gourmet cuisine: onion. Knowing some humor-less powerful politicians who don’t get jokes, this may not work. Pity!
No human is perfect. If any one claims to be such it will be the worst kind of leader. But comedians can see a fake and enable people to laugh at such absurdity. Comedians very often possess sharp insight to see reality behind fake surfaces and reality behind rhetoric. The best example of such a comedian is Charlie Chaplin. He said, “ You need power when you want to do something harmful. Otherwise, love is enough to get everything done.” His political perception was so sharp that the U.S. government was afraid of the comedian’s message spreading amongst the public. He was expelled from American soil and did not come back for many years. America had to admit his genius eventually and awarded him the special award for his lifetime achievement.
In my life I met an extraordinary person committed to love and to social justice. He was my teaching colleague for a few years at a university in Lesotho Africa. Desmond Tutu was one of the funniest men I met in my life though he was a priest elevated to be the Archbishop of the Anglican Church of South Africa. He was the man radiating joy of life. “We are all Africans. Some of us moved to the North and did not get enough Sun.” Humor and wit can be dangerous to people who are narcissistic and fake.