George Harrison Said Having a Sense of Humor Was ‘Absolutely Necessary’
George Harrison said having a sense of humor was “absolutely necessary.” Rolling Stone called him an “escape artist, forever evading labels and expectations.” He could never fit into any one category. George didn’t have the dial set to only one emotion.
Those who knew him the best were very familiar with George’s yin-yang personality. He meditated yet loved to party. George could make those around him uneasy and at ease simultaneously. His wife, Olivia, said George could be “very, very quiet or he could be very, very loud.” Most of all, George could be funny or very serious.
Despite his differing personality, Olivia explained, “George didn’t see black and white, up and down as different things. He didn’t compartmentalize his moods or his life. People think, oh, he was really this or that, or really extreme. But those extremes are all within one circle.”
George didn’t think he was just funny or just serious. No one could be one thing.
George Harrison thought people believed he didn’t have a sense of humor because of his religious songs
In the mid-1960s, George embarked on his spiritual journey. His musical guru, Ravi Shankar, gave him sitar lessons, taught him that God is sound, and gave him spiritual texts so he’d understand spiritual matters better. They traveled to India together and stayed in a holy place where ancient gurus once lived at the foot of the Himalayan mountains.
When George returned, he began incorporating religious themes into his music. Suddenly, the press and fans started viewing him as the serious Beatle and the quiet Beatle. Neither could’ve been farther from the truth.
During a 1987 interview, Creem Magazine pointed out to George, “You’re funny, too–and that’s funny, ’cause for all those years you were thought of as being so serious…”
George replied, “‘Cause I did them religious songs three or four times.”
In Here Comes The Sun: The Spiritual And Musical Journey Of George Harrison, Apple employee Tony King explained, “When I first met George in 1963, he was Mister Fun, Mister Stay-Out-All-Night. Then all of a sudden, he found LSD and Indian religion and he became very serious.
“Things went from jolly weekends where we’d have steak and kidney pie and sit around giggling, to these rather serious weekends where everyone walked around blissed out and talked about the meaning of the universe.”
George was serious about his spiritual journey, but that didn’t mean he forgot to be funny. As Olivia said, he didn’t compartmentalize his moods.
He added laughter to the end of “Within You Without You” as a “way of reminding listeners not to take his pontificating seriously—search for God but don’t lose your sense of humor, he seemed to admonish himself as much as his listeners.”
George said it was essential to have a sense of humor
George thought it was essential to have a sense of humor. He saw humor in every situation. Thinking George was serious all the time is funny in itself. Would George have funded Monty Python’s Life of Brian if he didn’t like to laugh? He thought it was funny that people thought he wasn’t funny.
Musician Magazine’s Timothy White was another journalist pleasantly surprised by George’s sense of humor. “People always say you’re so serious and broody, but I’d say you have a ready sense of humor,” White said.
George replied, “Me too! I’ve always had a sense of humor–and I think it’s absolutely necessary. I think what happened is, I was tagged as somber because I did some spiritual things during a sizable phase of my own career, and sang a lot of songs about God or the Lord or whatever you want to call Him.
“You can’t be singing that material laughingly, but if you’re not smiling people draw that conclusion of seriousness. I don’t think anybody’s all serious or all comical, and I’ve seen comedians who are deadly serious when they’re offstage.
“Frankly, I always thought it was very funny when people thought I was very serious! Maybe it’s also because the last time I did interviews back in the 1970s it was all that heavy hangover from the hippie ’60s, when everybody was into this discipline, that doctrine and the other.
“I’ve got a very serious side of me, but even within that, I always see the joke too. That’s why I always liked Monthy Python.”
He could ‘kill’ with his humor
George’s friends and family knew how humorous he could be. Tom Petty said George was often hilariously funny, even when he was being cynical. The former Beatle “killed” Petty with his sense of humor.
Petty told NPR, “But the best thing I can say to people that are curious about that is George was probably everything that you thought he was, and then some more. Very funny man; he could just kill me with his humor.”
In Martin Scorsese’s documentary, George Harrison: Living in the Material World, Monty Python’s Eric Idle said, “He would test things by what made him laugh or what was close to his heart.”
Even after almost dying in a 1999 home invasion, George joked that Olivia, who’d saved his life, was like Western epic director Sam Peckinpah. When Idle visited him after the attack, George cracked another joke: “Why doesn’t this kind of thing happen to the Rolling Stones?”
George once said people fear spiritualism because they don’t understand it. They immediately correlate religiousness with seriousness. They couldn’t understand how Georg could be funny and spiritual any more than he could be quiet and talkative.
