Here’s the text for the 23 February 2026 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

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One of the things I love about The Breakfast Show on BBC Radio 2 is how much laughter there is. From you, Scott Mills, from your guests and your team, from the whole family of listeners.

Maybe I resonate with it because I grew up in a family of jokesters. My uncle Jerry so properly funny he could have his own Netflix special.

My dad’s more old-school. Slapstick. Our extended family still talks about the time we were in a packed restaurant, on holiday, and my dad paraded from the loo with an epic streamer of toilet-paper tucked into the back of his shorts. My aunt was so mortified she slid under the table, but everybody else in the restaurant was crying with laughter.

Humour is how my family shows affection. It’s a complicated love language, though, and one result of that is: I can be a bit suspicious of people who don’t laugh very much. And I’m especially wary of people who can’t laugh at themselves. (Though I’ve been that guy, too, in defensive seasons of my life).

I once watched an interfaith panel whose main guests were Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama. The moderator started with a sort of pompous question – one of those remarks designed to brag more than to explore.

After the question, there was this long silence –– and then Tutu started to giggle. And then the Dalai Lama started to giggle. Both of their faces crinkled up as they tried to contain it, but then they looked at each other – and absolutely lost it. Belly laughter for a solid thirty seconds. The audience was stunned quiet and had no idea how to react.

Finally Tutu caught his breath, wiped his eyes, and said to the moderator: “I’m so sorry, my dear, I’m so sorry. Ummm … what was the question, again?” And at that, the whole room erupted with laughter – including the moderator!

It wasn’t the laughter of shame, though, or of mockery; it was the laughter of freedom.

There’s a stereotype about religious people that we’re all are stoic, sour-faced sticks-in-the-mud. But I want my life to resonate with what the Bible calls “the joy of the Lord”, with the spirit of Jesus, who is so unconfined – and so unconfining – that uptight people in the Bible call him “a glutton and a drunk and a friend of sinners”.

I sense Jesus’s presence sometimes at comedy clubs when the crowd’s howling at something that’s hilarious because it’s true. Or in AA meetings when someone undergoes holy laughter after finally admitting the truth.

And I know his presence in church, too, when – whether I’m feeling uptight or unconfined or somewhere in between – I’m reminded that we are all loved by God and freed for joy.