Humour in theology & preaching
I read a book about anti-gravity. I just couldn't put it down
The use of humour in general and irony in particular has been a feature of Modernity for most of the last century. The two best known works from the beginning of the 20th century are probably Freud’s 1905 work Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (Penguin, 1991) and the Frenchman Henri Bergson’s Laughter written in 1911 (Macmillan, 1912). But of course it was Germany, the chuckle factory of Europe, which produced the best theological work on ‘Laughter’ this century. Karl-Josef Kuschel’s Laughter, (SCM, 1994) is a remarkably interesting and stimulating read.
Most of the more recent books I have on my shelves concerning humour and preaching are lightweight and American, apart from my own slim volume (with Stephen Gaukroger, Double Cream, Monarch, with some serviceable sermon jokes), which is just lightweight. Arthur Asa Berger’s An Anatomy of Humor (Transaction, 1998) is a full and amusing analysis, but is most concerned with technique and classification. And Peter Berger’s 1997 Redeeming Laughter (1999) is a tour de force full of humour...) There’s also a very good chapter in Mark Oakley’s 2001 book The Collage of God.
But Kuschel’s work, which draws on a wide European literature, has both depth and an appreciation of the postmodern condition that makes it a good framework for this essay.
You are unique, just like everyone else.
After an analysis of the Ancients (Homer, Plato, Aristotle), Kuschel uses as a contemporary source Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, which he sees as a postmodern metalinguistic irony demonstrating the limits of knowledge and truth. Eco himself sees the mediaeval monastic whodunnit as a construct for exploring the masquerade of late 20th century epistemology. For Eco, when all is said and done there is only a stark choice left: laughter (William of Baskerville’s favourite) or silence (his pupil Adso’s conclusion in his dotage).
Kuschel then surveys the biblical material, concluding that the OT portrays human laughter of two kinds
1) the sceptical laughter of the faithful, who although they may deem God’s promises as unlikely, eventually (ideally) join the liberating laughter of God. So Sarah declares to Abraham, “God made me laugh, everyone who hears of it will laugh with me.” (Gen 21.6) But more significantly, Abraham laughs on being told to expect the patter of tiny feet (Gen 17.17). Despite Paul’s over optimistic interpretation (Romans 4.19f) Walter Gross (quoted by Kuschel) is possibly right when he states: “The Abraham prostrate in worship before God and yet laughing at the same time is one of the most inscrutable images in Holy Scripture.”
Jewishness has always been rooted in humour. (“beautiful Thursday joke”.
2) the mocking laughter of the fool in the face of the wise, which will lead to destruction, often expounded in the Psalms and Wisdom literature.
My Karma just ran over my Dogma
Kuschel also looks at Divine laughter in the OT and sees here three possible aspects of God
1) The God of joy and freedom who laughs with the sceptical believers at the unlikeliness of the faith enterprise
2) The “how odd of God to choose the Jews” God who mocks the wicked and laughs at the non-Israeli powers who presume world supremacy
3) The inscrutable God who appears to laugh at the innocent and act in an arbitrary fashion, which is Job’s experience (ch9 esp vv.21-23), although Kuschel argues that the redactors have obviously tried to ameliorate this view of God in the concluding chapters (eg. 37.23)
Veni Vidi Velcro; I came, I saw, I stuck around
Ironically it is in the Gnostic writings (eg the Apocalypse of Peter) that Christ is portrayed as demonstrating the very human characteristic of laughter, although they use it to support a form of docetism in which Christ laughs at the foolishness of mortals as they pin the human Jesus to the cross.
The NT knows nothing of Jesus’s laughter (or of Paul’s for that matter) which is why the monastic movement supported by Chrysostom, Augustine and a host of others were for the most part against any merriment that led to laughter. (Although Francis knew the power of mocking the temptations of lust - his body, Brother Ass.)
Yet Kuschel, following Moltmann in Theology and Joy (London, 1973), argues that the NT is suffused with laughter that stems from joy and paradox.
1) There is the joy of a God who sides with the marginalised and sympathises with the doubters, who rejoices with the sinners who see their need and mocks the smug righteous; he exults in physical and spiritual creation, and laughs at death in the resurrection of Christ.
2) The followers of Christ will know the laughter of others who mock them for their faith and for their Sermon on the Mount ethics. And in reverse, Christians will be those who do not join the wicked laughter of those who seek to put down with malice and superiority, the weak and the social outcasts.
Lottery: a tax on people who are poor at mathematics
I’m not going into the whatizitness of postmodernity here - I’ve written about it elsewhere. But humour is a key ingredient of postmodernity and especially blank irony: supposedly an irony without arrogance or self-importance. Moderns are still contemptuous enough to use irony as a tool for mocking that which they have ‘ridden above’, in the same way that theology students and clerics use cynicism to destroy their opponents while hoisting themselves on their own petards – for cynicism is deeply destructive.
The modernist ironist assumes privileged access to an objective point of view. He lives in the Big Picture. But the blank ironist has no such luxury. She lives in an incoherent and pluralist world.
So there is in art and literature (and the adverts) constant self-mockery: what various writers have called playfulness, pastiche, jokeyness, stylistic promiscuity, eclecticism, self-parody. You can see it in the Simpsons, The Family Guy, Green Wing, Eddie Izzard, Damian Hirst or Gilbert & George. There are strong connections in postmodern humour between death, violence, religion and sex, amply illustrated in films like Pulp Fiction, For many postmoderns, in apologetic discourse, you cannot be saying anything serious unless you say it with a smile. To be serious at being serious is to coerce. So humour must be employed.
The so-called ‘Waning of Affect’ is one reason why humour has become so dominant. The ability to feel deep emotion is spasmodic and brief for postmoderns. This is partly due to information overload and partly due to the fragmentation of consciousness. We have to cope with so many emotions in so short a space of time each day.
The TV culture and sound-bite sensations have coarsened the human spirit. There has been a loss of depth and more than that, in postmodernity there is a denial of depth. Jameson describes the loss of an ‘inner self’ that is able to feel, claiming that postmoderns’ “feelings (Lyotard “intensities”) are now free-floating and impersonal and dominated by euphoria.” Edward Munch’s famous painting The Scream is a canonical expression of the great modernist thematics of alienation, anomie, solitude, social fragmentation, and isolation. In postmodernity there can be no cathartic, wordless scream. There is only humour and another day.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
So how (if at all) do we use humour in preaching? There are those, and I guess they have already stopped reading this essay, who would agree with John Chrysostom: “This world is not the theatre for laughter; neither did we come together for this intent, that we may give way to immoderate mirth, but that we may groan, and by this groaning inherit a kingdom.” Or they might echo the words of Martyn Lloyd-Jones, from a different churchmanship and era: “It is an abomination for a man to go into the pulpit to be deliberately humorous.” Then others of us would agree with Malcolm Muggeridge that “Next to mystical enlightenment [laughter] is the most precious gift and blessing that comes to us on earth.”
Whether we are addressing modernists (the vast majority of our congregations), or postmodernists (the growing mind-set of western society), we remove a vital cultural element from our services and sermons if we remove humour. Evangelicals have made very good use of this, primarily in the modernist arena. The humour is very realist; it is the anecdote; it lacks surrealism. [Grocer to little boy by apple barrel: “Are you trying to steal one of those apples son?” “No sir. I’m trying not to.”] It is evangelicals who introduced the RCL collect for Sermon-block Sunday: ‘O Lord, who didst hallow laughter through thy gift of vestments; grant that we who have heard a fantastic joke recently, may find a Biblical text to accompany it...’ [You can find postevangelical humour all over the web. Eg, http://ship-of-fools.com] Perhaps Anglo-Catholics should re-introduce the risus paschalis of the middle ages, when at the Easter Mass the priest would use all manner of ribaldry and sexual humour to elicit peels of laughter from the congregation. Modernist Christian humour is still ‘western’, cataphatic, left-brain activity, full of the immanent. [Evangelist & pastor go bear hunting…] Postmodernist humour is more ‘eastern’, apophatic, reflecting mood and transcendent ineffability. It works better with agnostics who believe, rather than dogmatists who want reinforcement. [“I tried atheism, but in the end I found it too hard to believe.”]
Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be
Humour is an essential part of being human, and seems to reflect something within the Trinity. The joke, slapstick, physical laughter – these are but the visible outcrops of something that is very profoundly embedded in our psychology. Which is why you don’t necessarily have to be an outwardly funny or jokey person in order to have a deep sense of humour. If we go back to the Trinity, then perhaps humour is part of our psyche involved with our sense of self-worth and inner equilibrium – a part of the checks and balances on our self-reflection.
If the sense is either absent or ‘overbalances’ then it seems to exacerbate depression. (Antony Hancock or Kenneth Williams) But as a God given part of what it is to be human and seems to be a very effective survival mechanism. (The Life of Brian – always look on the bright side of things – a profound comment on how to live in this vale of tears.)
[If you don’t have a sense of humour, or at least are unable to use it publicly, then it is usually better not to try. Failed humour is a poor communicator and humour is only part of the communication process - hopefully you have other strengths. And of course good liturgy can help to restore a postmodern’s confidence in non-coercive seriousness. But if you can use humour, but have felt it inappropriate, maybe in some contexts you should reconsider. Then again, if you have a developed gift for humour, you should be aware of its manipulative potential and of the distinctive Christian theology which should undergird it. You could start in no better place than Kuschel’s Laughter.]
Coda: my vicar has a beautiful illuminated manuscript of this piece by Paul Bunday
In the beginning… God laughed
And the earth was glad.
The sound of laughter
Was like the swaying and swinging of thunder in mirth;
Like the rush of the north on a drowsy and dozing land;
It was cold. It was clear.
The lion leapt down
At the bleating feet of the frightened lamb and smiled;
And the viper was tamed by the thrill of the earth,
At the holy laughter.
We laughed, for the Lord was laughing with us in the evening;
For the laughter of love went pealing into the night;
And it was good.
