Somewhere along the line, we picked up the notion that it wasn’t okay to laugh in church, and it stuck. I fear theology had a lot to do with that, because far too often, theology isn’t a laughing matter. Theology, we think, is serious business, and nothing at which we should laugh. I beg to differ. Being funny should not be the enemy of being serious. The Christian faith is, I think, seriously funny.
A friend recently asked in a discussion forum what humor has to do with theology. As it just so happened, I've written a chapter on this topic for a forthcoming book on doing theology with virtue and joy, which I've drawn from in this brief reflection. Let me know if you'd like to be notified when the book releases; you can also take in a sermon I preached on the topic.
Humor is an overlooked virtue of the theological life. Bursting through the clear delineations of logic and cognition, laughter erupts as if our mind and body are conspiring against rationality itself by taking the mundane, the everyday, even (perhaps especially!) the vulgar, and conspicuously transgresses even the thinnest veneer of self-possession. Laughter overtakes us, even when we work to suppress it. If I’m honest, this may be one of my favorite things about laughter. Sometimes, the more you work against it, the more it makes a mockery of your effort. It doesn’t care that you’re at your aunt’s funeral. Your cousin’s oblivious boyfriend just walked the center aisle at the church with his shirt tail hanging out of his open fly for all to observe, and a particularly uppity funeral director who is clearly more comfortable interacting with dead people than living ones is wearing a look of horror on his face that is inexplicably and uncontrollably funny. We know we’re not supposed to laugh in a situation like that, so why is it so hard to stop ourselves?
This is precisely what I find to be so promising about laughter in doing the work of theology. It is upending, surprising, and overtakes us when we least expect it. It intrudes on the well-adjusted social norms that set the tone of our culture and the expectations for those who wish to fit in. It’s the kid who has smashed his nose and mouth onto the plate glass window of the fancy restaurant where a couple is having a romantic dinner and won’t relent until they acknowledge his sloppy impression of a blowfish. It offends the status quo and evokes a response precisely because it’s so out of the ordinary. Isn’t that something like hearing the gospel?
What if part of theology’s invitation to you was to be brought to laughter by God’s upending activity? Christians tend to find the clearest expression of God’s activity in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. What if the truth of God’s work to overcome evil in the world through Jesus was at least a little bit funny because it’s so truthfully serious? If this is the case, I can’t think of anything more absurdly truthful than the resurrection of Jesus. It isn’t normal for a man who was publicly executed to return to life. In fact, the public nature of the crucifixion is precisely what makes this so preposterous. Lots of people saw him die, but there’s no category of ‘normal’ where we see him come back to life, no matter the method of his demise. The odd feeling that overtakes me when I talk honestly about what I really believe is probably an indication of just how funny this resurrection business is. “I believe that a peasant carpenter, son of a virgin, from the wrong side of the tracks got crossways with religious authorities and the Roman government 2,000 years ago, and they killed him. After they killed him, he came back to life and talked with his friends, and ate fish, and appeared in locked rooms, and generally hung around for several weeks. I think he’s God and I worship him.” Speaking it out loud reminds me of how preposterous it is, but the truthfulness of it demands that I continue to speak it. When the absurd truth of God’s activity hits me like that, how can I say it with a straight face? Put another way, the only setup for a joke better than, “A guy walks into a bar…” may be, “A guy walked out of his tomb…” Or, as we often say during our laughter at a joke, it’s funny because it's true.
Funnier still is that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is how God has opted to deal with evil, sin, oppression, corruption, and the like. That’s a reality that moved Julian of Norwich to laughter. A fourteenth century theologian, she recorded a series of visions that she received in what became the first book to be written by a woman in English. In one vision, she saw the passion of Jesus as “the overcoming of the Fiend,” a reference to the devil. “Also,” she wrote, “I saw our Lord scorn [the devil’s] malice and set at naught his unmight; and he willeth that we do so. For this sight, I laughed mightily, and that made them to laugh that were about me, and their laughing was a pleasure to me.” Imagine, if you will, the work of a theologian to help others laugh mightily because of God’s overturning of evil, and to take delight in the laughter of those who join you.
Stanley Hauerwas comments on the nature of humor in the work of Christian theology, pointing out, “a story that has at its center a crucified savior does not invite jocular commentary.” He follows that comment with what has become one of my favorite theological sentences: “But there is resurrection.” Resurrection is the surprising punchline that makes the Christian life funny. It is not only a joke being played on death itself, but also on every familiar pattern in our life that tricks us into thinking that death is the ultimate end, and thus our lives are the ultimate good. Thinking of our lives as the ultimate good strikes me as profoundly humorless. It is completely serious because it has to be. If accruing a bunch of stuff, getting the dream job, or having the perfect house is the real meaning of life, it’s got to be defended at all costs. If our life is the ultimate end, it isn’t a laughing matter.
Resurrection is the truth that can make life funny. If it’s true that we can’t really laugh while we are afraid, resurrection opens the space for us to laugh in the face of the singular reality that has shaped human motivation from the beginning of time. Without resurrection, this life is all that we have, and is therefore the ultimate concern of human existence. You can laugh at a pie in the face when your belly is full. When you are starving, wasting food is no laughing matter. In the surprising event of resurrection, then, the Christian faith enjoys an abundance of life that can join with God in laughing at death. Pointing to the work of 20th century theologian Karl Barth, Hauerwas observes the humor that shines through Barth’s work, marking his preaching and teaching with a distinctive sense of playfulness and freedom. “Because Barth’s theology was so sure of the victory of Christ, he was free to enjoy the world.” The work of theology can be laughter, if we’ll allow ourselves to be surprised by the punchline.
Funny is what happens when absurdity and truth collide. Those of us who have been trained as theologians through the careful reading of texts and the writing of essays and books tend to run in a mode of analysis; we don’t often let things burst in upon us and call it theology. While there is most certainly something to be said for the careful consideration of an argument, this isn’t the way we experience humor. A joke lands, often surprisingly, and the surprise is what makes it funny. Steve Wilkins has observed, “Humor builds on punch-line surprises, disruption of the conventional, reversal of expectation…challenging boundaries, misinterpretation, redefinition of the familiar, satire, paradox, irony, and other related devices.” Perhaps this is what has made me a fan of Winston Churchill’s humor. “A joke is a very serious thing,” he once quipped. At risk of squeezing the life out of this clever little witticism, the surprise is that joke and serious rarely belong together. We are surprised by the word ‘serious’ after the word ‘joke,’ and that’s what makes it a joke!
Churchill was also the master of surprising his listeners by turning some serious philosophical or political reality into something else altogether. “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on,” he once said. I think I smile at this because I can’t help but picture some deeply philosophical concept like ‘truth’ as a bumbling, bleary-eyed old man, reaching for his trousers while trying to rub the sleep out of his eyes. The oddness of an image like that carries a sense of surprise. I’m familiar with old men, I’m familiar with pants, and I’m familiar with notions of truth, but putting them all together in this way makes the familiar a bit strange.
What else is Christian theology than coming to terms with the familiar being made strange? As an ongoing act of speaking the gospel, theology describes how commonplace realities are being redemptively upended by God’s activity. Can we behold the surprise that erupts from God becoming flesh? Isn’t the work of theology to help us and others receive the “redefinition of the familiar” that takes place over and over again in the history of God’s people? Not only does God’s activity surprise us with turning things backwards and upside down, but the work of theology also seeks to bring these incongruous acts of redemption to our attention. Churchill might as well have taken his line from John’s Gospel. If the Word can become flesh, the truth can certainly put its pants on.
Part of theology’s delight is when it does the work of making the familiar strange enough to evoke laughter through disruption of the familiar. Some of the greatest comedians are the ones who can take common, everyday experiences and narrate them in ways that point out how odd they really are. There isn’t usually anything particularly funny about an airport or commercial air travel until a good comedian gets ahold of the experience. Once you’ve heard a comedian bring to light how ridiculous the whole thing can be, it’s hard to ever see air travel the same way again. That also happens to be the comment I hear from folks in church after a bit of sermonic theology that has illuminated some aspect of God’s activity in the world. “I’ll never look at that passage the same way again,” I’ll sometimes hear. I only wish they’d laugh a bit more when they say it.
Learning to laugh at something that is truly funny takes theological vision. For those studying theology for the sake of ministry, this point cannot be missed. Ministry can be a life of laughter when our eye is turned to the joke God is playing on the familiar patterns of power, oppression, control, and kingdom-building. If our vision of life in the church is conditioned by the same old patterns of power, we won’t see what is so funny about the lowly being lifted up and the mighty brought low. It will offend us. Our laughter may quickly mutate to mocking.
Theology in the mode of laughter is also vital for church leadership. When we are in on God’s joke, decisions can be made in a way that help others laugh joyfully as well. Theology without the joy of humor, however, can quickly devolve into a desperate attempt to survive at all costs, or a quest to take control. This is probably why the people who have never really had much control have produced some of the funniest comedians. Theology that assumes it needs to defend or control will almost always miss the joke.
When it’s nurtured with a theological vision of true humor, the church is a community of laughter because it has long been associated with incongruous intrusions of the norm. From its early days as a kind of subversive underground comedy club, its members would get together and try out new material. They’d read out loud texts that conveyed to them what they’ve eventually call the gospel, and it would call them into an eccentrically holy life. (Eventually, they’d call those texts the New Testament.) The gospel was the truthful story that helped them chuckle even as they continued to be pressed out of life in the Roman Empire. Humor is a powerful vehicle for telling the truth, especially the truth a lot of other people can’t see. That’s most likely why some of the best comedic traditions have come from people who have been historically oppressed. This isn’t to suggest that being a member of the church in the late-modern West automatically makes one oppressed, but it is to suggest that stepping into the pattern of the gospel has usually made people a bit odd in whatever society they find themselves, and the gospel then is the story that can keep them laughing.
Doing theology with an eye to humor means that we’ll need to invite others to join in on the joke. The challenge will likely arise when we have taken faith and its institutions so seriously that we’ve lost our laughter. Doing work that is faithful to God’s comedic material sometimes puts theologians in front of what comedians might call a tough room, filled with those who come with expectations, but can’t laugh at any of the jokes. Sometimes, comedians face a tough room when their material doesn’t have a truthful edge; the jokes are too vanilla. On the other side, tough rooms happen when the jokes are just too offensive to be funny. Comedians probably have something to teach theologians here, especially those of us doing pastoral theology. If our work abandons the edgy and surprising inbreaking of God’s kingdom, it’s probably not worth our laughter. At the same time, if telling the truth about God’s activity is simply too offensive for people, that’s probably a good indicator that they aren’t in on the joke, and their commitments lie elsewhere. God’s activity has always disrupted and unsettled those who just couldn’t find the humor in it, and so the work of the theologian may sometimes mean helping them to get in on the joke by letting go of the commitments that are blocking their laughter. Gifted humorists can do this well, helping us to see issues from unique and unexpected angles, helping us to experience humor where we hadn’t seen it before. The work of theology calls on us to acquire some comedic skill, resisting the urge to offer humorless, bland material that promises the safety of not offending, while also offering a way in for those who may have built up resistance to God’s jokes, offended at what holiness actually is.
That will, of course, require that we ourselves learn to laugh first. We need to be able to get God’s sense of humor. In my work as a professor, I spend a lot of time with those who are just beginning their work as theologians. There is, of course, the evanescent beauty of uncovering mysteries of the divine that are life-giving and invigorating. There are also plenty of times I’ll look into the eyes of a student who’s struggling to get the joke. It’s not that they can’t grasp the concepts, but that they’re beginning to realize that God’s activity is making them uncomfortable. God’s activity, authoritatively witnessed to us by Scripture, sometimes even cuts against the concepts of God and God’s activity that they’ve carried into the classroom. Over the months I spend with them, I’ve come to see my job as helping them to laugh by getting the joke. It’s not as much that I do this by explaining how the joke is funny, but by introducing them to a vision of the world in which God’s activity really is capable of evoking laughter. When we’ve learned to loosen up from the theological hang-ups that make God’s material offensive to us, it prepares us for laughter. It happens in subtle ways across time, in things like listening carefully to Mary’s song, inquiring into why Peter didn’t get the joke himself, and when I can see a spark of theological laughter in their work, calling attention to it, even if they may be a little resistant at first, in words that were familiar to Sarah: “Yes, you did laugh.” And that’s perfectly alright. When you get the joke, you don’t need to cover your laughter.
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