One day long ago, in the 1970s, I remember listening to the fusty old Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham, on Radio 4. Years later I read a novel by Italy’s premier semiotician, Umberto Eco. The combination of both gave birth to a need to write a book on Christianity and comedy.
Lord Hailsham, urbane, dry and precociously witty, left a few bon mots behind: “The best way I know to win an argument is to start by being in the right”; “The introduction of religious passion into politics is the end of honest politics, and the introduction of politics into religion is the prostitution of true religion.” But it was listening to him muse about Jesus’s sense of humour that suggested I had missed the laughter of Jesus in the Gospels. He talked about Jesus’s hyperbole and the wit that lay behind the parables.
Failing to confront a builder’s plank stuck in one’s eye while giving way to a preoccupation with spotting a speck of sawdust in our neighbour’s eye is ludicrous and funny. Whether the eye of a needle is the eye of a needle or the name for a tiny entrance in the Jerusalem wall doesn’t matter much. It’s still about a monumentally large clumsy thing trying to get into or through a very small and delicate space. It’s the stuff that comedy is made of.
Reading the New Testament is a two-way process. We read it, but it also reads us. If we have no idea that love laughs, we may miss both the love and the laughter in its pages. We talk for instance about the parable of the prodigal son, but really, the story is about the prodigal father. A father so steeped in love that he runs towards his wastrel child and forgives him everything from greed to egotism and prostitutes and gambling. Jesus walks in dangerous territory here. For at the heart of the story is the message that there is nothing that should stand between us and the forgiveness of the Father. The father is almost eccentrically funny in his generosity.
Did Jesus laugh? The disciples must have laughed as they penned the papyri. Even calling the pompous, self-righteous religious prigs whose own self-regard was inversely proportional to their real spiritual calibre, “white-washed sepulchres”, is as funny as it is rude. Peter’s own ludicrous over-reactions veering between high-octane courage and narrow-minded over-confidant dogmatism are as funny as they are tragic – if you love him.
A God who laughs at us is one who will laugh with us. Have we glimpsed his humour in Jesus? And what would it do if we did? We might trust him more. We ought to have more expectation of humour than we do. It enables us to laugh at fate, and tease tragedy. There is a wonderful if astonishing book, It Kept Us Alive, written by Chaya Ostrower, a Jew. It’s a shocking book that looks at holocaust humour. One small example is that of a young boy in the Warsaw ghetto who was asked by some German guards, “What would you like most of all if you were Hitler’s son?” “To be orphaned,” he answered immediately. Gallows humour in the holocaust literally kept some of them alive. The author of the book explores the general theory of humour. She offers an overview of its psychology and sociology, presenting the insights of Freud, Frankl, Durkheim and Weber. Humour, we are reminded, can so often become the tool of the oppressed against the oppressors. Bullies and power addicts don’t like humour. Its currency is the ridiculous and the powerful never find ridicule comfortable.
But perhaps it was in Umberto Eco where I found the most fertile treatment of humour. His book The Name of the Rose is an astonishingly multi-layered novel that works in a bewildering number of ways all at once. But at the centre of the plot is a murder mystery in which an English Occamist who looks very like a medieval prototype of Sherlock Holmes is called in to solve a series of accidents or murders.
A series of corpses are discovered in the monastery library. Without giving the plot away, the deaths have something to do with the discovery of the genuinely long-lost second part of the Poetics by Aristotle – the lost book containing his theory of comedy and laughter. Someone is desperate to stop people reading Aristotle on laughter. The implications of the Church rediscovering not only the laugher of Aristotle but more powerfully the laughter of Jesus are nuclear. Love might laugh. Holiness might be happy. God might smile as much as He weeps. And so, as part of our discipleship, might we – and what kind of Church would that create? Time to start writing.
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