A reader writes:
If we did not fall from grace, would we find anything funny or humorous?
Someone once suggested that we find things funny because they are based on
misfortune.What’s your take on humor???
I’ve thought a lot about humor and the nature of humor. In everyday life, I use humor a lot (and with a good amount of success, though you always have to expect that 5-10% of the jokes you tell won’t get a laugh; risk is part of comedy), so it’s frustrating to be able to do something without being able to explain what you’re doing.
I have some thoughts on what makes things funny, but I haven’t yet sat down and devoted the brainpower to the topic to really try to crack the question (if that’s even possible for us humans).
I have read some treatments of humor, but not enough, and not ones I was happy with.
Some theorists do indeed posulate that humor is based on misfortune in a very strict way, but I think that they’re overplaying their hand. I’m not convinced that all humor involves misfortune.
Sometimes humor just involves wordplay, without anybody suffering or being the butt of a joke.
I can’t think of a specific example at the moment, but I often find that when I’m talking to a friend we discuss one topic and then, after the conversation has moved on to a new topic, it suddenly occurs to me that phrases that came up in our discussion of the first topic can also be applied to the new one.
When I deliver these phrases with the right timing (doing what is known among commedians as a "call back" because you’re calling back a previous line) the mere fact that the phrase has returned in a new context generates a pleased surprise on the part of the listener that produces a humorous response and laughter.
The more surprising the call back is (e.g., because of how long it’s been since it was first brought up) and the more apt it is to the current topic, the funnier it is.
Nobody gets hurt in this kind of comedy. It isn’t based on anybody undergoing suffering or embarrassment. It’s based on the joy of discovry and the delight of seeing a new connection one hadn’t noticed before.
I think that’s what’s behind a lot of wordplay humor. The joy we’re getting at it is the joy of seeing creativity in action, not laughter at anybody’s expense.
My basic theory is that when we have a humorous response to something then what we’re really doing is responding to a form of beauty. There’s something beautiful about humorous situations (even darkly humorous ones). It’s not a visual beauty like we see looking at a painting or an attractive person of the opposite sex. It’s not an audible beauty like we hear in good music. It’s a "situational" beauty that applies to certain situations.
The trick is to be able to cash it out and explain exactly what is beautiful about these situations that generates a humor response.
That’s not easy, but neither is it easy to say why a particular piece of music is beautiful or why a particular sunset is beautiful. That’s not to say it can’t be done; it’s just not easy, especially for a non-specialist.
To answer the question about the Fall of Man, it seems to me that there are two questions there:
(1) Would we have had the capacity to sense humor if we had not fallen and
(2) Would there have encountered any situations of the sort that would trigger our humor response if we had not fallen.
I think the answer to the first question is a definite yes.
Since the gospels never mention Jesus laughing, I had wondered whether he–as an unfallen man–would have done so, but I got my answer when I was spending time with some friends who had a tiny daughter who was born deaf.
Though this child was only three years old and had never heard laughter in her life, she laughed and shrieked and giggled her head off playing with her siblings. She wasn’t just imitating their mouth movements, either, but really laughing. That told me that laughter is a reflex built into human nature. It’s part of us, not just a learned response. It’s instinctive that even people who have never heard laughter still laugh. That means it was part of Jesus’ human nature, too.
We have other evidence as well, for Jesus sometimes uses humor in the gospels. In fact, he regularly uses irony and sarcasm (forms of humor) when dealing with evil people, as when he refers to "blind guides" or "the blind leading the blind."
So yes, we would have had the capacity for humor (what we might call "humor perception" or a sense of humor) even if we had not fallen.
Would there have been situations to elicit this response in us?
Most probably, yes. If I’m right about not all humor being misfortune-based then there definitely could have been. Maybe Adam and Eve entertained each other with wordplay as they worked out the first human language. Think of all the joyful wordplay connections they could make as they said things nobody had ever said before and made call backs when nobody had ever done that before.
Also, I can imagine Eve asking Adam what he’d named various animals and getting responses in some cases that were based on onomatopoeia, causing both of them to bust out laughing.
I’m not at all certain, though, that misfortune-based humor would have been absent. They could have, for example, laughed at the devil’s attempt to tempt them had it failed. And just as we can have a humor response to watching baby animals doing things (like leaping while playing and not quite making it), they might have laughted at them, too.
For that matter, the mere fact that we wouldn’t have died or suffered in the way that we did after the Fall doesn’t mean that paradise was totally . . . paradiasical. There might have been misfortunes, just not ones like we came to inherit as a result of the fall and our loss of whatever superpowers we had.
I mean, if you’re unfallen and not paying attention to where you’re walking and you stub your toe, it can still be funny.
So I suspect that, whatever the situation would have been like, humor would have existed. I also suspect that it would have been gentler on the whole than it is now. (Unless, maybe, you were making fun of that serpent that tried to trick you. You might have been viciously funny in that case.)
If we did not fall from grace, would we find anything funny or humorous? Someone once suggested that we find things funny because they are based on misfortune.
I think there are different kinds of “misfortune.” I’ve slipped and fallen on my butt in some really funny ways before, and they made me laugh. You might call it a misfortune, but I have no reason to think we would always be sure-footed and never fall down (physically) if we were unfallen (spiritually). 🙂
Absurdity and incongruity are also sources of humor, sort of the opposite of the “unexpected connection”.
One of my favorite examples would be the PDQ Bach album “Black Forest Bluegrass”. where clichéd elements of bluegrass and classical music are basically thrown into a blender, with hilarious results (if you like that kind of thing).
Great post!
This makes me think of a scene from “The Passion of the Christ”. And yes, I know that creative license was taken to portray the story, but even so, it resonated within me. My favorite scene in the movie shows Mary and Jesus discussing the table Jesus had just constructed. Mary comments on how tall it is and she laughs at the image of someone trying to sit at the table. In the same scene, Jesus splashes water (playfully) at her when he’s washing up to eat. Both show their human nature and neither of the chuckles they got seemed to be at the expense of the other – and if they were, that “expense” was understood to be playful as well.
Humor can be a great release. Some humor can be cutting… and one would then question defining it as humor. I have to think God gets some good laughs out of the things we do in life.
Interesting post. But, ya know, if you have to explain it, it isn’t funny anymore.
🙂
Tim J.,
That is some messed up stuff. I was introduced to him 5 years ago. A piccolo and accordian duet, who would of thought of it?
Very interesting post Jimmy.
This topic reminded me of the last paragraph of Chesterton’s Orthodoxy:
We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear. Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian. And as I close this chaotic volume I open again the strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I am again haunted by a kind of confirmation. The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.
Bear, thanks for sharing that passage!
How about puns? Those aren’t at anyone’s expense. They are just funny (or not!) because we understand the different meanings of words and phrases and putting something (a word or a person) in a situation where on the surface it appears to belong, but does not actually belong is funny. So absurdity, parody, puns, etc. would be funny even if we were not fallen, wouldn’t they?
Bear, I was thinking of exactly the same thing. Glad you found it to post it. I found an interesting discussion online of the role of humor in religion and theology. http://laetusinpraesens.org/musings/humourx.php
Josh
How about puns? Those aren’t at anyone’s expense.
Not all listeners agree ;D
PHA and Josh,
My pleasure. The full text of several Chesterton works can be found online here:
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/chesterton.html
(Makes it easy to cut and paste when quoting the peerless GKC.)
I was hoping someone would post that Chesterton quote! I think he definitely gets it right.
Also check here for quotes in bottled form:
http://www.chesterton.org/
I love puns. Some of my best friends are punsters. A British e-penpal of mine once referred to the abacus as “the venerable bead,” for which I think he deserves a Get Out of Purgatory Free card 🙂
As for Jesus’ mirth, Dorothy Sayers sees it differently in her essay “A Vote of Thanks to Cyrus”:
“Nor (one is led to imagine) did Christ ever use any ordinary behavior that is not expressly recorded of him. `We are told twice that he wept, but never that he smiled’ – the inference being that he never did smile. Similarly…we may infer that he never said Please or Thank you. But perhaps these common courtesies were left unrecorded precisely because they were common, whereas the tears were (so to speak) `news’.”
She then reminds us of the wording of the well-known story of Jesus and Zacchaeus (“He looked up and saw him, and said…Zacchaeus, make haste and come down; for today I must abide in thy house. And he made haste and came down and received Him joyfully.”) And she comments:
“Politeness would suggest that one does not commandeer other people’s hospitality with a morose scowl, and that if one is received joyfully, it is usually because one has behaved pleasantly. But these considerations would of course apply only to real people” (as opposed to `Bible characters’.)
BTW Miss Sayers’ portrait of Jesus in “The Man Born to Be King” is a delight – her Jesus is quick-thinking, loving, and FUNNY. And it really rings true.
I’m not personally familiar with the Hebrew of Genesis, but I’ve heard it said that Eve’s name is actually a bit of a joke itself. Someone more familiar with the Hebrew might be able to correct me or give better details. In English translations the humor is lost a little bit, but the joke is still present.
Adam names Eve “‘woman’, for out of her man this one has been taken.”, but in Hebrew the humor is more obvious because the word used for woman is literally “her” and “man” put together. It could be rendered more properly in English by saying “This one I will call Herman, for out of her man this one has been taken.”
I dunno why, but that cracks me up every time!
A British e-penpal of mine once referred to the abacus as “the venerable bead,” for which I think he deserves a Get Out of Purgatory Free card 🙂
It’s kind of a pun and kind of not. The words “bead” and “bede” (the saint’s name) were originally just two different spellings of one word, which means “prayer.” 🙂
Ghosty,
I seem to recall that the Hebrew words (albeit with Anglicized spellings) are Ish and Ishah.
Adam names Eve “‘woman’, for out of her man this one has been taken.”, but in Hebrew the humor is more obvious because the word used for woman is literally “her” and “man” put together. It could be rendered more properly in English by saying “This one I will call Herman, for out of her man this one has been taken.”
As I understand it, the word ishhah is not actually derived from ish, they just sound similar. So yes, it is a pun.
I like the “Herman” analogy, by the way. 🙂
Kinda hard to imagine Jesus laughing as a man, but also kinda hard to imagine a baby/toddler Jesus that never laughed.
And here is an Immaculate Joke, lifted from Balaam’s Ass:
Jesus is in town one day teaching some of the local folks, when a rabid crowd of religious professionals push their way toward him. They thrust a woman clad only in a bed sheet before him and say “We caught this woman in the act of adultery! Should we stone her?” Jesus looks off into the distance for a moment, then stoops down and begins scratching something in the sand. Eventually he stands up and says, “Let the person here without sin cast the first stone.” All is silent, and then a rock flies in from the edge of the crowd, smacking the woman in the cheek. Jesus looks over the crowd in the direction of the rock-thrower, then cries out, “Come on, Mom! Stop that!”
The OT Hebrew is -full- of puns, especially in the prophets. If God from heaven through His prophets puns, then puns must have an unfallen component.
Hawah, or Eve in English, is a conjugate of ‘to be’ as is YHWH (He Who causes to be) and Ehyeh asher Ehyeh “I AM that I AM” (The actual divine Name, you might not want to read that aloud) I think Genesis records Adam (Dusty)as giving her this name “because she was to be the mother of all who live” or something like that.
“Why did they lay Jesus in a borrowed tomb?”
“Because He was only going to use it for the weekend.”
As long as we’re swapping jokes… don’t read the end first…
It’s the end of the world, at the general judgment, and every soul that ever lived is getting sentenced to Heaven or Hell. Each person walks up to the Pearly Gates, gives St. Peter their name, and St. Peter tells them if they can go into Heaven or if they must go to Hell.
Peter’s been at it all day, and he’s getting pretty tired, so Jesus comes and offers to take over for a while. Peter thanks him and hands him the Book of Life. A few people come up, give their names, Jesus looks them up, and tells them where to go.
Then a little old, confused-looking man walks up. Jesus asks, “What’s your name sir?”
The old man replies, “I’m so old, I can’t remember.”
Jesus answers, “That’s okay, we’ll use some other information to find out who you are. Can you remember your occupation?”
The old man holds up his hands and says, “Well, I remember working with wood, and I have these splinters, so I think I was a carpenter.”
Jesus nods. “A very noble profession,” he says. “Were you married?”
The old man says, “Yes, I think so.”
“Any children?” Jesus asks.
“Yes, I think I had one..” the old man answers, and then tries very hard to think. “And I’m pretty sure it was a boy … and, now I remember, he was a very special boy, a very good boy, who had holes in his hands and his feet.”
Jesus is startled, and looks at the old man. “Father?” he asks.
The old man looks up at Jesus, and with tears in his eyes, answers… “Pinnochio?”
I’ve always thought that “I will make you fishers of men” was said with a smile.