from http://www.godsfriends.org/Vol14/No3/not-funny.html

Jesus, That’s Not Funny!

by Donald Schell

Jesus’ best-loved parables have all been carefully interpreted over the centuries to mute their startling, unbalancing humor-but I think people love them because some ghostly laughter remains despite the preachers’ efforts to tame it and explain around it.

At St. Gregory’s liturgies we enjoy hearing a skilled reader use voice, intonation, and pause to get hearty laughs from the Gospels or other Bible readings. Our congregation enjoys the ease of natural, spontaneous laughter. But should we be laughing at the Bible? Could its authors actually have hoped their listeners would laugh?

Consider how some lines and moments might produce laughter.

The religious leaders drag before Jesus a woman who has been caught “in the very act” of adultery and demand that he pass judgment. Should she be stoned to death (as a passage in the Mosaic Law demands) or not? Jesus stalls, writing something in the dust. Then he says, “Whoever among you is without sin, cast the first stone.”

If you’re like me, to hear this line you may have to silence the leaden voice of some preacher droning on about Jesus’ sinlessness: “And who but Jesus had a right to stone this woman?” Does calling Jesus sinless have anything at all to do with this story? A theologian might focus on the significance of Jesus’ innocence much later in the Gospels, when he dies as a criminal, but in the world of Gospel stories “sinless” only says that Jesus is self-righteous and seriously no fun.

Here’s the picture the solemn preacher doesn’t want us to see: Jesus (after scribbling in the dust for a while) suddenly exclaims, “Hey, I’ve got an idea: let’s have whoever among us is without sin cast the first stone!” And isn’t that the story (not just something a reader could tease out of it): Jesus’ edgy, provocative satirizing of himself and the woman’s condemners?

Here’s another: When a blind man shouting to get Jesus’ attention won’t be silenced, Jesus has the disciples bring the man over and asks him, “So, what do you want?” If the line is delivered right-friendly and exasperated, just a bit of wise guy to it-it would have to produce laughter from disciples, from bystanders (with heightened expectations), and even from the blind man. Don’t we all know what he wants? Does Jesus expect the poor man to fill out a form? Grovel? Or is he playing with everyone and building tension (and attention) for the sheer exuberance of a miracle, so that the blind man will proclaim, “Never since the beginning of the world has anyone done something like this!”

The impishness is even clearer in the story of the lame man lowered through the roof of a peasant house packed with people, where Jesus is seated on the floor, teaching. Dirt and bugs fall from the thatch and mud roof overhead, then bits of the roof. People keep ignoring the teacher to look up. Finally Jesus has to stop when the sick man’s friends start lowering the guy on a stretcher right into the middle of the teacher’s space. Students scramble out of the way, and while the poor paralyzed man is still dangling there, Jesus glances up at the friends and says to the man, “Your sins are forgiven.”

So this time, no wild question, but out of nowhere an equally wild proclamation. Jesus is free-as a teacher must be-to be intrigued at people’s baffled responses and ready to work with whatever those responses are. He toys with the crowd. Then he heals the man, but he also poses a riddle. Is it easier, he asks, to say, “Your sins are forgiven” or “Rise, take up your bed and walk,” when the room is so crowded that there’s no walking space?

We could play in the same way with Jesus’ best-loved parables: The Good Samaritan, The Prodigal Son, The Miraculous Harvest, The Talents. They all have been carefully interpreted over the centuries to mute their startling, unbalancing humor-but I think people love them because some ghostly laughter remains despite the preachers’ efforts to tame it and explain around it. What does the possibility of humor mean for Jesus’ teaching?

Holy Fools and Fearful Moralists: The Crooked Path to God

I began writing this piece to explore humor in Biblical texts. But the more I worked on it, the more I was troubled by how many Christian people have concluded that none of this could possibly be a laughing matter. I kept hearing a voice warning me, “That’s not funny!” Talking it over with Carol Hazenfield, who teaches improvisational theater, we began sketching the behavioral rules people count on to guarantee themselves a genuine church experience:

1. Dress up. 2. Slip unobtrusively into “your” seat (with attention to who to sit next to and where to sit). 3. Be quiet. 4. Stay in your seat unless directed by an usher to do otherwise. 5. Don’t laugh. 6. Stay put until the fire is safely out.

How many comic scenes in movies, plays, or literature have counted on the solemnity of church gatherings to force people to try with all their might not to laugh?

Despite the pervasive suspicion that laughter doesn’t belong in church, it ‘s easier to make a case for Original Silliness than for Original Sin in Genesis 3. There’s the opening scene in the garden, where the hero and heroine are naked. And don’t know it. Yet. And what a great comic villain this piece has-a stand-up serpent, worming his way up to whisper in Eve’s ear sneaky-snaky questions like, “Did God say.?” (We might at least give the author enough credit to imagine the creature hissing his Hebrew.) The domestic comedy continues with Adam hiding from God, Eve making a fashion statement in fig leaves, and the first-ever use of “The Devil made me do it!” Are we supposed to believe that the future of the human race is at stake here? Maybe the real original sin is people telling this wild old tale without laughing.

….

Humor can create an autonomous sense of group solidarity, seizing the authority to break boundaries and include “inappropriate” members in the group. Powerful leaders with simple answers don’t like such freedom or irreverence. Authoritarian leaders treasure group solidarity only on precisely their terms.

Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, takes us to fresh thoughts on humor in an unexpected place: the article on “Remorse” in his book Lost Icons.

Rediscovering remorse has a lot to do with the capacity of a culture to leave room for the non-heroic, to celebrate the vulnerable and even the comic.

Williams asks us to rediscover remorse so we can get to celebrating the vulnerable and the comic. Comedy isn’t our way out of suffering, it’s a human, non-heroic way through it.

[C]omedy is…acknowledging and dramatizing human involvement in a world [barely] controlled by human planning [where]… the wills and desires of others frustrate the tyrannies of any single human ego….What makes this comic rather than tragic is that characters survive; they are not wounded to death, mortally diminished….the audience is faced with a world in which the failure of control is amenable to being thought and imagined without paralyzing terror.

Can paralyzing terror be funny?

[C]omedy pushes hardest at its boundaries…where such terror is most audaciously evoked. And perhaps at those boundaries comedy is most powerful, because it doesn’t pretend that the risks are small or that the terror is a silly mistake… [because] comedy intimates finally that the uncontrollable environment can be the source of deliverance as much as of damnation….

“Deliverance as much as damnation”: how’s that for an ambiguity to make a fundamentalist scream? And no, the risks aren’t small; look at the ones Jesus took.

[I]f it damns us…in dramatic terms, [it is] because we choose the distinctive hell of placing our own wills at the centre of things….Comedy is thus deeply inimical to fascism-though it is also deeply inimical to most kinds of planned reform….

Again we return to Jesus: a popular, storytelling teacher caught between the primordial fascism of the Roman Empire and the planned reform of the rabbinic Pharisees.

Literalism’s Unkindest Cut

Religious fundamentalists, like Williams’s fascists, mistrust irreverence. Humor can’t resist it. Under the banner of literalism, fundamentalists want to make absolutely certain that people ask the right questions and want each question to have one and only one correct answer. But the knowledge of God grows by allusion and metaphor, not literal certainties, just as our language grows. And knowledge of God-like language itself-may contain such wildness of meaning that even the clearest assertion, with a tiny shift of tone, can imply its own contradiction. So when humor resists a one-to-one, word-to-meaning correspondence, it is imitating life. And when humor reigns, literalism always feels mocked.

….

Jesus’ Finger, Jesus’ Sword

In the Gospels, Jesus the teacher, like the Buddhist storyteller, defies expectations again and again. Sometimes he’s even the butt of his own jokes-as when he curses a fig tree for not bearing fruit. His disciples have to tell him (their teacher, who told them, “You know how to read the seasons”) that it’s not the season for figs. But more often his actions and parables in the Gospels are calculated to produce wide-eyed gasps and nervous laughter-or even, if we’ll go the whole way with him, startled, amazed, delighted laughter.

“If your eye offend you, pluck it out!” This saying of Jesus’ is the cryptic source of a very wise joke: “Never trust a two-eyed fundamentalist.” Literalists see plenty to take offense at, but this particular saying, they assure us, is metaphorical. In the joke, however, humor’s keen nose has caught the rotting whiff of Literalist Authority proclaiming just which parts of our texts are literal and which are not. Humor can’t pass up those embarrassing moments when literalism applies its principles and values selectively. Humorless inconsistency is the work of a comedic straight man, and humor will playfully deliver the punch line, stripping away the dishonesty.

“If your eye offend you, pluck it out!” No matter how much scholarly criticism we bring to bear, we seem intent on explaining why Jesus actually would want to put out the eye and why that’s best for all concerned. Even metaphorically it feels wrong: so we’re to put our eye out only figuratively? I think Jesus is pointing to something quite different from either the usual literal or metaphorical interpretations.

Sooner or later, aren’t we all offended by something we see? Whose eyes are never drawn to voyeurism, lurid curiosity, or satisfied witness of the sufferings of others? So what are we supposed to do with our offense: close our wicked eyes?

Metaphor tries to spiritualize the irony of the saying: “Jesus is just using a harsh image to warn us that we should cut ourselves off from all offensive seeing.” Is Jesus so inept a preacher as to provide this gut-wrenching image just so we can explain it away? Isn’t the saying rhetorically and pedagogically better as an ironic warning against our foolish efforts to insulate ourselves, to retreat into a bubble of dishonest piety from the inevitable offense of life?

If we imagine Jesus delivering the words with a wicked grin, suddenly they stop the mind. Perhaps we recall that our teacher Jesus also taught, “Judge not.” Maybe we remember that he lamented so many taking offense in him. Could he be suggesting that pretensions of spiritual purity are what’s really offensive? Can we live gratefully without the anxious struggle to be spiritual? Could we see just let our eyes see life as they fall on it? Maybe what we are literally to “pluck out” is our impatient eagerness to take offense.

With so many hints that Jesus’ humor and daring playfulness shapes his stories and actions, I began to imagine the actor Roberto Benigni delivering various lines in the Gospels in the manically joyful way he plays the condemned Jew in the film Life Is Beautiful. He faces the fascist powers in a death camp and, by playing the clowning idiot, saves his son’s life. Humor doesn’t mean that nothing’s at stake. Imagining Begnini in the role of Jesus brought to life in a new way Jesus’ feasts with sinners and his “cleansing” of the Temple. I loved the idea of watching Benigni/Jesus overturn the tables of money and set the animals loose. Even with life-and-death stakes, Jesus needn’t be an angry pedant. We can read him as a real teacher, taking us places with laughter where we’d otherwise be afraid to go.

….

So the real question is: with so much at stake-life, death, salvation itself-is there any salvation without laughter?

Related Articles:

• Police officer chased ‘himself’ for 20 minutes
• Humo[u]r
• Humo[u]r
• ATHEIST HOLY DAY :-)
• Humo[u]r (corny :-)

This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License.