Literary critics today write much about comedy and little about humor, perhaps because comedy nowadays is considered a larger concept, a comprehensive way of looking at life. Comedy in literature may be defined as an optimistic attitude, an interpretation of life that posits a happily-ever-after ending, an objectified (in metaphor, character, scene, plot) approach to temporal existence that affirms satisfied desires and final well-being. Yet, most theories of comedy are fundamentally non-Christian; they find their source of joy in some specious ideal-such as evolutionism, rationalism, collectivism, romanticism—humanism—rather than in Jesus Christ, who gives whole-life salvation to his people.
But only the Christian view of comedy begins, rightly, with the Sovereign Triune God, the Creator and Provider, the Almighty Jehovah who keeps covenant with his chosen and who works out all things for the good of those who love him. The only happy person, then, is he whose Cod is the Lord, for “he that keepeth the law, happy is he” (Prov. 29:18). Also, Jesus Christ—the Word become flesh in whom all things hold together, by whom and for whom all things were created—he is the only Source of redemption and, therefore, of comedy. For man the guilty sinner must meet the gracious Savior as his Reconciler and King before he can know the fullness of joy that only the reborn and justified-in-Christ find at God’s right hand (Ps, 16:11).
Freedom from sin, therefore, by the grace-gift of faith in Jesus Christ is the basis of comedy. Christ, the Way, Truth, and Life, speaks freeing truth to us in his infallible Word, so that, (as he says it): “…My joy might remain in you and your joy might be full” (John 15:11 ), Now this joy includes true comedy, for comedy is the exultation of the happy ones, spiritual Israel, “the people saved by the LORD” (Deut. 33:29). And the rejoicing profession: “I will sing unto the LORD as long as I live…I will be glad in the LORD” (Ps. 104:33–34), this assurance and delight, is the sole justification of comedy—and also, as I hope to remind you, of humor.
Several books—which I cannot recommend—have been written on humor in the Bible, irony in the Old Testament, humor in the words of Christ. God’s Word makes no explicit mention of wit, irony, humor, or even of smiling; furthermore, the few Biblical references to laughter are restricted to 1) the faithless laughter of Abraham and Sarah, who doubted God’s promise of a son; 2) the laughter of mockery; “The just upright man is laughed to scorn” (Job 12:4) and deserved contempt: “He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision” (Ps. 2:4); 3) the laughter of the materialist and of the fool (Eccl. 2:2; 7:6); and 4) the laughter of joy (not of humor), of Christian comedy: “A time to laugh” (Eccl. 3:4); “Ye that weep now…shall laugh” (Luke 6;21); “…till He fill thy mouth with laughing, and thy lips with rejoicing” (Job 8:21); and “When the LORD turned again the captivity of Zion, …then was our mouth filled with laughter and our tongue with singing” (Ps. 126:1–2).
But to assert (with liberal critics of the Bible) that tricky Jacob’s deception by his cunning uncle La.ban is laughable, humorous, that is, primarily that, is to ignore God’s providential strengthening of Jacob’s faith and long-suffering edification of his character. Similarly, when Balaam’s ass speaks, our risibilities are not being titillated, but our knowledge of God’s controlling power is being increased, and we take warning against egocentric blindness and hardness of heart. Nor is Elijah’s taunting of the Baal priests (“Maybe he’s sleeping—or out on the hunt”) meant to be merely funny. Elijah, here, is God’s spokesman, having his enemies in derision; and the issue is ultimate: Whom will you serve—choose! God or Baal?
Moreover, a light and liberal-literary laughter. oriented reading of Scripture finds it amusing that God should send a fish to swallow Jonah. But the Christian sees, instead, that God’s plan will not be frustrated, that no man can hide from God, that the Almighty uses means, the elements and laws of his creation, to work out his will—in ways that we often too glibly term “miracle.” Every day, every birth, every breath is a miracle (we can no more explain them finally then we can the Creation, Incarnation, or Resurrection)—if God would for a moment withdraw his life-giving, life-sustaining Holy Spirit from us, we would crumble into dust. God is immutable (“change not”), a God of order and law; but because we are finite creatures, we cannot know all of his law; and because we are fallen, sinful beings, even our partial understanding of his will and law is distorted. That is why God gave us his Word—our senses and reason and conscience are no longer trustworthy; and we cannot live without the light of his Holy Scriptures.
Though our Lord’s analogies and metaphors sometimes seem humorous, laughable, his teachings are all supremely and seriously meaningful. When he says graphically, for example, take that block of wood out of your own eye before you denounce your brother for that speck in his, we are not to laugh heartily at the wit, but to squirm repentantly in our hypocrisy. When we hear the Jewish leaders rebuked as blind leaders who strain out insects and swallow camels, we are not to evade, in humor, the life-and-death personal relevance of our Master’s admonition by our entertaining imagination of a man, anaconda-like, ingurgitating a hairy, humpy desert beast.
Nor are the Savior’s unanswerable questions laughable—though they are ironic; they are meant to expose false values: selfishness, hypocrisy, materialism, rebellion. Christ’s trenchant and excoriating questions convict of sin, call to repentance, render inexcusable his rejecters: “The baptism of John, whence was it? from heaven or of men?”; “Whose is this image and superscription?”; “If David then called Him Lord, how is He his son?”; “Is it lawful to do good on the sabbath days, or to do evil? to save life or to kill?”; “If I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your sons cast them out?”
But I do not wish to imply that God’s Word is completely humorless and that our Lord is intolerant of the laughable. Not without their weight of meaningful didactic, yet conveying the message through humorous analogy are some of the similes in Proverbs—these two, for instance: “As a door turneth upon his hinges, so doth the slothful upon his bed” (26:14); and “He that passeth by, and meddleth with strife that belongeth not to him, is like to one that taketh a dog by the ears” (26:17)—an unpleasantly vulnerable posture, you will admit. John Gay, the English poet, rephrased this Scriptural truth in the following couplet:
He that would in quarrels interpose
Must often wipe a bloody nose.
Three other proverbs that God has given us through Solomon present their message in smilingly everyday terms. Here are Eccl. 10:20, Provo 6:6, and Provo 17:22, as I have expressed them in this Trio of Triolets:
A little bird
Conveys the thing,
The cursing word
A little bird
(It is averred)
Will surely sing.
A little bird.
Conveys the thing.
Observe the ant,
You idle lout.
Say not, “I can’t!”
Observe the ant
And do not rant
Or plead your gout,
You idle lout.
A merry heart
Is medicine.
The goodly art
A merry heart
Will soon impart
Transforms chagrin.
A merry heart
Is medicine.
A seemingly harmless, but actually irreverent fonn of humor, however, is a sin almost peculiar to Biblereading and even Bible-believing persons, namely. quoting Scripture—only a word or a phrase, sometimes—out of context to apply to some trivial situation: “The lines have fallen to me in pleasant places” (I caught a big fish); “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?” (we insert, Sioux Center?, Grand Rapids?, Chicago?, Amsterdam?); “Where there is no vision, the people perish” (sign on an optometrist’s shop); “Physician, heal thyself” (to a doctor suffering from gluttony); “Touch not; taste not; handle not” (on a candy counter); “Get thee behind me” (in the food line). Such flippant use of Scripture is demeaning and irresponsible; it is not humor Christianly defined, for it misappropriates God’s words and treats his Revelation carelessly, profanely.
As for the whispered or guffawed jokes on sexual relationships, our consciences immediately condemn them as indecent, a violation of God’s teachings that the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit and that even to look with lust is to sin. And many other texts give additional instruction and monition on this intimate matter of the human love relationship between the sexes. Especially appropriate here is Ephesians 5:3–4: “But fornication, and all uncleanness, or covetousness, let it not be once named among you, as becometh saints; neither filthiness, nor foolish talking, nor jesting, which are not convenient: but rather giving of thanks.”
Good (Godly) humor, the properly laughable, is part of our daily lives, however; and the Christian is called to use this distinctively human, image-of-God blessing as he must employ all things -also his eating and drinking—to the glory of God; and that goal will include, quite naturally, the edification of his neighbor. A type of humor, wit is usually considered to be more astutely contrived, more intellectual, more ironic, and less genially sympathetic than humor. But humor, which deals with the ridiculous, the ludicrous, the absurdly incongruous, the simply funny—with what amuses us and makes us laugh, need be neither superficial nor farcical. The Christian, of course, will not always laugh at what the non-Christian thinks funny; and the unbeliever, who serves the lie and lives for delusion, will be unable to perceive true humor as it relates to Christ, the Truth.
A type of humor based on unexpected relationships, on paradoxical juxtapositions, is the pun, sometimes called the lowest form of humor, at other times defended as the foundation of all humor—not without basis. A word or phrase that may be interpreted ambiguously—in two or more ways—may convey light and usually impersonal satire (the pleasure of the pun is often in the retelling) as in these examples:
“Are you fond of tongue, sir?”
“Yes, madam, I have always liked it, and I like it still.”
He: “I’ve proposed, without avail, to six girls.”
She: “Maybe you should try wearing one next time.”
The “Swifties” popularized in Time (May and June of 1963) are jokes written into speech tags. My wife and I wrote a dialogue of these punning retorts at the time:
“Here. This is for you,” said Tom engagingly.
“Darling, how nice!” Tam replied ringingly.
“You took so long about it though,” she finished winningly….
“May I have some money for shopping?” Tam asked solicitously.
“No, we need it for car repairs—the block is cracked,” said Tom icily; “the carburetor isn’t working right,” he went on haltingly, “and I had two blowouts,” he continued tirelessly. “Also, she needs a new muffler,” he concluded exhaustively…
“You didn’t polish my shoes,” said Tom rebuffingly.
“I couldn’t find the polish,” Tam answered uncannily.
“I see you cut yourself shaving,” she slashed cheekily.
“Yes, these fluorescents are burning out,” said Tom dimly; “and one gets out of focus in this mirror,” he added reflectively.
“Jiggle the switch,” Tam suggested lightly.
Another type of humor focuses on the sharp riposte, the turning-of-the-tables, the fitting inversion of the situation. For instance, a nobleman asked the clergyman sitting at the foot of his table why the goose was always placed nearest the parson. “Really,” replied the cleric, “I can’t say; but your question is so odd, that I shall never see a goose in the future without thinking of your Lordship.”
But a more artful frustration—though not at all annoying—of the reader’s (misguided) expectations is this example of meaningful Christian rhetoric by Joy H. Witte in the January, 1968 Christian Educators Journal. Mrs. Witte concludes her short essay on merit rating and teachers’ pay as follows:
Have I avoided the common issue of merit rating and pay? I confess, a little…I do believe the true reason the subject has aroused so much ardor is that money is involved. Money for the chosen arouses something base in our natures. Rather than base passion, I would rather see the base salary raised for all….After all, everyone has to live with the cost of living….
Meanwhile, back at the school building, let’s strive for the Ideal! Then someday, when better salary schedules have tamed the money tiger, when as-objective-as-possible measurement devices have been established in cooperation with teachers themselves, when we are love-our-neighbor Christians who have worked all that while towards the Ideal [a “Well done, my good and faithful servant” from our God], when we then approach the topic of merit rating and pay—who will need it?
Often we take ourselves too seriously; we forget that we are God’s servants (as well as representative prophets, priests, and kings), and we incline by our carnal nature to arrogate the priorities of God himself. And then, inevitably, we have to accept the unmasking of our ridiculous pretensions and learn again sorrow for our self-deifying idolatry. Nor may we in our authority as covenant parents provoke our children to wrath, driving them to exasperation and nervous inhibition, by over-severity. For example, the children in our home are not permitted to play with guns or with toys resembling guns: no mock shooting or even pointing fingers, pistol-like, at people.
Therefore, when our two boys, then in kindergarten and first grade and fascinated with rhymes, composed thus: Robin: “It’s fun to run in the sun” and Greg: “It’s fun to run in the sun with a gun,” I objected pontifically: “No guns!” Whereat Robin meditated briefly, then ventured, “It’s fun to run in the sun—without a gun!”
Students, too, tormented by wordy and technical definitions that must be painfully assimilated, sometimes—though perhaps inadvertently—even the score, as one of my students did with this exemplifying definition of redundancy: “Saying the same thing over again twice.” Another teacher recently sustained the following equivocal criticism: “I sincerely believe that he puts”too much of the burden of learning on the student.”
Some manifestations of humor reveal man’s knowledge, through his conscience (the law of God on his heart), that he is violating the God-ordained way of conduct, that he is breaking God’s moral law, the Ten Commandments and Christ’s summary thereof, in the psychological, rational, historical, aesthetical, physiological, or some other aspect of human functioning—and perhaps, if he is given completely over to a reprobate mind, in all these modes of man’s being.
But even those apostate persons who despise the Scriptures and blaspheme their Creator are image-of-God beings, and they have a sense of right, of truth, of charity, of justice that becomes evident even as they flout it in their covenant-breaking anecdotes and unregenerate humor. For out of the heart are the issues of life; and the jokes that a man tells and enjoys indicate his Christward or Satan-ward heart-direction.
Undeniably, though, there is some humor that wi1J be appreciated by both Christian and non-Christian: the Christian, to be confirmed and sanctified in his Christ-centered faith; the pagan, to justify his impenitence and to adulate his own ego by absolutizing some aspect of the creation. The Christian will laugh restrainedly, soberly, conscious of the ultimate alternatives in the overtly humorous situation, whereas the God-denier will laugh self-centeredly, inordinately, rationalizing his own deliberate disobedience to God’s commands as they affect every motion and mood and moment of human life. Reflect, for example, on the two profoundly different responses that are possible as one considers the following droll account:
A merchant ship was in peril by storm, and all aboard were seen to be upon their knees except for one man. When he was requested to join the rest of the hands at prayer, he rejoined, “Not I; it is your business to take care of the ship. I am but a passenger.”
The secular reaction, of course, is laughter at the absurdity of the ingenuous passenger’s “disengagement assumption,” but, meanwhile the heart-committed retention of the pagan reader’s neutrality postulate remains undisturbed. The other, the Christian response, informed by a Holy-Spirited self-consciousness, is also laughter—but more; this latter response is transformed by the Word-enlightened awareness that in no human activity can one be a religious, uncommitted—one must bow either to the God of Providence or to the specter of fatalism, the chimera of chaos.
Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) is celebrated as a pre-eminent American humorist and, indeed, there is much that is laughable especially in his principal and most popular works, Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The reader chuckles. for example, at Twain’s hilariously apt use of the malapropism in the rapscallion kings funeral oration “diseased” for “deceased” and “orgies” for “obsequies”:
“…they bein’ partickler friends 0′ the diseased. That’s why they’re invited here this evenin’…; he liked everybody, and so it’s fitten that his funeral orgies sh’d be public.”
But the Christian reader should also recognizethe clues are there -that underlying the incidental and surface humor is a bitterly tragic and insidiously God-denying view of life. The vicious satire on Christianity that is evident to all readers in The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and in The Mysterious Stranger, also, though less obtrusively, pervades Huck Finn. For Twain tries to convince us that Huck is fundamentally innocent, undepraved, and wholly justified in his rejection of the Christian religion because (the old excuse) the “Christians” (whom Twain presents) are hypocrites. Clever dialectic, is it not? First compose a caricature of Christianity; then condemn that way of life on the basis of your parody.
When Huck decides not to tum in his friend Jim (a runaway Negro slave), he renounces all his old-wives-tale inculturated beliefs—and those “superstitions” clearly include man as guilty sinner needing redemption and Christ as the only Redeemer; for Huck Finn, in the anthropocentric tradition of romanticism, has a “good heart,” and that for Twain—in the blind revolt of his unbelief—is worth more than the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Obeying his innately innocent and noble feelings, Huck tears up his informer-letter to Jim’s owner (Miss Watson) and says, “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” This autonomous, humanistic confession of faith is the climax of the novel, and it epitomizes Mark Twain’s anti-christian interpretation of life—a view of destiny that stands willfully opposed to the truth of God’s Word, a modern pagan philosophy of life that is integrally related to all the incidental and textural (surface) humor in the unified organic structure that constitutes this novel.
Joseph Conrad, himself an aesthete (art-worshipper ): “the Supremacy of Art for Art itself” and “Art reveals all the truth of life” and a desperate romantic (see his Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim), was nevertheless right in acknowledging that “Even the most artful of writers will give himself (and his morality) away in about every third sentence” (from the Preface to Chance).
Because the fear of the Lord is the beginning, the principal element, of wisdom, and as the knowledge of the holy is understanding, only the Christian can truly know reality -and 1 do not mean merely a common-grace knowledge, but a living testimony to the Lordship of our Christ-King over every iota of God’s creation. When a tale and definitive work on humor is written, therefore, it will necessarily be the work of a Christian—a simple child of God, redeemed by the blood of Christ, and illuminated by the Holy Spirit (Who leads his own into all truth) through the inscripturated Word. For only he who is in Christ can rightly know any aspect of reality and can joyously restore the God-gifts of the created order, including humor, as homage to him, “of Whom and through Whom and to Whom are all things: to Whom be glory for ever” (Rom. 11:36). For he is Source and eternal End of our love and our life, of our humor and our happiness.
Humor is a favor from God, and laughter is a sweet delight. The Christian can laugh without malice and without excess because his Father rules and his Savior will forsake him never. The Christian, at home in God’s world, can laugh: “This is my Father’s world!” Thus the believer knows by grace the Saving Word and, therefore, sees life in its worshipping wholeness; already, in principle, the Kingdom is come, for Christ has triumphed. The sin-wracked creation is also principally restored; and his chosen, who in sin-sorrow thankfully love him and faithfully replenish his world, have humor. They alone can laugh—with the eye-rubbing early riser who warms himself impatiently over the unplugged toaster, with the greedily dollar-grasping shopper on “Candid Camera,” with the birthday boy who gets back from Uncle Mortimer that same, ghastly, lavender, untieable tie.
Laughter is, humor is, because God is God. And because the Messiah has come and dwells within us (see John 15), we God-reconciled sinners know humor and peace and eternal joy.
Prof. Merle Meeter is Professor of English at Dordt College, Sioux Center, Iowa.
But only the Christian view of comedy begins, rightly, with the Sovereign Triune God, the Creator and Provider, the Almighty Jehovah who keeps covenant with his chosen and who works out all things for the good of those who love him. The only happy person, then, is he whose Cod is the Lord, for “he that keepeth the law, happy is he” (Prov. 29:18). Also, Jesus Christ—the Word become flesh in whom all things hold together, by whom and for whom all things were created—he is the only Source of redemption and, therefore, of comedy. For man the guilty sinner must meet the gracious Savior as his Reconciler and King before he can know the fullness of joy that only the reborn and justified-in-Christ find at God’s right hand (Ps, 16:11).
Freedom from sin, therefore, by the grace-gift of faith in Jesus Christ is the basis of comedy. Christ, the Way, Truth, and Life, speaks freeing truth to us in his infallible Word, so that, (as he says it): “…My joy might remain in you and your joy might be full” (John 15:11 ), Now this joy includes true comedy, for comedy is the exultation of the happy ones, spiritual Israel, “the people saved by the LORD” (Deut. 33:29). And the rejoicing profession: “I will sing unto the LORD as long as I live…I will be glad in the LORD” (Ps. 104:33–34), this assurance and delight, is the sole justification of comedy—and also, as I hope to remind you, of humor.
Several books—which I cannot recommend—have been written on humor in the Bible, irony in the Old Testament, humor in the words of Christ. God’s Word makes no explicit mention of wit, irony, humor, or even of smiling; furthermore, the few Biblical references to laughter are restricted to 1) the faithless laughter of Abraham and Sarah, who doubted God’s promise of a son; 2) the laughter of mockery; “The just upright man is laughed to scorn” (Job 12:4) and deserved contempt: “He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision” (Ps. 2:4); 3) the laughter of the materialist and of the fool (Eccl. 2:2; 7:6); and 4) the laughter of joy (not of humor), of Christian comedy: “A time to laugh” (Eccl. 3:4); “Ye that weep now…shall laugh” (Luke 6;21); “…till He fill thy mouth with laughing, and thy lips with rejoicing” (Job 8:21); and “When the LORD turned again the captivity of Zion, …then was our mouth filled with laughter and our tongue with singing” (Ps. 126:1–2).
But to assert (with liberal critics of the Bible) that tricky Jacob’s deception by his cunning uncle La.ban is laughable, humorous, that is, primarily that, is to ignore God’s providential strengthening of Jacob’s faith and long-suffering edification of his character. Similarly, when Balaam’s ass speaks, our risibilities are not being titillated, but our knowledge of God’s controlling power is being increased, and we take warning against egocentric blindness and hardness of heart. Nor is Elijah’s taunting of the Baal priests (“Maybe he’s sleeping—or out on the hunt”) meant to be merely funny. Elijah, here, is God’s spokesman, having his enemies in derision; and the issue is ultimate: Whom will you serve—choose! God or Baal?
Moreover, a light and liberal-literary laughter. oriented reading of Scripture finds it amusing that God should send a fish to swallow Jonah. But the Christian sees, instead, that God’s plan will not be frustrated, that no man can hide from God, that the Almighty uses means, the elements and laws of his creation, to work out his will—in ways that we often too glibly term “miracle.” Every day, every birth, every breath is a miracle (we can no more explain them finally then we can the Creation, Incarnation, or Resurrection)—if God would for a moment withdraw his life-giving, life-sustaining Holy Spirit from us, we would crumble into dust. God is immutable (“change not”), a God of order and law; but because we are finite creatures, we cannot know all of his law; and because we are fallen, sinful beings, even our partial understanding of his will and law is distorted. That is why God gave us his Word—our senses and reason and conscience are no longer trustworthy; and we cannot live without the light of his Holy Scriptures.
Though our Lord’s analogies and metaphors sometimes seem humorous, laughable, his teachings are all supremely and seriously meaningful. When he says graphically, for example, take that block of wood out of your own eye before you denounce your brother for that speck in his, we are not to laugh heartily at the wit, but to squirm repentantly in our hypocrisy. When we hear the Jewish leaders rebuked as blind leaders who strain out insects and swallow camels, we are not to evade, in humor, the life-and-death personal relevance of our Master’s admonition by our entertaining imagination of a man, anaconda-like, ingurgitating a hairy, humpy desert beast.
Nor are the Savior’s unanswerable questions laughable—though they are ironic; they are meant to expose false values: selfishness, hypocrisy, materialism, rebellion. Christ’s trenchant and excoriating questions convict of sin, call to repentance, render inexcusable his rejecters: “The baptism of John, whence was it? from heaven or of men?”; “Whose is this image and superscription?”; “If David then called Him Lord, how is He his son?”; “Is it lawful to do good on the sabbath days, or to do evil? to save life or to kill?”; “If I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your sons cast them out?”
But I do not wish to imply that God’s Word is completely humorless and that our Lord is intolerant of the laughable. Not without their weight of meaningful didactic, yet conveying the message through humorous analogy are some of the similes in Proverbs—these two, for instance: “As a door turneth upon his hinges, so doth the slothful upon his bed” (26:14); and “He that passeth by, and meddleth with strife that belongeth not to him, is like to one that taketh a dog by the ears” (26:17)—an unpleasantly vulnerable posture, you will admit. John Gay, the English poet, rephrased this Scriptural truth in the following couplet:
He that would in quarrels interpose
Must often wipe a bloody nose.
Three other proverbs that God has given us through Solomon present their message in smilingly everyday terms. Here are Eccl. 10:20, Provo 6:6, and Provo 17:22, as I have expressed them in this Trio of Triolets:
A little bird
Conveys the thing,
The cursing word
A little bird
(It is averred)
Will surely sing.
A little bird.
Conveys the thing.
Observe the ant,
You idle lout.
Say not, “I can’t!”
Observe the ant
And do not rant
Or plead your gout,
You idle lout.
A merry heart
Is medicine.
The goodly art
A merry heart
Will soon impart
Transforms chagrin.
A merry heart
Is medicine.
A seemingly harmless, but actually irreverent fonn of humor, however, is a sin almost peculiar to Biblereading and even Bible-believing persons, namely. quoting Scripture—only a word or a phrase, sometimes—out of context to apply to some trivial situation: “The lines have fallen to me in pleasant places” (I caught a big fish); “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?” (we insert, Sioux Center?, Grand Rapids?, Chicago?, Amsterdam?); “Where there is no vision, the people perish” (sign on an optometrist’s shop); “Physician, heal thyself” (to a doctor suffering from gluttony); “Touch not; taste not; handle not” (on a candy counter); “Get thee behind me” (in the food line). Such flippant use of Scripture is demeaning and irresponsible; it is not humor Christianly defined, for it misappropriates God’s words and treats his Revelation carelessly, profanely.
As for the whispered or guffawed jokes on sexual relationships, our consciences immediately condemn them as indecent, a violation of God’s teachings that the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit and that even to look with lust is to sin. And many other texts give additional instruction and monition on this intimate matter of the human love relationship between the sexes. Especially appropriate here is Ephesians 5:3–4: “But fornication, and all uncleanness, or covetousness, let it not be once named among you, as becometh saints; neither filthiness, nor foolish talking, nor jesting, which are not convenient: but rather giving of thanks.”
Good (Godly) humor, the properly laughable, is part of our daily lives, however; and the Christian is called to use this distinctively human, image-of-God blessing as he must employ all things -also his eating and drinking—to the glory of God; and that goal will include, quite naturally, the edification of his neighbor. A type of humor, wit is usually considered to be more astutely contrived, more intellectual, more ironic, and less genially sympathetic than humor. But humor, which deals with the ridiculous, the ludicrous, the absurdly incongruous, the simply funny—with what amuses us and makes us laugh, need be neither superficial nor farcical. The Christian, of course, will not always laugh at what the non-Christian thinks funny; and the unbeliever, who serves the lie and lives for delusion, will be unable to perceive true humor as it relates to Christ, the Truth.
A type of humor based on unexpected relationships, on paradoxical juxtapositions, is the pun, sometimes called the lowest form of humor, at other times defended as the foundation of all humor—not without basis. A word or phrase that may be interpreted ambiguously—in two or more ways—may convey light and usually impersonal satire (the pleasure of the pun is often in the retelling) as in these examples:
“Are you fond of tongue, sir?”
“Yes, madam, I have always liked it, and I like it still.”
He: “I’ve proposed, without avail, to six girls.”
She: “Maybe you should try wearing one next time.”
The “Swifties” popularized in Time (May and June of 1963) are jokes written into speech tags. My wife and I wrote a dialogue of these punning retorts at the time:
“Here. This is for you,” said Tom engagingly.
“Darling, how nice!” Tam replied ringingly.
“You took so long about it though,” she finished winningly….
“May I have some money for shopping?” Tam asked solicitously.
“No, we need it for car repairs—the block is cracked,” said Tom icily; “the carburetor isn’t working right,” he went on haltingly, “and I had two blowouts,” he continued tirelessly. “Also, she needs a new muffler,” he concluded exhaustively…
“You didn’t polish my shoes,” said Tom rebuffingly.
“I couldn’t find the polish,” Tam answered uncannily.
“I see you cut yourself shaving,” she slashed cheekily.
“Yes, these fluorescents are burning out,” said Tom dimly; “and one gets out of focus in this mirror,” he added reflectively.
“Jiggle the switch,” Tam suggested lightly.
Another type of humor focuses on the sharp riposte, the turning-of-the-tables, the fitting inversion of the situation. For instance, a nobleman asked the clergyman sitting at the foot of his table why the goose was always placed nearest the parson. “Really,” replied the cleric, “I can’t say; but your question is so odd, that I shall never see a goose in the future without thinking of your Lordship.”
But a more artful frustration—though not at all annoying—of the reader’s (misguided) expectations is this example of meaningful Christian rhetoric by Joy H. Witte in the January, 1968 Christian Educators Journal. Mrs. Witte concludes her short essay on merit rating and teachers’ pay as follows:
Have I avoided the common issue of merit rating and pay? I confess, a little…I do believe the true reason the subject has aroused so much ardor is that money is involved. Money for the chosen arouses something base in our natures. Rather than base passion, I would rather see the base salary raised for all….After all, everyone has to live with the cost of living….
Meanwhile, back at the school building, let’s strive for the Ideal! Then someday, when better salary schedules have tamed the money tiger, when as-objective-as-possible measurement devices have been established in cooperation with teachers themselves, when we are love-our-neighbor Christians who have worked all that while towards the Ideal [a “Well done, my good and faithful servant” from our God], when we then approach the topic of merit rating and pay—who will need it?
Often we take ourselves too seriously; we forget that we are God’s servants (as well as representative prophets, priests, and kings), and we incline by our carnal nature to arrogate the priorities of God himself. And then, inevitably, we have to accept the unmasking of our ridiculous pretensions and learn again sorrow for our self-deifying idolatry. Nor may we in our authority as covenant parents provoke our children to wrath, driving them to exasperation and nervous inhibition, by over-severity. For example, the children in our home are not permitted to play with guns or with toys resembling guns: no mock shooting or even pointing fingers, pistol-like, at people.
Therefore, when our two boys, then in kindergarten and first grade and fascinated with rhymes, composed thus: Robin: “It’s fun to run in the sun” and Greg: “It’s fun to run in the sun with a gun,” I objected pontifically: “No guns!” Whereat Robin meditated briefly, then ventured, “It’s fun to run in the sun—without a gun!”
Students, too, tormented by wordy and technical definitions that must be painfully assimilated, sometimes—though perhaps inadvertently—even the score, as one of my students did with this exemplifying definition of redundancy: “Saying the same thing over again twice.” Another teacher recently sustained the following equivocal criticism: “I sincerely believe that he puts”too much of the burden of learning on the student.”
Some manifestations of humor reveal man’s knowledge, through his conscience (the law of God on his heart), that he is violating the God-ordained way of conduct, that he is breaking God’s moral law, the Ten Commandments and Christ’s summary thereof, in the psychological, rational, historical, aesthetical, physiological, or some other aspect of human functioning—and perhaps, if he is given completely over to a reprobate mind, in all these modes of man’s being.
But even those apostate persons who despise the Scriptures and blaspheme their Creator are image-of-God beings, and they have a sense of right, of truth, of charity, of justice that becomes evident even as they flout it in their covenant-breaking anecdotes and unregenerate humor. For out of the heart are the issues of life; and the jokes that a man tells and enjoys indicate his Christward or Satan-ward heart-direction.
Undeniably, though, there is some humor that wi1J be appreciated by both Christian and non-Christian: the Christian, to be confirmed and sanctified in his Christ-centered faith; the pagan, to justify his impenitence and to adulate his own ego by absolutizing some aspect of the creation. The Christian will laugh restrainedly, soberly, conscious of the ultimate alternatives in the overtly humorous situation, whereas the God-denier will laugh self-centeredly, inordinately, rationalizing his own deliberate disobedience to God’s commands as they affect every motion and mood and moment of human life. Reflect, for example, on the two profoundly different responses that are possible as one considers the following droll account:
A merchant ship was in peril by storm, and all aboard were seen to be upon their knees except for one man. When he was requested to join the rest of the hands at prayer, he rejoined, “Not I; it is your business to take care of the ship. I am but a passenger.”
The secular reaction, of course, is laughter at the absurdity of the ingenuous passenger’s “disengagement assumption,” but, meanwhile the heart-committed retention of the pagan reader’s neutrality postulate remains undisturbed. The other, the Christian response, informed by a Holy-Spirited self-consciousness, is also laughter—but more; this latter response is transformed by the Word-enlightened awareness that in no human activity can one be a religious, uncommitted—one must bow either to the God of Providence or to the specter of fatalism, the chimera of chaos.
Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) is celebrated as a pre-eminent American humorist and, indeed, there is much that is laughable especially in his principal and most popular works, Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The reader chuckles. for example, at Twain’s hilariously apt use of the malapropism in the rapscallion kings funeral oration “diseased” for “deceased” and “orgies” for “obsequies”:
“…they bein’ partickler friends 0′ the diseased. That’s why they’re invited here this evenin’…; he liked everybody, and so it’s fitten that his funeral orgies sh’d be public.”
But the Christian reader should also recognizethe clues are there -that underlying the incidental and surface humor is a bitterly tragic and insidiously God-denying view of life. The vicious satire on Christianity that is evident to all readers in The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and in The Mysterious Stranger, also, though less obtrusively, pervades Huck Finn. For Twain tries to convince us that Huck is fundamentally innocent, undepraved, and wholly justified in his rejection of the Christian religion because (the old excuse) the “Christians” (whom Twain presents) are hypocrites. Clever dialectic, is it not? First compose a caricature of Christianity; then condemn that way of life on the basis of your parody.
When Huck decides not to tum in his friend Jim (a runaway Negro slave), he renounces all his old-wives-tale inculturated beliefs—and those “superstitions” clearly include man as guilty sinner needing redemption and Christ as the only Redeemer; for Huck Finn, in the anthropocentric tradition of romanticism, has a “good heart,” and that for Twain—in the blind revolt of his unbelief—is worth more than the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Obeying his innately innocent and noble feelings, Huck tears up his informer-letter to Jim’s owner (Miss Watson) and says, “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” This autonomous, humanistic confession of faith is the climax of the novel, and it epitomizes Mark Twain’s anti-christian interpretation of life—a view of destiny that stands willfully opposed to the truth of God’s Word, a modern pagan philosophy of life that is integrally related to all the incidental and textural (surface) humor in the unified organic structure that constitutes this novel.
Joseph Conrad, himself an aesthete (art-worshipper ): “the Supremacy of Art for Art itself” and “Art reveals all the truth of life” and a desperate romantic (see his Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim), was nevertheless right in acknowledging that “Even the most artful of writers will give himself (and his morality) away in about every third sentence” (from the Preface to Chance).
Because the fear of the Lord is the beginning, the principal element, of wisdom, and as the knowledge of the holy is understanding, only the Christian can truly know reality -and 1 do not mean merely a common-grace knowledge, but a living testimony to the Lordship of our Christ-King over every iota of God’s creation. When a tale and definitive work on humor is written, therefore, it will necessarily be the work of a Christian—a simple child of God, redeemed by the blood of Christ, and illuminated by the Holy Spirit (Who leads his own into all truth) through the inscripturated Word. For only he who is in Christ can rightly know any aspect of reality and can joyously restore the God-gifts of the created order, including humor, as homage to him, “of Whom and through Whom and to Whom are all things: to Whom be glory for ever” (Rom. 11:36). For he is Source and eternal End of our love and our life, of our humor and our happiness.
Humor is a favor from God, and laughter is a sweet delight. The Christian can laugh without malice and without excess because his Father rules and his Savior will forsake him never. The Christian, at home in God’s world, can laugh: “This is my Father’s world!” Thus the believer knows by grace the Saving Word and, therefore, sees life in its worshipping wholeness; already, in principle, the Kingdom is come, for Christ has triumphed. The sin-wracked creation is also principally restored; and his chosen, who in sin-sorrow thankfully love him and faithfully replenish his world, have humor. They alone can laugh—with the eye-rubbing early riser who warms himself impatiently over the unplugged toaster, with the greedily dollar-grasping shopper on “Candid Camera,” with the birthday boy who gets back from Uncle Mortimer that same, ghastly, lavender, untieable tie.
Laughter is, humor is, because God is God. And because the Messiah has come and dwells within us (see John 15), we God-reconciled sinners know humor and peace and eternal joy.
Prof. Merle Meeter is Professor of English at Dordt College, Sioux Center, Iowa.