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.
