We know Jesus wept, but did he laugh? And if he did, how might that help us in our struggles with the culture wars, and in our attempts to recapture the imagination of Christendom?
Laughter seems to have been the particular gift of the children of the First Covenant. Jewish humour is amongst the most potent in the world. They know how to laugh. Laughter does not, however, come so naturally to the children of the second Covenant.
This may be a theological mistake. It’s certainly a psychological and political one. Laughter and humour are some of the most powerful tools to exercise against the misuse of power. And what we are facing is a remorseless pursuit of power by the politically correct designed to drive us from the public square.
(Umberto Eco explores this wonderfully in his novel <em>The Name of the Rose </em>where he has a monastic community discover Aristotle’s great missing work on laughter, and it threatens to cause a theological earthquake.)
Laughter is one of the most powerful weapons when we are faced with abuses of power. Dictators hate being laughed at more than they fear political opposition. Part of Christianity’s mission is to destabilise the love of power by circumventing it with a love of compassion. And our greatest danger has always been to allow the Church to loosen its grip on compassion and tighten it on power.
So if laughter is the most potent weapon, we need our comedians, and if we don’t have enough of our own (and we don’t), then we need to borrow them. <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/podcast-37-the-new-puritans-with-andrew-doyle/"><strong>In the latest edition of Merely Catholic</strong></a>, the Catholic Herald podcast, Andrew Doyle is our guest interviewee. Andrew is an atheist comedian. And he is a liberal atheist, very alert to the abuse of power by the new Left, and so perhaps one of the most valuable of fellow travellers for Christians.
We were discussing his book <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/ch/how-far-can-the-new-woke-religion-go/"><strong>The New Puritans</strong></a>, which is an exposé of “wokery”.
Doyle is an ex-Catholic and has become an atheist. But there are two kinds of atheist, or perhaps two modes of atheism. The first and least helpful is a rage against the possibility of a God born partly of a frustration that the non-existence of God is incapable of being proved in their epistemological language of preference called rational empiricism. But the second, the straightforward belief that God does not exist, is helpful to the Church. It helps to keep us honest and clean about our own values.
In the fight against wokery, truly liberal atheists and Christians can and should make common cause against a common enemy. For cultural Marxism is determined to end the free thought and free speech that both Christians and atheists depend upon. It wants to end the primacy of the individual and replace it with the collective; it wants to replace compassion for the vulnerable with a new incoherent system of forever shifting reversed power relations.
And there are also two routes in the struggle against wokery. The first is simply analysis and argument, exposing it for what it really is and what it really intends to do, as opposed to what it pretends to be and pretends to do. The second is to make fun of it. Because it is full of internal contradictions, it is vulnerable to being seen as absurd. It constantly gets caught up in its own internal contradictions.
In his book, pursuing analysis and exposure, Andrew Doyle explains how this movement is characterised by a kind of infantalisation (a sort of permanent adolescence) and, to some a degree, an element of mass hysteria, with people following the crowd.
But while anyone reading the book is likely to feel more confident challenging the basis of this new form of secular fundamentalism, it is his other path, humour, that may have more power to set the victims of wokery free from their conditioned beliefs.
Andrew Doyle created the character Titania Mgrath who describes herself on Twitter as “<em>Activist. Healer. Radical intersectionalist poet. Nonwhite. Ecosexual. Pronouns: variable. Selfless and brave. Buy my books.”…</em> where she has 757,000 followers.
Titania takes wokery to its outrageous illogical conclusions and so ridicules them. The woke are apoplectic with hatred of “her”, simply because she exposes the internal contradictions and idiocy so effectively.
Try some of her tweets:-
<em>We will never defeat racism until people of colour have their own spaces away from whites. I suggest we start with schools, restaurants, buses and drinking fountains.</em>
“If you don’t want to be censored, don’t say the wrong things. It really is that simple.”
“For those who don’t know, ‘Antifa’ is an abbreviation of ‘antifascist’, which means they’re allowed to punch people in the name of tolerance.”
“Hiring drag queens to perform in schools and libraries promotes tolerance and prevents children from growing up to be fascists.”
Or
“Some people would be troubled by a children’s hospital that likes to surgically remove the reproductive systems of healthy young kids. Luckily we’re on the right side of history, so we know that all of this is totally fine.”
"@latimes has confirmed that white supremacy is now racially inclusive. This means that the only thing more racist than being a white supremacist is not being a white supremacist."
Laughter can be misused for bullying if the jokes are punching down. But if they are punching up, there are few more effective ways of confronting and undermining people and organisations who abuse their power. Is laughter a legitimate tool for the Church?
Did Jesus use laughter? We may not be catching his tone of voice accurately from the way we read the Gospels.
Surely when he pitied the supercilious rich (whom he had also come to save) and he compared their attempts to get into heaven unfavourably with the camels going through the eyes of needles, he must have had a smile. So much depends on how you hear his tone of voice. In listening, is the Jesus you encounter someone who came threaten us into heaven or someone who came to capture our hearts to get us there? If you think Jesus threatens, you won’t hear the humour and laughter. You won’t see the smiles.
Every public speaker knows that if you can crack a joke at the beginning of the gig, you have the audience in your hand for a few moments. When Jesus turned to hyperbole, as he so often did, and talked ludicrously of plucking an eye out, of cutting off a hand (who can ever realistically be thought to be able to do such thing?), he is more likely to have a smile not a frown. Frowns threaten. Smiles enable. Jesus came to enable. People don’t pluck their eyes out. It was a massive exaggeration; hyperbole – joke. Serious, but funny. Just because we are tipped into laughter doesn’t mean the moral is not serious. Usually, the bigger the laugh, the more serious the moral.
Some moments of humour may have been darker than others, but everything depends on how you tell them. “You whitewashed sepulchres” is darkly funny. It exaggerates, ridicules and exposes, all in one phrase.
The snooty critic with a plank stuck in his eye looking for a spot of sawdust should make you smile; so should the gnat strainer swallowing a camel.
Jesus placed banana skins under the feet of the powerful and pompous so that they might slip into his arms rather than fall flat on their faces.
Like Andrew Doyle we should set out to use our wits in two ways. The first is to out-argue our opponents by having a better grasp of the truth; but the second is to laugh at mendacity wherever we find it.
If we laughed at those who hate, ridicule and persecute us, we are more likely to make them think twice than if we don’t. If we laugh at vacuous, treacherous and manipulative ideas, we are more likely to win over the bystanders than if we don’t. Andre Doyle (among others) shows us how it’s done.
(CNA)
