The Sacred Art of Joking

The Sacred Art of Joking is available in all formats on Amazon/Audible.

Every few weeks a politician, pundit or soap star causes a media storm by making a gaffe or tweeting a joke that some people do not find funny. Comedy is very hard to get right and yet we think it's important to have a sense of humour and not take yourself too seriously. On the other hand, a sense of humour failure can lead to losing your friends, your social media account, your job, your career and, in some cases, your life.

James Cary knows about this. He is a sitcom writer who's written jokes about bomb disposal in Afghanistan (Bluestone 42), defended comments about Islam by Ben Elton on Newsnight, been on a panel with radical Muslim cleric Anjem Choudary, sits on the General Synod of the Church of England and somehow managed to co-write episodes of Miranda. An odd mix, but one that makes him very listenable. This entertaining, breezy book explains how comedy works (with jokes and quotes) and gives much-needed insights into the controversy surrounding humour.

©2019 W. F. Howes Ltd (P) 2019 James Cary

The Sacred Art of Joking book and ebook published by SPCK.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Welcome to the Stand Up Theologian Podcast. My name is James Carey. I am the Stand Up Theologian. I have written a book called The Sacred Art of Joking. It came out in 2019, published by SPCK. And do you know this whole time is available as an audiobook? And they've just renewed the audio rights for another five years. And I said, ooh, can I have some chapters? Because I could promote it on my podcast. So that people who might miss the sound of my voice when this podcast takes a break. Round about Easter, they will be able to happily hear me talk about comedy and joking, how jokes work, why they go wrong, why people get upset and offended, and why the Bible is funnier than they thought it was. So they said, yes, here you go, here are some chapters. These are the ones I asked for. It's the preface, it's the first chapter, and it's also the last chapter about Easter and April Fool's Day. I think you'll enjoy this. Here we go. Only once have I attempted actual journalism. You be the judge of how well it went. It was 2008. I had been asked to interview Ben Elton for a now defunct Christian magazine called Third Way, for which I used to write the column. As a sitcom writer myself, they thought I might bring some insight to the piece. I jumped at the chance. Elton is a comedy hero, co-writer of classic comedy Blackadder, entire episodes of which I'd memorized by the end of my teenage years. Doing my best to look like a serious journalist, rather than a grinning fanboy, I met Elton in a cafe on Shepherd's Bush Green. The conversation was interesting enough, especially for a comedy geek like me. We talked a little about Ben Elton's latest novel, which he was promoting. The unremarkable interview was transcribed and edited. Very little journalism was required on my part. No one was talking nominations for Pulitzers. After a few weeks, the interview was duly printed and circulated, and it made headlines. As I hunted down a copy of The Times in which Ruth Gledgehill had broken the story, I tried to remember what Elton had said that was in any way controversial, shocking, or factually untrue. When I found a copy of the article, I saw they had plucked out Elton's comments on how, in his opinion, the BBC would allow jokes about vicars to pass, but not jokes about Imams. He said things were so bad that it was difficult to use even common sayings while writing and rehearsing a sitcom. I wanted to use the phrase, Muhammad came to the mountain, and everybody said, Oh, don't, just don't, don't go there. It was nothing to do with Islam. I was merely referring to the old proverb, if the mountain won't come to Muhammad, Muhammad must go to the mountain. And people said, let's just not, it's incredible. Was the BBC afraid of Islam? Ben Elton was unavailable for comment, having already returned to Australia, where he lives for at least part of the year. So the journalist responsible for the original article was dredged up and summoned to the Newsnight studio. This was, I have to admit, rather exciting, as I found myself sitting opposite Jeremy Paxman, along with some other comedians discussing the issues around comedy, religion, and offence. I did not feel the need to agree with or defend Elton's comments, although neither did I want to say that I felt his comments were inappropriate or untrue. This all rumbled on for another 24 hours and went global. I took part in a BBC World Service phone-in show called World Have Your Say, which included in its panel Angem Chowdry, subsequently imprisoned in HMP Belmarsh for inciting people to join ISIS. He was at pains to point out that he and his wife had a good sense of humour. The next day, almost as quickly as it erupted, the storm blew itself out. I decided that proper journalism wasn't for me. Ship of Fools. I should not have been surprised at the Fiore about religion and comedy. A couple of years earlier, I had unwittingly found myself in the press through a subversive Christian comedy website called Ship of Fools. They were running a competition trying to find the best but also the most offensive religious jokes. The top ten of each kind were to be read out at the Greenbelt Festival, a large Christian arts festival, think latitude with a few prayers and dog collars. Having been involved in the festival for a few years, and as someone with an interest in this area, I agreed to be involved and read some of these jokes out. When I saw the jokes, however, I was astonished at how imaginatively offensive they were. I'm reluctant even to say them here, and have managed to almost blot them from my memory. But to give you a flavor, there were jokes that somehow sexualized Christ's wounds. I was scandalized. Not only could I not read the jokes out, I felt I couldn't even be in the same tent as they were being read out. In a very slow week during silly season, this was also deemed worthy of being reported in a national newspaper. This came hot on the heels of the Jerry Springer, the opera day barkle, in which Jesus Christ was portrayed as being an adult in a nappy, and saying that sometimes he felt a bit gay, all bathed in impressive levels of swearing. We look at this show later in this book. All of the above were several years PT free Twitter. Recent experience shows that, apart from enabling discussion of the issues among friends in a dispassionate way, social media has polarized opinions. It has fanned the flames of dissent and turned moral outrage into a performance art, ironically, which must not be questioned or critiqued. The need to discuss issues surrounding religion, comedy, and offense have never been more pressing. We live in a world in which the staff of Charlie Hepto were brazenly shot dead in broad daylight for the production of satirical cartoons. At the same time, social media, rolling news, and the need for compelling clickbait have all made that discussion even harder to conduct in a rational, constructive, or good-humoured way. Where's your sense of humor? We think, rightly, that having a sense of humour is incredibly important. We Brits especially pride ourselves on having a sense of humor. We consider it essential that someone can take a joke. Dating profiles often specify a G S O H good sense of humor. We are suspicious of politicians who seem to be overly serious, and we are quick to give a free pass to those who joke around. At weddings, we think it's important to take the time to humiliate the bridegroom with a dirt-dishing best man speech. The groom has to just sit there and take it while the rest of the room cringes. This practice has morphed into the celebrity roast, a format popular on American television. The White House Correspondence Dinner is a version of that, where the president is fair game, although Donald Trump was criticized for not attending the first correspondence dinner of his presidency. And yet Trump used humor a great deal on the campaign trail, much to the annoyance and outrage of his opponents. People giving speeches at dull conferences love to start off with a joke. We like greetings cards with funny pictures and captions. We engage in practical jokes, hoaxes, and April Fool's Day antics. We think comedy is really important, and yet it can so easily go horribly, embarrassingly, toxically, career-endingly wrong, especially in the realm of religion. And that, dear reader, is why you are listening to this book. We need to think seriously about the issues surrounding comedy, religion, and offense in a measured, informed, and good-humoured way. If we learn those lessons, maybe we can break the cycle of misconstrued jokes, media outrage, hysterical punditry, reactionary commentary, and grovelling apologies. But I doubt it. Instructions. This is a book about comedy and why it goes wrong. From the baffled look and the eye roll to public shaming and death threats. I suggest you listen to parts 1, 2, and 3 of this book in that order. This will seem obvious to most readers. The instruction could be construed as insulting, if so, apologies. No offence is intended on this occasion. There is material in this book that I expect will offend some readers. I hope I can justify why that's okay, but of course, you may not appreciate the arguments being put forward if you turn to the chapters of greatest interest first. Plenty of readers may already have skipped straight past this section. In an attempt to arrest their attention as they rush past, I have called this chapter instructions rather than introduction. But also I'd like to explain briefly how this works beyond simply start listening. It looks as if you've already got the hang of that. In part one, we look at the basic anatomy of a joke and how comedy is considerably more complex than it first appears. I argue that the actual words of the joke may not tell you whether a particular joke should have been told or not. In part two, we see how jokes work, or fail to work, in the religious realm, with particular reference to Christianity. This is partly because that is my experience, but also because it is still the dominant religion in the West and the basis of our culture and morality. I will argue that the causing of offense is a poor guide as to whether a particular joke should have been told or not. With all of the above in mind, we will launch into part three, which gives some practical outworkings of these principles, with specific references to famous cases in which jokes have gone horribly wrong, or arguably gone right and caused outrage and chaos. Instructions complete. Freud said that the essence of the comic was the conservation of psychic energy. But then again, Freud never played Second House Friday night at the Glasgow Empire. Ken Dodd.

SPEAKER_00 10:52

Whom would you rather listen to on the subject of comedy? Sigmund Freud or Ken Dodd?

SPEAKER_01 10:59

Academics, psychologists, linguists, theologians, and social scientists have their theories about comedy. But wouldn't you rather listen to Ken Dodd? Not least because he went out on stage night after night and made audiences laugh for hours on end. Nothing is less funny than theories of comedy. As E.B. White famously said, explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better, but the frog dies in the process. Most of us have been in that situation where you crack a joke and receive blank looks. Try to explain the joke and you will only make matters worse. Amusement will turn to pity. Never go back. The task before us, however, is to understand comedy better so that we can see how it goes wrong. Therefore, we need to have a stab at some kind of overarching theory of comedy. This, I believe, is impossible. Comedy is by nature subversive. It tweaks your nose and taps you on the wrong shoulder. It rings your doorbell and runs. It defies exhaustive explanations because it undermines everything around it. That's what makes comedy so anarchic and hard to control. If a social anthropologist presents some grand unified theory of comedy in a lecture hall, someone will stand up and say, What about knock-knock jokes? Or demand to know how limericks or innuendo fit in. The academic will scramble for an answer, realizing a chink has been found in the armour. As it all starts to fall apart, people will start to giggle and not know why, which is in itself funny, but it's also hard to say why. I do not propose to get bogged down by academic theories on humour or Freud's ideas about psychic energy. Let's go with some widely accepted maxims among comedians and comedy writers I've worked with over the past 20 years. One key element is this. Comedy is based on truth.

SPEAKER_00 13:00

In order for a joke to work, it has to have a kernel of truth at the heart of it. Observational comedy.

SPEAKER_01 13:11

This is clearly true of what is often called observational comedy. A comedian points out things we all do in the bathroom or the bedroom and habits we have formed that we hadn't noticed were universal. And this is funny. I'm not entirely sure why, but it's funny because it's true. If the observations weren't true, we wouldn't be laughing. This is the world of Michael McIntyre in the UK and Jerry Seinfeld in the USA. Not everyone laughs at such comic observations. In fact, some comedians are very snobby about observational comedy, commenting that this is merely pointing things out. It's hard to argue with this. That is what it is. Common subjects that some comedians might consider overused or hack would be highlighting the differences between men and women, or cats and dogs. Cult comedians, like Stuart Lee, can be very funny in condemning this straightforward form of comedy. Ironically, their jokes about observational comedy are in themselves observations about comedians. For some reason, that makes it okay.

SPEAKER_00 14:19

There we are, comedy is hard to define. I did tell you that earlier. Satire.

SPEAKER_01 14:28

The moment comedians start being rude about people rather than habits, hets or things, we are in the realm of satire, which is another type of comedy that clearly relies on telling the truth, or at least a grotesque version of it. The satirist doesn't invent facts or motives, he or she takes a small truth and exaggerates it to the point of absurdity for comic effect. Look at the Gerald Scarf cartoons on the opening titles of Yes Minister. The noses are very long and the bodies are out of shape, but they are recognizable and based on the actual appearance of the actors. The satire of the show is based on the truth of the impossibility of government and democracy, trying to square the eternal circle of popularity versus doing the right thing. Satire also relies on another kind of truth, the truth of a morality that assumes injustice, cruelty, and hypocrisy are wrong. The grubby individual truths of government ministers, bishops, journalists, and TV personalities are held up to the greater truths of justice, mercy, and integrity. We make jokes about MPs fiddling their expenses because that is based on the truth that some are doing it, and the truth that it is wrong.

SPEAKER_00 15:48

Sitcoms.

SPEAKER_01 15:50

Truth may be the key for stand-up comedy and satire, where comedians are talking about or depicting real people or situations. But what about sitcoms which are entirely fictional? Yes, Minister, is clearly only quasi-fictional because it is based on recognizable aspects of government, MPs, and civil servants. What about The Simpsons, or Porridge, or Mrs. Brown's boys? These sitcoms also rely on truth. The characters, situations, and stories have to be believable. They have to have a truth to them, or a ring of truth, or truthiness, a word popularized by American comedian Stephen Colbert. There is some dispute about whether Colbert coined the word truthiness or merely popularized it. Characters and situations must sound plausible. Sometimes, to aid this believability, they are based on real people. The legendary sitcom Faulty Towers was based on a real hotel that John Cleese stayed at, where he encountered a highly strung proprietor who at one point was convinced a briefcase contained a bomb, grabbed it, and hurled it outside into the car park. Cleese stayed on at the hotel in order to observe this man, and Basil Faulty was born. He is a character you have no trouble believing would beat his car with a branch of a tree or goose step in front of German guests. Truth is stranger than fiction is a well-warned cliche, but like most hackneyed phrases, it's broadly true. When advising new writers in the creation of sitcoms, I remind them that they can push characters to greater extremes than they might first think. In a quest for plausibility, sitcom characters can easily become bland and unremarkable, which is not what you want. Although TV heightens the persona, we live in a world in which Gordon Ramsay, Simon Cowell, Christine Hamilton, and Geoffrey Boycott actually exist.

SPEAKER_00 17:49

Sitcom characters can be larger than life, but still believable. Science fiction.

SPEAKER_01 17:59

A sitcom character and situation can be pure invention but must have the same quality of truthiness and believability. Even if you have an absurd situation like a man marooned in space in the future, as in Grant and Naylor's Red Dwarf. In that show, the main characters are the last human alive, a humanoid cat, a hologram, and an android. But the characters have to behave within believable parameters. We don't need to like the characters in question, or even identify with them. We just need to recognize them. Many of us know an Alf Garnet from Till Death Us Do Part, or All in the Family's Archibunker in the USA. We do not need to agree with their views, merely believe people exist who espouse those views. The same goes for Adina in Absolutely Fabulous. She behaves like a child.

SPEAKER_00 18:52

But we are prepared to believe that people like that exist in the fashion industry. The logic police. Good comedy characters then are based on truth.

SPEAKER_01 19:05

What they get up to must be truthful to that character. It's frustrating to see a character in a TV show or movie do something that makes no sense in that situation. When I'm editing sitcom scripts, I sometimes refer to the logic police. The most obvious example is the stereotype of bad horror films, in which stranded teenagers voluntarily decide to stay in a clearly haunted and creepy house in the woods. Watching the movie, you're thinking that any rational person would not go near the place, let alone stay the night. Immediately the dishonesty of the story has broken the spell. Someone call the logic police. Characters can do irrational and illogical things as long as we believe that they would. No one would beat a broken down car with a tree branch, but the genius of Faulty Towers is that we have no problem believing that Basil Faulty would do just that.

SPEAKER_00 20:02

You can't handle the truth.

SPEAKER_01 20:05

The internet is full of quotations of dubious origins. There is a particularly good one on humor attributed to famous comedian Victor Borges, who apparently said, humor is something that thrives between man's aspirations and his limitations. There is more logic in humour than in anything else. Because you see, humour is truth. If comedy is based on truth, we can begin to see why it can easily go wrong, because the truth hurts. It's why jokes are often bittersweet or close to the bone, especially in satire. Hypocrisy that we have learned to live with or ignore what has been highlighted. Good sitcoms are truthful. They depict people we recognize in our lives, showing them to be ludicrous or laughable. Fortunately, most people are blind to this most of the time, especially when it concerns their own failings or comic flaws. If there's a character in a sitcom who is exactly like your boss at work, your boss will most likely find it funny too, because he or she knows someone exactly like that, blissfully unaware of the reflection closer to home. No one exemplifies this exact situation better than David Brent in the office, or Michael Scott, in the US version. A character whom everyone recognizes, but no one thinks that's me. Ironically, we also know this to be true, and it's funny when this is the joke. One occasion springs to mind from a Dame Edna Everidge television show. The self proclaimed megastar and creation of Barry Humphreys was asked about what she liked and didn't like. In reply, she talked at length about how repulsive she finds it when men dress up as women, unable to understand why anyone would find that funny. Which was, of course, hilarious. Because of this blindness, we can get away with a lot more jokes than we think we can. But we can already see how comedy can so easily go wrong when the truth hits home and the listener experiences a sense of humor failure. As we have said earlier, cliches have a grain of truth in them. Jokes rely on cliches and stereotypes, and this can easily be the cause of offense, as we will see in the next chapter. Naturally, the audiobook is missing this music and this little interlude, and so hope you're enjoying it so far. The next chapter is entitled An Englishman, An Irishman and a Scotsman, followed by How Jokes Work Without Killing a Frog, How Jokes Go Wrong, Punched by a Punchline. Where's the line? Where jokes are no laughing matter. My favourite one is about leaping from car to car, in which I explain how telling a joke is like getting from one moving car to another moving car via a third moving car. And with that in mind, it's quite surprising that jokes ever seem to be able to work at all. Part two of the book is all about comedy in the church and whether Christians have a sense of humour, and to be honest, we don't, I don't think. I think we're worried about what we're seen to laugh at. And we often do a thing called the Philippians 4 maneuver, uh, which is basically to seize upon any joke we don't like and hold it up to the standard of whatever is good, whatever is lovely, whatever is noble. So that's chapter 13 of the book. And there's various other bits in that part as well. The Supreme Being walks into a bar with one chapter. Was Jesus funny? is another answer, yes. And why Christianity is an easy target? Why don't Christians make jokes about Islam? I think you might have found my answer to that slightly surprising. And why you shouldn't start your sermon with a joke is one of my more controversial chapters. And in part three, Advanced Joking, I talk about how this all works out in the real world, including thinking about Jerry Springer, the Opera, and the Book of Mormon, and then I finally get to the last chapter, which is about April Fool's Day and Easter. Here it is. Chapter 28. What's so funny about Easter? Here's something that sounds like a joke, but isn't. When is a joke not a joke? When it's an April Fool. I told you it wasn't a joke, it's not funny, but then again, neither is April Fool's Day. You will detect a mild note of disapprobation in my tone here. I'm not a fan of April Fool's Day, mainly because, as you have discovered, I'm boringly technical about comedy. Practical jokes aren't jokes, they are pranks, they are hoaxes, not jokes. Having heard almost all of this book, you know why practical jokes are not really jokes. Jokes require shared information. But if you are being pranked, either by an individual or by a national newspaper, you don't have all the information. If you're being pranked by a schoolboy in a black and white Will Hay film, you don't know he's put a bucket of water above the door. You aren't in on the joke.

SPEAKER_00 25:16

You are part of the joke. In fact, you are the joke. Thinking bigger. The dynamic shifts when we scale this up to a full-blown hoax.

SPEAKER_01 25:30

This is the favoured April fool gag of the moment. Newspapers, radio breakfast shows, and large corporations love to tell a story that is on the edge of believability, but is actually pure fiction. In 2017, Emirates Airline announced its triple decker plane, complete with swimming pool, games room, and park. A year earlier, the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts tweeted that Texas would start to issue its own currency. In 2014, King's College Choir in Cambridge announced that they were replacing boys singing soprano with older men using helium instead. They produced an amusing video illustrating this. In these cases, an enormous bucket of water is being placed on a huge doorway in order to drench an entire nation. Only the perpetrator of the hoax has all the facts. The rest of us are not in on the joke, we are all the joke. Anyone who falls for it is the joke. And rather than getting wet, you feel foolish. How is that a joyful comic experience? The hoax then is not a joke, it's a prank.

SPEAKER_00 26:40

This is why I'm not a fan of April Fool's Day. Thank you for listening. Easter tomfoolery.

SPEAKER_01 26:50

What does this have to do with Easter, other than taking place at roughly the same time of year? In 2018, Easter Day fell on April Fool's Day for the first time since 1956. Skeptics of the Christian faith may have enjoyed this coincidence, since they might be tempted to describe Easter as another day in which Christians are taken in by what must be a hoax. They argue, not unreasonably, that the dead do not come back to life. I would argue that this is the very point of the story. The dead do not rise, but Jesus did. Taking the story of the death of Jesus at face value, it doesn't seem like a comic tale. The church rarely presents it as such, but it used to. The phrase Rhesus Pascalis could be found in Easter celebrations in previous centuries.

SPEAKER_00 27:39

It means the Easter laugh Easter laughter. The origin of the phrase Rhesus Pascalis is obscure.

SPEAKER_01 27:50

Some attribute it to early church fathers like Gregory of Nyssa. There is stronger evidence of linking Easter with comedy in the work of Christian philosopher Peter Abelard, 1079 to 1142. He wrote hymns for Good Friday and Holy Saturday, asking God to allow the faithful to enjoy the laugh of Easter grace. On the eve of the Reformation, in the early 16th century, it had become a widespread phenomenon. Priests would tell jokes in Easter sermons. This attracted criticism from Luther's contemporaries, Okalampardius and Erasmus, who were shocked by the baudiness and tone of the gags, which they considered unsuitable for church.

SPEAKER_00 28:35

What's the joke?

SPEAKER_01 28:38

To those outside the church and plenty inside, it may not be easy to see what the big joke is about Easter. In bold terms, God tricked Satan. Since the fall of humanity in the Garden of Eden, God had been working on a plan to save people from their sin. This is hinted at many times in the Bible in passages like Isaiah 53, normally read in carol services. We also get the bizarre gift of myrrh for embalming at Jesus' birth. In contriving the death of Jesus, Satan achieved God's purposes. Jesus saved the world by his death on the cross, and old Nick was humiliated by Jesus' resurrection on the third day. God won, Lucifer nil. Laugh at the devil.

SPEAKER_00 29:24

He's been played for a fool. In fact, he's an eternal April fool. The devil in the detail.

SPEAKER_01 29:34

The Rhizus Pascalis tradition waned for a variety of reasons. It may have fallen by the wayside because of the theological shifts in the past five hundred years. As with mystery plays, the Reformation has something to answer for here. But Easter is funny in other ways, even though it does not seem so at first or possibly even second glance. Crucifixion is a gruesome and painful punishment. It is literally excruciating. That's where the word comes from. It would therefore seem hard to describe the brutal execution of any man, let alone the gold man Jesus Christ, as funny. A fresh look at the details of the story, however, reveals a story riddled with comic incongruities and ironies. This begins well before the traditional recognized passion narratives. We have already seen in part two, chapter 16, how Jesus' raising of Lazarus creates comedy back at the temple in John 11. On seeing that Jesus has power over life and death, the religious authorities decide to kill him. This is quite a contrast from the numerous occasions where Jesus predicts his own death, like Mark 9, verses 30 to 32. The disciples have no idea what he meant, since in their minds, there was no way this miracle worker could be killed.

SPEAKER_00 30:56

False sense of security.

SPEAKER_01 30:58

Killing Jesus, however, proved worryingly easy, considering his divine cosmic power. His trial was rushed and fixed. The crowd was so easily swayed. They had been cheering Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem, and there they were, demanding the release of a murderer. The speed with which they spoke with one collective mind is reminiscent of the yes, we are all individuals scene in Monty Python's life of Brian.

SPEAKER_00 31:27

Black Friday.

SPEAKER_01 31:29

In the blackest and bleakest day in human history, all of the above mocked and jeered as Jesus was nailed to a cross beneath a sign saying that he was the king of the Jews. Which is funny because it's true. The only person who had committed no sin was crucified between two common criminals. One of the criminals, despite being near to death himself, used his dying words to join the mockers, sneering at Jesus. The other is told by Jesus that they will be together in paradise. Luke 23, verse 43. Likewise a centurion, the despised Roman occupier, could see that this man was the Son of God. Meanwhile, Peter, the sturdy fisherman, Jesus's rock, who has been with him for a few years, is denying him to a young girl. In a way, this is more humiliating than the experience of the disciple who runs away naked in the garden of Gethsemane. Ironies abound as the religious people mishear Jesus quoting Psalm 22, saying, He is calling Elijah, when he is giving more clues to his identity, and the awful mistake the religious leaders have made. They taunt Jesus, telling him to come down from the cross, which he could do, but chooses not to. He saved others. He cannot save himself. Matthew 27, verse 42. He is, of course, saving others at the cost of his own life. Jesus, the Prince of Peace, healer of the sick, God's chosen prophesied king, has been killed by priests.

SPEAKER_00 33:08

It doesn't get more incongruous than that. Death, where is thy sting? The Easter story was not over.

SPEAKER_01 33:19

The disciples had missed the clues which were not very subtle. The earth had shaken, rocks had split open. There was an unexpected total solar eclipse that lasted not minutes but hours. Three hours. The tall, thick, woven tapestry curtain from the temple, protecting the Holy of Holies, was torn in half, from top to bottom. Then a zombie apocalypse. The tombs were also opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection, they went into the holy city and appeared to many. Matthew 27, verse 52. The signs were there that something of cosmic significance was happening. Jesus' followers seemed convinced that when Jesus said, It is finished, it really was finished. When the women brought spices to the tomb on the Sunday, they were not planning to use them to make celebratory herbal tea. The spices were for Jesus' corpse, but his tomb was empty. The body was gone. Disciples were summoned, angels reminded them of Jesus' words, pointing out how embarrassingly clear Jesus had been about what would happen to him when he was killed. This is the moment of triumph. Jesus saved his best miracle until last. Euphoria, joy, jubilation, laughter, death is defeated.

SPEAKER_00 34:49

The priests, the principalities, the powers, and Pontius Pilate have been thwarted. Jesus wins. What happened next?

SPEAKER_01 35:00

The Easter comedy continues and becomes more obvious in the scene that follows in Luke chapter 24. Two followers of Jesus, possibly Cleopas and his wife, are on the way to Emmaus when they meet Jesus. Except they don't realize it is him, but we do. Hooray for shared information. The two followers are astonished that the man they have met is ignorant of what's been happening in recent days. They have the temerity to say to Jesus, Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days? Verse 18. Now that's funny. It gets funnier when they proceed to mansplain everything to the Supreme Being. But it turns out that the man they've met knows way more about it than they thought. He rebukes the two followers before God splaining everything to them. They beg this stranger to stay and eat with them, and when he breaks the bread, they recognize him, and he vanishes. The two followers run miles back to Jerusalem, saying that they've seen the risen Christ. One can imagine the disbelief in the room, and how their attempts to be convincing are vindicated when Jesus himself appears. The scene that unfolds is undoubtedly comic, especially when one really imagines how the disciples must have been feeling. The disciples are in a state of shock, fear, confusion, and joy.

SPEAKER_00 36:27

Blithe Spirits.

SPEAKER_01 36:29

The scene we find at the end of Luke's Gospel with Jesus appearing to the disciples is a bit of a comedy staple. You will find it in films and plays, like Ricky Gervais's overlooked comedy Ghost Town, and Null Coward's Blithe Spirit. In the latter, an eccentric medium is invited to conduct a seance by a novelist, looking for material for a book. It backfires when the medium invokes the spirit of the novelist's annoying and temperamental first wife, Elvira, and the comedy plays out from there. This kind of comedy is not just to be found in Edwardian spiritualism. You'll find something similar if you look up the astonishing scene in 1 Samuel 28, with the witch of Endor. Saul wishes to speak with Samuel to gain wisdom and prophecy about a forthcoming battle. Except Samuel is dead. When Samuel was alive, Saul didn't listen to a word he said, but now Samuel is long dead. Saul is all ears. More irony. In order to hear a prophetic man of God, a god who has forbidden sorcery and witchcraft, King Saul pays a visit to the witch of Endor. The king goes in disguise, obviously, but the witch sees through it when Saul asks for Samuel. Margaret Rutherford from Blythe Spirit would make an excellent witch in this scene. But the seance continues, and Samuel actually appears. He issues the same prophecy that he'd been prophesying all his life, the very one that Saul refused to listen to. But here's the kicker. Samuel signs off by saying that Saul and his sons will be joining him in the afterlife tomorrow.

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Ouch, but funny. And here's the kicker.

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Let us return to the scene at the end of Luke's gospel, where they all disbelieved with joy and were marvelling. Luke 24, verse 41. At that moment Jesus says something hilarious. Have you anything to eat? It really punctures the moment. Clearly, Jesus is keen to prove that he is not merely an apparition or a spirit, but that his resurrection body is physical and real. But the moment is comic. There is a very similar joke in terms of the incongruity of cosmic wonder and earthly banality in Terry Pratch's finest work, Mort. The young Mort meets Death in order to be his apprentice, and it's a very funny scene.

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Death speaks in capital letters, by the way. It's beautiful, said Mort softly. What is it? The sun is under the disk, said Death. Is it like this every night? Every night, said Death. Nature's like that. Doesn't anyone know? Me, you, the gods. Good, isn't it? Gosh! Death leaned over the saddle and looked down at the kingdoms of the world. I don't know about you, he said, but I could murder a curry.

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One could read Jesus' request for food in this way. They give him broiled fish, and you can imagine them gorping at him as he eats it to see what will happen. Throughout the Gospels, we see people trying to come to terms with the man who is God. Here we see them processing how a dead man can be alive. Such a scene is hard to play any other way than comically.

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Easter tomfoolery.

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The Easter story brings all of these astonishing incongruities crashing together into a comic and cosmic symphony. They are interwoven through the Bible, stunning in their complexity, and yet their overall message is so sweet and simple it can scarcely be believed. Christ is risen. Hallelujah. Reesus Pascalist is, and should still be, a part of the Christian tradition. Any tradition that makes Christians laugh more and see the comedy that God has woven into the text of the Bible and the fabric of the universe would be very welcome.

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The Sacred Art of Joking.

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In Echo's The Name of the Rose, Yorge commits murder in order to prevent Aristotle's second poetics book about comedy from being discovered, translated, and read. For him, comedy is so subversive that it only brings anarchy, disrespect, and godlessness. Yorge is prepared to burn the book and destroy the entire library in which it has been hidden, rather than allow anyone to discover the secrets of laughter. He is a truly tragic figure, but one who would feel at home in many Christian churches and communities today. He'd be great on Twitter. Too often we fail to appreciate the absurdities and incongruities found throughout Scripture, buried even within the darkest of tales like the Easter story. We are often naive and short-sighted in our handling of conflicts surrounding jokes. We judge jokes in the wrong way, robbing them of their context and listening only to the shrieks of offense, taken or feigned. Psalm 2 says that in heaven, God is laughing at us. All things considered, that seems a highly appropriate response to our pomposity and self-importance. We think we can fully understand the sacred art of joking, but we don't, and we can't. We simply don't have all the information. But God does. We are April fools. In fact, we are year-round clowns. When all is said and done, the joke's on all of us. So we might as well have a good laugh. So that was the Sacred Art of Joking, the beginning and the end. And if you're interested in listening to the middle, then go to Audible and find the Sacred Art of Joking. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. If you click the link in the show notes, there's an outside chance I might get slightly more money, but I'm not holding my breath. Thank you very much to WF Hams, who have extended the rights to have the audio of that on Audible. I don't know what I'm gonna do with the audio rights to because record it to a sitcom like I haven't quite figured that out. Nobody bought them when the book came out, so I'll probably end up putting them in the audio for lolaluts, but I'll keep you posted on that. Lulla lala much paid subscribers to the weekly papers. I have plans in the future for that. And I'll tell you all about it next time, which is the last in this current season of the Standard Theologian podcast. Until then, is this how to end? Yep.