The Great Christian Comedy

Today in class, when I saw Mary and Jesus nested within the burning bush, I couldn’t help but grin. When asked why I was grinning so much, I don’t think I was able to fully articulate or understand why laughter was my reaction to the art (and to the overall lecture, especially in reacting to RLFB’s delightfully snarky comment on Calvin).  This blog post will be an exploration of why I laughed in class today. 

"Laughing Jesus"

...well, it will be an exploration on why laughter might be an appropriate response to learning about God.  Overall, I hope this blog post provokes thought on the relation between laughter, comedy, and Christianity. 

First, laughter can be a celebratory response to a great discovery, to an epiphany.  In this respect, laughter is not only a celebration of a newfound truth, it also may have a humbling nature. I can imagine a mathematician laughing after he finally discovers a proof after spending decades trying to solve it; the subtext of his laugh may be,“I can’t believe I was so stupid to have not seen this all along!"  Laughter is an expression of joy, and as I discussed in my previous blog post, for Christians, joy is closely associated with the discovery and understanding of God. The cliche “It’s funny because it’s true” is particularly appropriate here. Good comedians (the jester types) speak the truth, and good jokes are often met with laughter because laughter is precisely the response that recognizes the truth of the joke.  Comedy and laughter become especially important in situations where we cannot articulate the truth, either because we are strictly prohibited from speaking the truth or because we lack the ability. The Christian God is the God of truth, and thus in realizing that it is the same God (Jesus) who is the God that speaks to Moses through the burning bush, I laughed at my recognition of this truth. This recognition is surely a thing to celebrate.  

As I commented in class, the Christian assertion of monotheism may be isomorphic to its assertion that there is one great story (one great comedy?), and we are all a part of it.  Since I had grown up Jewish, when I exposed myself to Christianity in college, I still was unable to understand the connection between the New Testament that I was learning and the Old Testament stories that I had learned as a young child.  It took me seeing this piece of art in order to finally put it together, and as a response, I laughed from the joy I felt in my realization of the unity of the Christian narrative.     

Apart from being a celebratory response to good news or understanding, laughter and comedy also serve a much more serious purpose: namely, comedy serves as a means to process and accept the suffering and tragedy inherent in life.  It is fitting that humor be discussed within a Christian context because it is precisely the Christians who assert that, from the fall, sin and tragedy are embedded within man’s very existence.   Despite this harsh reality, through the Incarnation, we may bear the suffering of life with joy and hope, for Jesus is more good than the human race is collectively bad.  Likewise, comedy, especially dark comedy, may be used as a sort of coping mechanism.  When faced with the incomprehensible tragedy of the world, sometimes the best thing (sometimes the only thing) we can do is to laugh at it.  It is fitting to explore the connection between comedy and Christianity because, as we previously discussed in class, the story of Christ is a comedy (in the Shakespearean sense of "comedy"- the kind in which everyone lives at the end of the story).  Jesus is not properly categorized as the tragic, pagan, dying god archetype, for in fact He defeats death and is resurrected.  The radical Christian claim is this: life is not a tragedy, but a comedy.  Tragedy ends with everyone dying.  Comedy, and Christianity, end in life. 

Then, it is no surprise that we find some humorous elements in our readings for this week.  Auerbach emphasizes the extremely relatable nature of Le Mystere d'Adam: “Adam calls his wife to account as a French farmer or burgher might have done” (Auerbach 147).  I don’t know about you, but it gives me a kick to imagine the first man and his wife as working-class couple bickering.  In the York Mystery plays, we also see extremely relatable and humorous situations: Noah’s wife complains about leaving her friends to die from the flood (YMP 25), and God errs grievances and expresses annoyance over his creation (YMP 16).  Through these farcical elements of medieval reenactments of the Christian story, Auerbach argues, we see an intersection of the profane and the holy, the humble and the sublime.  Due to Christianity’s insistence that it be accessible to every man, in its reenactment, we see a relatability of the characters that is also essential to comedy.  

There is also a sense in which York’s cyclic, annual retelling of the story of Christ (from Creation to Last Judgment) resembles the format of sitcom.  Apart from the popular, everyday nature of these reenactments (the contemporary language, the guildsmen actors, the relatability of the characters), the very contents of the narrative resemble the general arch of an episode of 30 Rock, The Simpsons, or Arrested Development. Each episode, the characters make mistakes and act foolishly, but at the end of the episode, the characters learn from their mistakes, change, and are redeemed.  At the end of the episode, everything is back to normal. In each episode there is, phrased using Christian vocabulary, the repeated fall and redemption of the characters. Perhaps the Christian story of the fall and redemption served as an archetypal form of comedy that inspired modern sitcoms…

To be clear, I do not mean at all to claim that Christianity is a joke.   By pointing out the moments for laughter in a Christian context, I don’t mean to suggest that there aren’t serious moments of deep contemplation, prayer, and devotion.  There clearly exist Christian contexts where laughter is not and should not be permitted (i.e. a Benedictine monastery).  That said, I hope that I have made clear the curious similarities that exist between Christianity and comedy: they are humbling, relatable, truthful, joyful, and each has a redeeming end.  

Thank you to Trevor and Nick, without whose company and conversation after class I would have not been able to generate and develop these ideas.

-Andy Cohen

Sources cited:

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature,

trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953)

York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling, ed. Richard Beadle and Pamela King (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)