A Meditation on Comedy as a Christian Genre – Andy Cohen
It is no doubt that Christianity has left
an indelible mark on ‘the West’– without it, Europe may not have experienced
the birth of the university system, its rich history of visual art, or even the
development of modern science. But just as Christianity has influenced high art
and culture in the West, so too has it influenced the more popular forms of art
and culture, including the art of comedy. This essay argues that both medieval and
modern practices of comedy, like most other cultural artifices of the West, are
inextricably entangled with the Christian foundation out of which they arose. Simply
put, there is something very Christian about comedic narrative.
In considering why we might call comedy
a Christian genre (or rather, why we might call Christianity a comedic
narrative), a historical problem quickly arises: since our current practice and
understanding of comedy is so colored by our Christian history, it becomes
almost a tautology to call Christianity a comedic narrative. Rather than trying
to establish a causal relationship between the two, this exercise merely aims
to draw attention to the deep symmetries that exist between the Christian story
and comedy, both medieval and modern. Overall, this essay aims to challenge
contemporary stereotypes of Christians as too prude, austere, or unfunny, and
claims instead that laughing at and humiliating oneself (that is, the very practice
of comedy) is in fact central to the Christian practice.
Both Christianity and comedy are
redemptive: they each tell a story of the redemption of human error, and this
story has a happy ending filled with life and marriage. Though this observation
may be self-evident, it is nonetheless profound to meditate on how the
Christian story aims to distil the narrative structure of comedy into the ultimate redemptive story. In other
words, if we define comedy to be a redemptive story, then Christianity is an
attempt at articulating the archetypal comedy. Consider the Shakespearean
comedy, which invariably ends with all (or almost all) of the characters surviving
and get married. The Christian comedy takes the notion of a happy ending to its
theoretical limit (answering the question, “what is the happiest ending
possible?”): The Christian story ends in eternal
life and a marriage not just between two humans but between Jesus (the Lamb)
and the Church.[1]
After establishing that comedy is redemptive, the next task is to understand
how the characters of the comedy are redeemed.
In both medieval and modern comedy, the
emergence of truth is that which redeems error. To phrase
it another way, comedy describes the transformation of chaos into order by the revelation of truth, and this
insistence on truth as redemptive is fundamental to comedy. But in order for
characters to discover the truth, they must first be deceived. Take for
example, the comedic poems in the Cambridge
Songs (nos. 14, 15, 24, 35, 42) – a collection of lyric poetry written over
several centuries but compiled and transcribed to English in the eleventh
century[2] – which all
begin with elements of ignorance and deception. Poem 15 begins with,
The lying
ballad that I sing,
I will give
to little boys,
so that
they may bring great laughter
to
listeners through lying little measures of song.
To a
certain king was born a noble and comely daughter,
Whom he
offered to suitors to be wooed
under terms
of this sort:
“If anyone
experienced in lying
should
apply himself to deception
so well
that he is called a deceiver
by the
emperor’s own mouth, that man may marry the daughter.”[3]
Clearly, the poet draws an association
between deception and laughter. Generally speaking, deception and ignorance are
necessary elements of comedy because without their presence at the beginning of
the narrative, the characters could not experience an epiphany at the end. It
makes sense that the audience should laugh at this deception and the climactic
discovery of truth because laughter is
precisely the response that recognizes the truth of a joke (hence the
adage, “it’s funny because it’s true!”). Returning to the poem, it is also of fitting
that poet dedicates the song to “little boys” since the story evokes the same
playful, foolish, and provocative attitude that is typical among young boys. At
the end of Poem 15, a Swabian suitor cleverly tricks the king to win his
daughter, and the comedy appropriately ends in a marriage.
To draw on another example, in the fourteenth
century York Corpus Christi
play Joseph’s Trouble About Mary, Joseph
is puzzled about how it could be possible for Mary to be a pregnant virgin, and
his disbelief serves as a great source of comedy. Joseph ponders,
Her works me works my wangs to wet;
I am beguiled–how, wot I not.
My young wife is with child full
great,
That make me now sorrow unsought.[4]
In contemplating the immaculate
conception, Joseph wonders if a “young man [took] her” into the woods and she
did not remember it. Later, when Mary’s maidens reject his claim and tell him that
the angel was the only person to ever visit Mary, Joseph then wonders if some
“man in angel’s likeness” had impregnated her.”[5] The
humor in this play comes from its dramatic irony: although the whole audience
knows the truth, Joseph’s ignorance about Mary’s pregnancy results in his jealous
and suspicious attitude towards his wife. Ultimately, Joseph will be revealed
the truth about Mary, but until then the audience laughs along at his confusion,
as if Joseph is being pranked.
This pattern found within comedy – of
the truth emerging to redeem error – maps directly onto the Christian
story. It goes without saying that climatic moment in the Christian narrative
is the incarnation. To Christians, the incarnation is the moment when truth (or
in a very literal sense, the God of Truth) [6] comes
out into the world to redeem mankind of his original sin. To articulate this in
more visual terms (since there is a deep symbolic connection between vision and
truth), the incarnation finally allowed humans to see God. As Anselm articulated in his Proslogion, “I was created to see you,”[7] and
through the Incarnation, God’s creatures could see and know their true creator
at last. Thus, at the climax of a comedic narrative the truth emerges for all the characters to see, and as a
result the characters are redeemed of their error. With the emergence of truth,
“heaven rejoices, earth laughs, [and] everything takes delight.”[8]
Louis C.K. and Saint Anselm of Canterbury
What do Louis C.K. and Saint Anselm of
Canterbury have in common? Humiliation. Humiliation is a fundamental part of
their routines, be it a stand-up routine for Louis C.K. or prayer for St. Anselm.
Consider part of a transcript from a 2011 Louis C.K. stand-up special, in which
Louis jokes about how tormented he is by his sexual impulses:
I just want to be a
person in clothes walking in a store and just– I just want to go to the library
and ask for– Hi, ma’am, is there– I’m looking for a book about early Abraham
Lincoln, like when he was– I wish I could wrap your hair around my dick and– Oh,
shit. I’m trying to talk to her!
…
You’re a tourist in
sexual perversion. I’m a prisoner there.[9]
In front of
a whole crowd, Louis debases himself by revealing his reprehensible thoughts. In
essence, Louis is shaming himself for his sexual sins (how very Christian of
him!). In response, the audience laughs because they recognize the truth of man’s twisted, sinful nature. In a similar
humiliating fashion, it is typical for Anselm to begin his prayers with a series
of self-deprecating remarks, for he is disgusted by his sin. Take for example
his admissions, “I chose to become vile,” or “I cannot bear the interior horror
of my face.”[10]
He cannot even look at himself in the mirror because he is so disgusted by his
sin. Importantly, Anselm, like Louis, wants to
be seen in his humiliation. He begs of both the saints to whom he prays and
God that they look upon him, and this supplication is repeated throughout his
prayers and Proslogion.[11] Just as Louis has an audience at his
stand-up special, Anselm’s audience are the saints and Jesus. The audience plays
an absolutely vital role in both of these routines because humiliation only occurs in a social context. Anselm is only ashamed
of his sin when he reminds himself that God the Judge is watching.
To heighten
their senses of humiliation, both Christians and comedians make use of the
motif of verticality, of the sublime on high and the humble below. They are not
only saying “look at me,” but they are saying “look down on me.” The theme of
verticality within Anselm’s writings and Christianity in general is fairly
obvious. Anselm speaks of his “soul, weighed down for so long by its misery,”
for example.[12]
Similarly, Bernard de Clairvaux, in his meditation on kissing Christ, begins by
humiliating himself and lying prostrate to kiss the feet of Christ before he
can rise to kiss the hands of Christ and finally kiss the face of Christ.[13] This
pattern of verticality, of descending in order to ascend, is even captured in
the trajectory of Jesus, who descends into Hell to defeat Lucifer before he
ascends into Heaven.
The same pattern
of verticality is likewise found in comedy. Dante, in his Divine Comedy (note the title) mimics Christ’s trajectory, for
Dante must descend to the depths of hell before he can ascend to paradise. This
trajectory appears in the Cambridge Songs
as well. For example, Poem 35 tells the “amusing story” of a “country
priest” who was also a shepherd, but a recent invasion of wolves had threatened
his herd. In an act of “revenge through craft” (note that the sin is already
present in his seeking “revenge,” and deception is present in his “craft”), the
priest builds a trap for the wolves by digging a pit in the ground. As luck
would have it, he catches a wolf, but as he is trying to strike it, the wolf
grabs onto his rod and the pulls the
priest down into the pit with it. Fearing for his life, the priest prays to
God “Have mercy on me,” and in response, the wolf leaps upon the man’s back and
jumps out of the pit. After this near-death experience, “never afterward did [the
priest] pray more devoutly or faithfully.” Overall, in this story we see the
very same trajectory as in the story of Christ or of Dante: man must first descend
into the pit with the wolf in order to then look upwards and become closer to
God. Man must first fall in order to be redeemed.
Ultimately, both Christianity and
comedy live in the intersection of the sublime and the humble. It is this
Christian insistence that the everyday man can experience sublime revelation
through grace that made it possible for the ordinary townspeople of York to assume
and act out the divine roles of Jesus and Mary in their plays. It is this
humility that gives Christianity the powerful ability to laugh at itself. Take for example the musical The Book of Mormon, perhaps one of the most sacrilegious works of art
in the past couple decades (and truly sacrilegious, not just provocative – to illustrate, a highlight of the show
is when a Ugandan tribe repeatedly sings “Fuck you God in the ass, mouth, and
cunt”).[14] Though
leaders of the LDS surely found this musical reprehensible, it did not stop
them from making use of the publicity as a way to spread the good word. Truly,
the Mormons know how to take a joke. Funnily enough, in The Book of Mormon
playbills, the Church of LDS purchased ad space to proselytize, with ads
saying, “You’ve seen the play, now read the book.”[15] This
goes to show how you cannot satisfyingly ‘put down’ Christians because they
will just agree with you about their shameful, fallen nature. In fact, it might
backfire because they then might try to share the story of Christ with you,
often with a positive attitude (the Mormons are really quite good at this). It
is noteworthy that this insistence on humility and ability to laugh at itself
seems to be characteristic of Christianity. As Bill Maher joked on his HBO
show, Real Time with Bill Maher, “‘The Book of Mormon,’ did you see
the show? … OK, can you imagine if they did ‘The Book of Islam’?”[16] In a similar vein, imagine if Andres Serrano had instead photographed a
‘Piss Muhammad.’ I expect that the response would not have been the same.
Elder Price
sharing the Book of Mormon with a group of Ugandans in The Book of Mormon
One final intriguing connection between
Christianity and comedy is their shared association with singing and music. Both
in the monastic practice of antiphonal recitation of the psalms and in the medieval
popular comedic art forms, singing is
of critical importance. In the York
Mystery Plays, singing is embedded within the dramas through stage
directions, often appearing during moments of rejoicing and redemption.[17] For
example, the actors playing Noah and his family in The Flood are instructed to sing after they see land, and later in
the cycle, the cast of The Harrowing of
Hell is directed to sing when Christ arrives to save them.[18] Again,
in the Cambridge Songs, singing plays
a vital role in storytelling because sung verse is the medium through which
comedic narratives are told. Not only do music and verse make up the very
format of the Cambridge Songs, but in
fact several of its poems meditate on the power and beauty of music and
particularly harmony.[19] In the
case of the Cambridge Songs, the
format fits the content.
It may be a productive to investigate
why comedy and singing appear to be so proximate to one another in both the Cambridge Songs and the York Mystery Plays. In fact, this
music-comedy connection remains alive today in musicals like Avenue Q, La Cage Aux Folles, or The Producers as well as in popular
late-night comedy such as SNL or Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, which feature
live music interspersed between comedic content.
Apart from the self-evident observation
that both comedy and music have the potential to engender great joy in the
spectator, the two art forms are also curiously connected through their harmonic structures. Though the presence
of harmony in many forms of music is obvious, finding harmonic structure in
comedy requires some elucidation. Comedic narratives begin with discordant
subplots, in which the various characters find themselves in undesirable places
as a result of their own errors – in the Christian narrative, this descent into
chaos and error is distilled into the story of the fall of man. As the comedy
develops and reaches its climax, the truth
emerges as the antidote to the error, and all of the seemingly unrelated
subplots converge at the moment of truth. Here is the key idea: the subplots converge in manner that mirrors
a harmony of voices coming together. While the beginning of a comedy
resembles a cacophony in its disarray, its finale resembles perfect harmony in
its happy ending. To take a modern example, for both Seinfeld and Curb Your
Enthusiasm, Larry David crafted brilliant episodes as if they were comedic
symphonies – all the parts come together at the end in a harmonious and
hilarious climax.[20]
Larry David
urinating next to an image of Christ
It is no surprise that the same
harmonic pattern is found within Christianity since the story of Christ is,
after all, a comedy. The incarnation, the comedic climax that depicts the
emergence of truth, is precisely the event which unites all of the disconnected
subplots into one unified story. It
is the incarnation that reveals the convergence of scriptures into one grand
narrative; that is to say, it reveals the harmony
between the Old Testament and the New. This harmony is apparent in the modern
adaptation of the medieval York Corpus Christi plays, in which New Testament
plays are performed right after their Old Testament analogues: Creation is
followed by the Annunciation (creation), The Fall of Man is followed by the Temptation
of Christ (temptation), Abraham and Isaac is followed by The Crucifixion
(sacrifice), and the Moses and Pharaoh story is followed by the Harrowing of
Hell (liberation).[21] This
harmony in the Christian story is the reason why there exist paintings
depicting Moses seeing Mary and Jesus in the burning bush.[22] Because
of the Incarnation, the whole story comes together into one grand narrative.
The articulation of Christianity (or
comedy) in musical terms is nothing new, for many of the poems from the Cambridge Tales in fact reflect on the
religious significance of music and its ability to reveal God. One of the
poems, in obvious allusion to the Trinity, reflects on the three-form way in
which sound is produced from “strumming [strings], blowing [woodwind
instruments], and singing.”[23] Another
more explicitly religious poem, in similar fashion, celebrates Pythagoras’
discovery of the three components of a harmony: “To complete this art
[Pythagoras] made these three concords: the fourth, fifth, and octave, which
sound out a harmony fully.”[24] This
poem fittingly begins with worship to the “Giver of life, creator of all, God,”[25] which primes
the poem’s listener to recognize that harmony in music, with its triune nature,
reveals the divine pattern designed by
God the Creator. It must be remembered that this meditation on music was transmitted
through a musical format; the bards who recited this poem were not only
contemplating the divine beauty of harmony, they were embodying it themselves
using their voices. Likewise, in the case of the YMP, not only did the York townspeople belong to the Christian
story they told because they were followers of Christ, they also became a part
of the story in a profound sense through their embodied reenactment of it.
Ultimately, these works of lyric poetry
and theater serve as forms of worship.
In writing comedy or composing music, man is creating something using the mystical pattern of harmony designed
by God. It is through man’s imitation of the act of God’s creation that he may
fully and truly worship his own creator.
And look, we find ourselves back at the
original Christian claim of God the Creator of heaven and earth, the very first
story in the Bible! Just as the townspeople of York return to their plays each
year on Corpus Christi day, just as the seasons change and the harvest comes
each autumn, and just as everything in a sitcom returns back to normal at the
end of an episode, it seems that even our discussion of Christianity has a
cyclical nature to it, for we are always returning to the idea of God the
Creator. Isn’t that funny?
[1]
Revelation 19:6-10
[2] The
Cambridge Songs (Carmina Cantabrigiensia), ed. Jan M. Ziolkowski (Tempe, Ariz.: Medieval &
Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1998), p xviii.
[4] York
Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling, ed. Richard Beadle and Pamela King (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1995), p 50.
[5] York
Mystery Plays, p 52-53.
[6] In our readings, the insistence that God is
the God of Truth appears over and over again, particularly in Anselm of Canterbury’s
prayers and Proslogion (Anselm of
Canterbury, The Prayers and Meditations,
with the Proslogion, trans. Sister Benedicta Ward, London: Penguin
Classics, 1979 p 259, 267) and Hildegard of
Bingen’s Scivias: “I sent My Son for
its salvation, miraculously incarnate of the Virgin, true God and true man.
What does this mean? That His Divinity truly
came forth from Me, the Father, and His Humanity truly took flesh from the Virgin Mother” (Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Mother Columba Hart, New
York: Paulist Press, 1990, p 288, emphasis added).
[7] Anselm of Canterbury, The Prayers and Meditations, p 240.
[9]
https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2017/06/28/louis-c-k-live-at-the-beacon-theatre-2011-full-transcript/
[10] Anselm of Canterbury, The Prayers and Meditations, p 128, 130.
[11] Anselm frequently uses phrases like “by a
glance from your mercy,” “do not turn away your merciful eyes,” or “Jesus,
John’s master, look on us” “You see me – see me,” which invoke the imagery of
him being judged and looked upon by both Saints and God (Anselm of Canterbury, The Prayers and Meditations, p 108, 136,
169).
[12] Anselm of Canterbury, The Prayers and Meditations, p 139.
[13] Bernard
of Clairvaux, Kilian J. Walsh, and Irene M. Edmonds. On the Song of
Songs, (Spencer, MA: Cistercian Publications, 1971), p 16-24.
[17] York
Mystery Plays, p 3, 30, 116, 124, 239, 249, 250, 258.
[18] York
Mystery Plays, p 30, 239, 249.
[19]
“You who exist unchangingly as the origin of things… and rule the lyre of our
soul,” “Now, string, sound melodies devoutly to the son of the holy virgin
Mary,” “May the golden lyre sound bright melodies” The Cambridge Songs, p 27, 37, 45.
[20] Take for example the synopsis of the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode titled “The
Bare Midriff”: https://curb-your-enthusiasm.fandom.com/wiki/The_Bare_Midriff. Funnily enough, this episode features a
scene in which Larry’s urine accidentally sprays on an image of Christ, nicely
putting the episode in conversation with Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ. Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCodaoMt8XE, or if you have an HBO account, I highly encourage
you to watch the full episode.
[22]
https://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/f/froment/burning.html
[23] The
Cambridge Songs, p 23. See also Poem 21: “A fifth and a fourth, a concord
both high- and low-pitched, together a consonance, produce an entire octave in
a harmonious modulation” The Cambridge
Songs, p 87.
[24] The
Cambridge Songs, p 55.
[25] The
Cambridge Songs, p 57.
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