Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert Darden is Associate Professor of Journalism at Baylor University in Waco, Texas where he also runs the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project. He served for twelve years as Gospel Music Editor for Billboard magazine, and since 1988 has been Senior Editor of The Wittenburg Door, the world s oldest, largest, and pretty much only religious satire magazine. He has been featured on National Public Radio and authored more than twenty-five books on a wide array of subjects, from football to David Koresh, including Reluctant Prophets and Clueless Disciples, published by Abingdon Press, and the definitive People Get Ready! A New History of Black Gospel Music.

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Jesus Laughed

Abingdon Press

Chapter One

To explain the nature of laughter and tears, is to account for the condition of human life; for it is in a manner compounded of these two! —William Hazlitt

Laughter. Humor. Gaiety. Mirth. Joy. Happiness.

If the thesis of this book is that these things really do matter to Christians and the church, then perhaps it's a good idea to explain/understand them and—in a perfect world—even learn how to use them. Your salvation does not depend on whether or not you get your pastor's latest joke. In fact, as we'll see, we're not even talking about jokes. But the quality of your life both before and after your salvation depends, in part, on your understanding of, as Hazlitt says, "the nature of laughter and tears" (1901, B). Or, as William H. Willimon expresses it: "... the very essence of grace is to receive the gift of laughter, especially when the joke is on us, particularly when the most laughable incongruities consist of the gap between who we are and who God would have us to be" (1986, 10).

Most of us have the tears bit figured out pretty well. We've already got two books in the Bible that spend 99 percent of their time telling us how crummy things are and how come we deserve it—Lamentations and Ecclesiastes. And you should probably avoid Job, James, and Revelation if you're a little blue too. For balance, you'd think there would be at least one book in the Bible titled "Delirious" or "Giddy with Delight" or even "Slap-Happy." But there's not.

Fortunately, humor and happiness are two intimately related concepts that you can learn to recognize, learn to reproduce, and even learn to internalize. And, in the pages ahead, I hope I'll be able to convince you that it is a good thing.

[T]he ability to see the humor in things, or to create comic tales and rituals, is among the most profound and imaginative of human achievements. The comic sense is an important part of what it means to be human and humane. Without it we return to brutishness, and the Philistines are upon us. (Hyers 1981, 11)

From a scholarly, academic standpoint, science is still a little wobbly when it comes to explaining laughter and humor. Susanne Langer's pivotal Feeling and Form notes that laughter erupts, often unexpectedly, from a "surge of vital feeling." It's a complicated physiological and emotional process, she says, "a culmination of feeling— the crest of a wave of felt vitality." Langer further defines laughter as being more "elementary" than humor, since we can break into spontaneous laughter without any apparent stimulus or cause. "People laugh for joy in active sport, in dancing, in greeting friends; in returning a smile," she writes, "one acknowledges another person's worth instead of flaunting one's own superiority and finding him funny" (1953, 340, 341).

Comedy, still another separate quality, occurs when something is reinterpreted for us, somehow surprising us, creating something new:

Humor, then, is not the essence of comedy, but only one of its most useful and natural elements. It is also its most problematical element, because it elicits from the spectators what appears to be a direct emotional response to persons on the stage, in no wise different from their response to actual people: amusement, laughter. (346)

Surprise

The most crucial concept related to humor that Langer identifies is surprise. Simply put, without surprise, there is no humor. Period.

Consider this: You're going to hear your favorite musical artist— Loreena McKennitt, Van Morrison, Prince, whoever—in concert. You scream madly each time he or she performs one of your favorite songs. And for an encore, you scream even louder to hear one (or more) of them again. If they comply, you leave feeling satisfied.

But say you've heard a very funny story. You want to share it with a friend. How do you preface your story? You say, "Stop me if you've heard this one before ..."

Why? Because if they've heard it before, there is no surprise. Without the surprise, the story, the joke, isn't funny. The humor is in the surprise ending.

So the first great essential of humor/comedy is surprise.

Surprise comes from expectations being overturned. You expect one thing, but something unexpected happens. Surprise is—essentially— pulling the rug out from under someone's feet. But first you have to get them to stand on the rug ...

In order to have surprise, you have to have the commonplace. The normal (or what appears to be normal) order of things; the everyday.

You'd expect the founders of our faith to be sterling individuals, saintly aesthetes who walk in God's favor. But the revered patriarchs and matriarchs of the Old Testament steal, lie, dissemble, flee in fear, kill, cavort with undesirables, fail repeatedly, and, in general, behave as badly as freshmen on Spring Break. If you're looking for heroes in the Bible, you're going to be surprised by the antics of Joseph, Isaac, David, Rachel, Tamar, Abigail, Jael, Solomon, Elijah, and all of the rest.

You'd expect the Founder of Christianity to speak in Grand Truths, in stirring, noble language, not to speak in riddles or tell little stories about goofy, common, infuriatingly normal people. And if you do fall for the Founder's gentle message, you're sure not expecting logic to be so consistently turned on its head—to conquer death, you only have to die; the last shall be first; it is better to be the servant than the master; you must be born again; and how come the rich man has such a long, hard slog if he's going to get to heaven?

You'd expect the long-awaited messiah to ride triumphantly into Jerusalem on a magnificent white stallion, at the head of a powerful army. But he trots in on a donkey, his way littered with palm fronds, surrounded by the common people of the city—some of whom may or may not call for his death in just a few days. Another surprise.

Oh, the Bible is all over surprise.

The best example of this is the surprise death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The sheer, unadulterated, holy, outrageous unexpectedness of it is—sadly—lost to us today. We're told the story as soon as we're able to (barely) understand it. But two thousand years ago, the apostles were absolutely gob-smacked (to use one of my favorite British colloquialisms). Stunned. Flabbergasted. Mary didn't recognize Jesus in the garden—she thought he was the pool boy! John and Peter raced each other to the empty tomb and babbled about what they saw—or didn't see—so much so that the accounts in Matthew, Luke, and John are all slightly different.

The biggest joke of all, of course, is on Satan. That would be Easter, the day the bad guys thought they'd won—but didn't. The ancients have a long tradition of understanding Easter Sunday in terms of humor.

Early church fathers such as Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, and even John of Chrysostom mused that God played a practical joke on the devil by raising Jesus from the grave. The Greek Orthodox Church even gave the joke the theological name of "risus paschalis"—Easter laughter (Segal 2001, 24).

In...