The CHA Weekend Edition Presents: Sarah Laughed: A Brief History of Faith and Humor (Reprise)

Introduction

Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac. It's the weekend edition. We are here, of course, for a daily show on the weekdays — six to eight minutes long, an on-this-day format — and then once again on the weekend I'll make a slightly longer show, a topic of my own choosing, or perhaps a suggestion from you to me.

Who is me? I'm Dan. I'm your host. Once upon a time I was a full-time professor, and I was plucked from the classroom by 1517 — 1517, of course, at 1517.org.

Hey, let's make this real short. We're going to transition into a show.

It is the dog days of summer. People are out and about. It's pastor vacation season. I know this because I get asked to preach more in this season, which I did last weekend and again this weekend. And I decided I was going to do a replay. I'd been teasing one for some time.

Last weekend we did a show on Maximus the Confessor. Hopefully you learned something. It was heady. It was medieval. It was Eastern. Not a lot of jokes, as one listener pointed out. So how to balance that out? Well — a show consisting entirely of knock-knock jokes relating to church history. Yes, and I did sit down and try and write a few. They didn't work.

No, we are going to replay a show from many years ago — four and a half years ago, actually. I did a show on the history of comedy and faith. I considered rewriting it or redoing it, because it really is a topic that fascinates me, and I thought maybe at some point we'll do something else with it. But this was four and a half years ago. Either you didn't hear it or you forgot it, and it's one of my favorite shows. Let's play it. We'll transition right into it.

I'll play the intro too, where I discuss kind of where we're going, but also the context for the show. And just — man, it was four and a half years ago. It was a tough time. There were a number of mass shootings. You had Uvalde down in Texas. There was a church shooting just down the road from where I live. COVID deaths hit a million. And our beloved Ron Hodel — my old pastor, and for many of us here at 1517, he was our pastor, he was our chaplain here — he had just died. And so I almost didn't do the show on comedy, but I decided it would actually be the right time to talk about faith and humor. It's got some of my favorite clips from comedians, a lighter show, lots of fun.

Let's go.

The original episode

Welcome to the Christian History Almanac, weekend edition. I am Dan van Voorhis, and this show comes to you five days a week in a five- to seven-minute format, and then once on the weekend for the weekend edition, brought to you by 1517 and produced by Christopher Gillespie.

So let me tell you about today's show and how everything has kind of come together for this episode.

I received an email last week sometime from Ryan. Now, Ryan — we had gone to school together, and we had met up at the Mockingbird Conference in New York, and I met him and his wife there. And he sent a mailbag question asking me about Christian comedy, kind of linked to the episodes on Larry Norman and Christian music — Christian music sort of being something I wasn't into, even though I was into music. And so Ryan wondered if there was a parallel here with Christian comedy.

I was going to make it the mailbag show, perhaps. I was a little reticent to go there for a number of reasons.

First of all, I have my own experience in comedy. If you don't know the story — I've told it elsewhere — as a kid I got into broadcast radio and then improvisational comedy, and I was with a troupe for two years as a teenager. I was like the kid in the group. And we performed — we performed for the O.J. Simpson jury that was sequestered. They drove us to the actual courthouse where it was all happening, and we performed right before Shirley Jones from the Partridge Family.

Anyway. So comedy is something that's always been really kind of dear to me. At the same time, I found it not good for me. I found it to be destructive in some ways. And kind of like I was a music snob, I was a comedy snob. So if someone wants to talk to me about Christian comedy or clean comedy — no thank you, that stuff's lame. Or so I thought. Or so I think. Or so — I don't know.

And so it's an interesting place to go, to look at the history of Christianity and comedy.

And then this week hit. It's already been a hard time for everybody — a million COVID deaths, Buffalo, and then the Laguna Woods shooting. And if you know where I am, I'm about four miles from the church where the shooting was, and was at church about six miles from where the shooting was. And so to have all of that happen — and then, if you heard on Monday, you know that my longtime pastor Ron Hodel died suddenly, unexpectedly, and has shocked the 1517 community. Not as someone shocked without hope, but shocked nonetheless. And all of this is happening, and then the tragedy in Uvalde with the fourth-grade classroom, and my son is in fourth grade.

And the last thing I wanted to do was yuck it up on the weekend edition talking about Christianity and comedy. But perhaps, from a historical and a Christian perspective — perhaps talking about comedy at a time like this isn't bad at all.

Today we're going to talk about Christianity and humor. I've got clips from Cheers, from Stephen Colbert, from John Mulaney. So let's — well, sit back and enjoy the show.

What is comedy?

So my oldest son, Court, came to me and told me that he was reading Dante for his history class — excerpts from Dante. And it was from the Divine Comedy, but he didn't think it was very funny at all. And while it's got some humor in there, it's not a comedy in the sort of ha-ha style of comedy.

And so this is where we're going to start. What is comedy? What do we mean by comedy?

Well, you know, it goes back to the Greek stage. We have comedy and we have tragedy, and both of them take place when there is some incongruity. Something's not right. And so Greek comedy is distinguished from drama in that the comics are going to try and work with that incongruity. They're going to work with stereotypes. They're going to show people often worse than they are, by playing with stereotypes and exposing foolishness.

Think about movies that center around somebody's death. Oftentimes these would be tragedies — we're dealing with the incongruity of death. And so you can certainly list a number of movies that are tragic and revolve around a funeral. But how many comedies do we have that also take place at funerals? Think of Four Weddings and a Funeral, or Death at a Funeral. In television shows, are there funerals where they're actually comic scenes? Funerals are used by comedians.

And so it's not always different subject matter. It's just: how do you deal with the problem? And going back to the Greeks, oftentimes it'll be dealt with with, you know, maybe some trickery or dealmaking, or something that highlights that something's not right here.

And it tended to be anti-establishment, anti-hierarchy. Comedy would punch up. Comedy would take aim at the big boss hogs and go after that.

And for this reason there were a number of Greeks who didn't like comedy. They thought, well, it's no good, because we're being made fun of. And so — well, Plato. I know he's an important philosopher, yada yada yada, but it's just like all these bad — they always come through Augustine too, but nevertheless.

So Plato does not like comedy, or has little use for comedy. First of all, it's not rational, right? We suspend our disbelief for the laugh, oftentimes. And so Plato says, well, that's just a bad idea — if you're not being rational, then you're not being human. Also, when you laugh it moves your emotions in a way that maybe you can't control. And so Plato says, I don't like this stuff. And then through him, Augustine says, I don't really like this stuff.

And so — not the early church; the early church didn't have time for plays, they were being persecuted — but the imperial church, post-325, it doesn't like theater. It doesn't like comedy.

Is comedy biblical?

And while comedy will develop in the church, I thought it'd be probably helpful here to look at the idea of whether or not comedy is biblical. Now, there's been a lot of work on this, so let me just point you to a couple of highlights of comedy in the Bible.

Probably the chief example from the Old Testament is the man whose name itself means laughter: Isaac, the patriarch. What happens when Sarah gives birth at her age? She's told that she's going to give birth. She laughs. That's impossible. There's incongruity, and that's not how things work. And so she names her child what she did when she first heard this amazing good news.

I think that's something to really hold on to. Not only is laughter a response, but it's a response to things being not as we think they are. And how much of the Christian message is that?

Of course, in the New Testament, Jesus himself is a master with irony and satire — calling the Pharisees foxes, and telling his audience that they strain at gnats but swallow camels. Jesus talks about whitewashed tombs and cups that are meticulously clean on the outside but filthy on the inside. This is all irony and wordplay to draw us to that incongruity.

Now, while the imperial church may have been a buzzkill, we do have the development of passion plays in the Middle Ages. A while back on the show we did my favorite church history movies, and I mentioned The Seventh Seal. A few of the main characters in The Seventh Seal are medieval actors. They go around as a troupe and they act, they perform plays — plays that people knew, plays that people were expecting. And oftentimes the passion plays, right? That was something that everyone had in common. Those were stories.

And this is true in Western culture up through the 19th century, even into the 20th, where, well, the Bible stories are the ones we know. And so if you take a story that people know and you play with it, well, there's some comedy.

There's also something to be said that there's something about the tension and the resolution, right? That there's a setup, and then that is broken — and oftentimes with a smile. And this reminded me of the Christian author Frederick Buechner, who said that the preacher speaks both the words of tragedy and comedy. This idea that the gospel itself is incongruity — it is foolishness, is what Paul says.

Now, the church's understanding is going to change a little bit, and partly because Plato and Augustine aren't the only folks who are going to dictate where the church goes theologically. And of course, as you have Augustine, you have Aquinas — and Aquinas isn't reading so much Plato as he is Aristotle. And Aristotle, when it comes to comedy, thinks his normal sort of golden mean shtick: so don't be too humorous, but don't be too dull. And Aquinas would pick up on that and suggest that the person who is never playful and never humorous is acting against reason, and thus sinning. Way to go, Aquinas. So not to be funny is a sin. Maybe not exactly — but you get the idea that the church would warm up to humor.

Let's take a break right now, and we're going to come back and I'm going to talk about some of the ideas behind what makes comedy funny in the church. We're going to talk about some theories and listen to some clips. We'll be right back.

Theories of humor

I want you to think about what makes you laugh. Movies, comedians, books, commercials. What things do you go back to over and over when you know you need a laugh? Do you have a movie? I go to episodes of Whose Line Is It Anyway? — that's kind of my depression buster sometimes, where I want to watch this. And so, as you think about the different kinds of humor: what characterizes what makes you laugh?

Well, last week for the mailbag we talked about the book of Revelation, and I mentioned that for one of my senior papers for my theology degree I wrote on the history of the interpretation of Revelation. And then, as I was working through this show, I remembered — oh, I wrote two senior papers. True story. One was for my theology degree, and one was for my senior capstone course with Dr. Susan Bachman. It was a great class, and it was on the theory of humor. And so we were looking at theories of humor and Christianity, and it all kind of came back to me, and I was reminded of some of these theories.

So see if this rings true to you — why we laugh at what we laugh at.

Superiority. One of the oldest philosophies, going back to people like Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes, is the idea that there is a superiority in comedy — that we are reacting to knowing something that someone else doesn't, if that makes sense. So that could be an inside joke. It could be an inside joke that's pretty broad, but enough to exclude just a little bit. It's taking something you know, and it's playing with it. Thomas Hobbes referred to this as a sudden burst of glory — that all of a sudden you get it, right? And you're in on it, and that makes you laugh.

And one of my favorite examples of this kind of humor that intersects with the church goes back to an early scene in the show Cheers — one of my favorite shows. Woody, played by Woody Harrelson, has gotten married, and he learned something about his new wife. So let's listen here.

[Clip — Cheers]

WOODY: What if we had children? We'd have half-breeds. FRASIER: Woody, very often these problems can be resolved by a group session. WOODY: Oh, no, I don't think so, Dr. Crane. The sight of Kelly with another man would drive me crazy. SAM: Oh, no — Frasier's talking about counseling, Woody. You are, aren't you? FRASIER: Counseling, yes. See? Perhaps Lilith and I could provide some help. WOODY: That's nice, Dr. Crane. I'll ask Kelly. She's not too busy begging at airports or whatever those people do. KELLY: Hi, everyone. WOODY: Kelly, I admire you for coming. KELLY: I believe a marriage is worth saving. WOODY: Well, that's not all she believes. Ask her why she believes the Book of Concord and the Scriptures are on the same level. Go ahead — ask her. KELLY: Because they're not. WOODY: That's why the sacraments are considered vehicles of grace. Go ahead, I dare you. KELLY: They're symbolic memorials. WOODY: Heretics. KELLY: You too.

So if you have spent time in the — that was Lutheran Church in America, now ELCA — or the LCMS, Lutheran Church of Missouri Synod, that is hilarious. And it was on NBC in primetime. They're making jokes about sort of — I don't want to say obscure Lutheran distinctions, but compared to, you know, I mean —

But that's an example of superiority, right? We're making a joke because we're insiders.

I want you to listen to John Mulaney. John Mulaney, who doesn't consider himself a Catholic anymore but grew up a Catholic, has got kind of the same kind of insider joke here in a bit of his standup.

[Clip — John Mulaney]

For those of you that aren't Catholic — I don't mean to exclude you, even though we love to exclude you, but... There's a part in church where the priest says, "Peace be with you," and for many, many years we all said, "And also with you." But they changed it to "And with your spirit," because that's what needed revamping in the Catholic Church. That was the squeaky wheel that needed the grease.

The Catholic Church is one of these common targets. Now, there are reasons for that culturally, and pointing out some bad things in the Catholic Church — just as there are in other churches. But at the same time there's such a shared culture, in ways. And some churches have a shared culture and some don't — they all have shared cultures, but some emphasize those things more than others.

And so oftentimes, like that Lutheran joke, or Catholic jokes from John Mulaney, who is a Catholic, or from Jim Gaffigan, who is another comedian who is a Catholic and does a number of sort of religious comedy bits. Here's a short one.

[Clip — Jim Gaffigan]

Don't worry, you know God has a sense of humor. He appeared as a burning bush. A burning bush? Can you imagine if you were the first person Moses told about that? "Yeah, God just talked to me as a burning bush." "Sure he did. Moses, we think maybe you've been burning some bush."

All right, that is all for me. Thank you very much, you guys.

So I've spent days now on YouTube looking up Christian comedians — and that's where, you know, you get Gaffigan and you get people doing their bits on the church. And I looked at a lot of Christian comedians, which is kind of an interesting — you know, these guys. Jim Gaffigan's a Christian. Norm Macdonald, rest in peace, was a Christian. There's Stephen Colbert — you're going to hear in a bit, certainly.

But oftentimes Christians are doing this kind of superiority humor, inside-joke humor. And so oftentimes what I found with these clean comedians is they belong to a certain kind of Baptist, non-denominational world that's just not my world. And so the jokes are sometimes kind of lost on me. Or they're jokes about, once again, kind of cultural things that I might not get — in the same way that someone might have heard that first clip from Cheers and thought, "I don't get it. What, they're two Lutherans? They're not Lutherans."

And so I don't have a big sort of epiphany on Christian comedians or clean comedians. Oftentimes, if it says "clean" first, then I know that's what they're maybe more concerned with — being clean rather than being comedians. Although I don't want to speak ill; of course there are people who would go by clean comedians and are very funny. Once again, this is a subjective thing that we're talking about.

My fear with superiority humor is that sometimes it can punch down. And we know that one of the great things about comedy is that it punches up. It looks at injustices. It looks at the way things are and says, this isn't how it ought to be. And it makes fun of. Making fun of others — it's why Mulaney's interesting, because he's not a Catholic anymore, but at the same time he says, "Don't make fun of my mom's church. Don't be Bill Maher. Don't be rude about it."

Relief and play. A couple of other theories when it comes to what makes us laugh. Well, another theory — superiority is one — is the theory of relief and play. This is slapstick humor. It was Lord Shaftesbury; it was very common to write on sort of theories of humor in the 17th and 18th and 19th centuries. And Shaftesbury believed that laughter actually released, like, spirits that are in our nerves — something's happening, right? They don't do x-rays, but something's happening with our body and our spirit. There's a release of something. Freud suggested that it was our surplus energy that left our body when we laughed.

Something about relief and play — there's a resolution. Think of Sudoku and Wordle, right? Not comedies, but two things that have been very, very popular in the past couple of years. And there is a relief in playing these games. It was shown to me that the heart of these games can be expressed in a question mark becoming an exclamation point. You start out puzzled, and then it makes sense. And that's sometimes what good comedy can do.

It also signals playfulness. We're signaling to others: hey, we're not taking ourselves too seriously. Why do you think I do the dumb nicknames at the end of every show? It's the same reason I did a question of the day when I was teaching in person. The idea being that I want to foster some playfulness, because as an academic and as a Christian, sometimes we're not seen as the most humorous people. It's why I never like it when people criticize a pastor's sermon for being humorous. Humor is doing something here. It's signaling something. It's saying, don't be too serious. It's giving us a release.

Incongruity. And then finally, I want to go to what I think kind of wraps this up for the Christian, and I've hinted on it a little bit. This is the third theory. So we have superiority, we have relief and play, and then we have the idea of incongruity — a word I've already mentioned.

And here I come to Søren Kierkegaard, who thought that the person with a religious view of life, in his words — so a Christian, sort of looking at the gospel and the complexity of everything — is likely to cultivate humor. Because as Kierkegaard says, Christianity is the most humorous view of life in world history.

Christianity is the most humorous view of life in world history.

Think about it. The expectation. The imperfections. Think about everything that happens, and then God becomes one of the creation, and then that God dies. But what happens three days later? And what does that mean for us? There's incongruity, and we're looking at that incongruity. We're hearing the words of tragedy and comedy from our pastor and our Bibles, from the Holy Spirit.

And in this sense, Christianity is the most humorous view of life in world history. "Everything is going to be okay" is a humorous statement, because it recognizes that it doesn't look like that. But I promise — in this week, in this just seemingly unending two years of just craziness — having a faith that is the most humorous view of life, that allows us to laugh.

I want to end here with a clip from Stephen Colbert, who you might know is a practicing Catholic, very devout, and talks about it a lot. And on his show recently he had on the pop star called Dua Lipa, who I have heard of but know nothing about. And she has a podcast now, and Colbert asked her if she wanted to interview him. And so she asks about his faith and being a comedian. Let's listen in.

[Clip — Stephen Colbert and Dua Lipa]

DUA LIPA: So I think something that your viewers really connect with in your comedy and your hosting skills, especially in the past few years, is how open and honest and authentic you are about the role your faith plays in your life. COLBERT: Oh, that's interesting. DUA LIPA: And I was wondering — does your faith and your comedy ever overlap? And does one ever win out? COLBERT: I think ultimately, us all being mortal, in the end... But I certainly hope when I get to heaven, Jesus has a sense of humor.

But I will say this. I will say this. Someone was asking me earlier about what I — this relates to faith, because my faith is involved with — I'm a Christian and a Catholic, and that's always connected to the idea of love and sacrifice being somehow related, and giving yourself to other people, and that death is not defeat. You can see where I'm getting at there.

Someone was asking me earlier, what movie did I really enjoy this year? And I said, well, I really liked Belfast, which is Kenneth Branagh's story of his childhood. And one of the reasons I love it is that I'm Irish and Irish-American, and it's such an Irish movie. And I think this is also a Catholic thing, because it's funny and it's sad, and it's funny about being sad. In the same way, that sadness is like a little bit of an emotional death — but not a defeat, if you can find a way to laugh about it. Because that laughter keeps you from having fear of it. And fear is the thing that keeps you from turning to evil devices to save you from the sadness.

As Robert Hayden said, "We must not be frightened nor cajoled into accepting evil as deliverance from evil. We must go on struggling to be human, though monsters of abstraction police and threaten us."

So if there's some relationship between my faith and my comedy, it's that no matter what happens, you are never defeated. You must understand and see this in the light of eternity, and find some way to love and laugh with each other.

So — the new setup I have here where I record: I have my — well, I don't need to go into exactly how the board and the computer and how everything works. But I now listen to these clips. I put them in while I'm recording and listen to them in real time while I'm doing the show. So I just listened to that clip again with you. And boy, did I need that again.

I think we need good news, and the ultimate good news is the good news of Jesus — that everything is going to be okay. And this is deeply, deeply humorous in a way that's not punching down, but rather is giving hope to everyone. And especially in a time like these.

So once again, thank you for listening. Thanks for all your kind emails about the hymn shows and sending me your favorite hymns. I really love that personal interaction that I'm getting. I'm trying to respond to as many as I can. I'm working my way — so be patient with me, but I'm getting back to people as fast as I can. You can email me at danv@1517.org.

This is a good time now to remind you again that Jesus is good news, and on account of that, everything is going to be okay.
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GTI Zoom Info Meeting on August 11th at 7 pm Eastern/4 pm Pacific: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89787313197

Show Notes:

What’s New from 1517:

The CHA Weekend Edition Presents: Sarah Laughed: A Brief History of Faith and Humor (Reprise)

Introduction

The original episode

What is comedy?

Is comedy biblical?

Theories of humor

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Introduction

The original episode

What is comedy?

Is comedy biblical?

Theories of humor

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