The Gentle Slope of Heedless Humor

Four People Laughing by Bartolomeo Veneto (1502-1555)

The great Church Father Basil of Caesarea (330-379 A.D.), when citing Ephesians 5:4 on the nature of humor said,
 
“The Christian…ought not to indulge in jesting [and] he ought not to laugh nor even to suffer laugh makers. He must not talk idly, saying things which are of no service to the hearers.”[1]
 
In short, for Basil, humor was no laughing matter.  Now we recognize that this is excessive and somewhat priggish on the surface, but below in the meat of thought lies a truth: laughter has soul shaping power.  But seldom do we ever think about this – even we Christians.  We enlightened moderns are living in an age of sitcoms, stand-up comedians, and infinite memes, which wash over us with rivers of puns, wit, and knee slapping entertainment.  But even here there lies both great joy and great danger.  Even here, in our humor and laughter, we must become reflective and ask if we have allowed the law of Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5) to reign. 
 
Humor can be a Balm and Bane to Life
Humor and laughter are sweet balms of life.  They make life bearable and beautiful by breaking down barriers and helping us forget about the business and seriousness of reality.  All the incongruities (the absurdities, oddities, and “out-of-placeness”) have a humbling effect upon us as creatures.[2]  Through humor we tend to make fun of ourselves and our place in the world.  Therefore, humor has a humbling aspect to it at times because we realize just how absurd and weird we can be.  As one author said, “[Humour] involves some confession of human weakness”[3] and is “the chief antidote to pride; and has been, ever since the time of the Book of Proverbs, the hammer of fools.”[4] The great English philosopher and essayist G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) said it this way,
 
“If you really ask yourself why we laugh at a man sitting down suddenly in the street you will discover that the reason is not only recondite, but ultimately religious. All the jokes about men sitting down on their hats are really theological jokes; they are concerned with the Dual Nature of Man. They refer to the primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy.”[5]
 
There is much to unpack here but we will point to only one minor aspect of what Chesterton is getting at.  The fact is humor is deeper than we think.  Laughter reveals more than we think.  They reveal something about us as a people.  Why we laugh at what we laugh says something about how we think the world is and who and what humans are, and how it all should be.  This is centrally because we were made to be social creatures who live a certain way in the world and seek joy in the good.  What grounds all of this is the comforting and empowering knowledge that we serve a Creator King who laughs and has joy (Psalm 2:1-12, Zephaniah 3:17) and in fact has made us to be people who can laugh, and play, and express such joy through lighthearted interactions (Ecclesiastes 3:4; Job 8:21; Proverbs 15:13, 17:22; Psalm 126:2-3; Luke 6:21).       
 
But with everything, sin and darkness become the kill-alls and makers of infinite devaluation.  This is where a demon can give us insight. 
 
C.S. Lewis in all his piercing correctness speaks straight to the quick of the power and influence of humor in The Screwtape Letters.  In the section below the senior demon Screwtape informs his underling Wormwood of the most effective ways of utilizing humor and laughter to slowly destroy purity and sacredness in the life of his patient Christian believer.  Before this conversation you will remember our previous post in the Gentle Slopes Series which dealt with friendships.  Here the Christian patient has not only begun to hang out with two carousing skeptical unbelievers but has been introduced to another broader group of friends, all of them obsessed with revelry, novelties, and joking.  Screwtape decides to advice Wormwood on his next steps with his patient,
 
My Dear Wormwood,
 
Everything is clearly going very well. I am specially glad to hear that the two new friends [of your Christian patient] have now made him acquainted with their whole set. All these, as I find from the record office, are thoroughly reliable people; steady, consistent scoffers and worldlings who without any spectacular crimes are progressing quietly and comfortable towards our Father's house. You speak of their being great laughers…. [This] point is worth some attention.
 
I divide the causes of human laughter into Joy, Fun, the Joke Proper, and Flippancy. You will see the first among friends and lovers reunited on the eve of a holiday. Among adults some pretext in the way of Jokes is usually provided….  Fun is closely related to Joy-a sort of emotional froth arising from the play instinct…. 
 
[But the] real use of Jokes or Humour is in quite a different direction….  Humour is for [some] the all-consoling and (mark this) the all-excusing, grace of life. Hence it is invaluable as a means of destroying shame…. Mere cowardice is shameful; cowardice boasted of with humorous exaggerations and grotesque gestures can be passed off as funny. Cruelty is shameful-unless the cruel man can represent it as a practical joke. A thousand bawdy, or even blasphemous, jokes do not help towards a man's damnation so much as his discovery that almost anything he wants to do can be done, not only without the disapproval but with the admiration of his fellows, if only it can get itself treated as a Joke. And this temptation can be almost entirely hidden from your patient [the Christian]….  Any suggestion that there might be too much of it can be represented to him as "Puritanical" or as betraying a "lack of humour".
 
But flippancy is the best of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny….  If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armour-plating against the Enemy [God] that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter. It is a thousand miles away from joy [and] it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practice it.[6]
 
In this passage Lewis is soberly reminding us of how the Adversary of our souls uses humor to slowly deaden our souls to any sense of shame or sacredness. 
 
Laughter Often Carries an Agenda
One point worth noting that Lewis shows is that behind laughter there often lies an agenda.  We do not often think of this when we enjoy good banter.  But this is true.  That agenda can be merely to bring joy into others’ lives – which is a noble activity within itself.  But often it can be pregnant with ulterior motives: such as to generate self-aggrandizement or attention-seeking or to soften people’s acceptability of particular behaviors, beliefs, or values.  Here, on this last point specifically, lies the far more subtle yet sinister element of humor. 
 
Humor can shape our souls.  It can also shape culture.  G.K. Chesterton poignantly said back in the twilight of Victorian England,
 
“If you really want to know what is going to happen to the future of our democracy, do not read the modern sociological prophecies, do not read even [utopian novels]…. Read the [comic pages] as if they were the dark tablets graven with the oracles of the gods. For…they contain some hint of the actual habits and manifest desires of the…people. If we are really to find out what the democracy will ultimately do with itself, we shall surely find it, not in the literature which studies the people, but in the literature which the people studies.”[7]
 
If you want to shape people’s souls, and even guide the culture of a people, then shape what they laugh about.  Shape the entertain they consume.  In time what they consume will consume them.  They will become what they cajole and joke about.  Why?  Because laughter has the inherent capacity to bypass the mind and go straight to the emotional and appetite driven parts of our nature.  These areas of our souls are the most malleable and guiding aspects of our being.[8]   If you want people to be willing to start accepting a particular behavior, to normalize it, then your best methodology is to soften it as playful, innocent, and lighthearted. 
 
I think we can say with some accuracy we can see this in our own lives and culture.  Before any particular behavior or preference or lifestyle is accepted in our society it is always “normalized” on our televisions and the silver screen.  Make it look “normal” or friendly or innocent within the context of story making and laughter and you have all but won over the audience.  If you do not think this is the case, then take a moment for some personal inventory.  Ask yourself: How much have you changed in the past 10 years in your views of religion, morality, modesty, gender identities and roles, language use, sexual preferences, politics, and justice?   Have you come to accept, loosen up on, or shrug off certain ideas within these areas?  Now ask yourself, how have you come to change so?  Did you sit down and do a lot of arm-chair philosophizing and dialoging?  Did you read a ton of philosophical, theological, political, sociological, and psychological manuals, treatises, and books?  For most, the answers would be no. 
 
While we can change our views on life based on mere experiences, education, and political shifts, these are not the central methods of how we change.  Change happens gradually and centrally through the relationships we share and the entertainment we consume.  It is inescapable and undeniable.  This past year alone we Americas spent a whopping $30.03 billion on entertainment[9] and spent an average over 7.5 hours a day using media.[10]  On top of this the U.S. media and entertainment industry has affirmed that its budget is going to exceed $825 billion by 2023.[11]  Interesting enough, connecting to the main point of this post and Chesterton’s words, the most popularly consumed genre by us is comedy.[12]
 
It is a truism: the things we consume in turn consume us.
 
The movies, TV shows, video-games, and music of our age are all our modern high priests and philosophers slowly teaching us to accept the ways of the idols of our age.  Laughter has always, but especially now in our age, possessed the power of democratizing or “leveling” values, behaviors, and beliefs.  It has the capacity to make everything a desacralized joke or meme or caricature.  As a result, slowly, unknowingly, unthoughtfully, the concepts and virtues of shame, respect, honor, dignity, faith, beauty, and charity are chipped down and become lost in a sea of chuckles and shrugs.  This especially happens with religion and faith. 
 
The Power of Laughter to Desacralize
Some of the most effective uses of laughter are those about spiritual things.  Do not misunderstand nor assume that we cannot be joyous nor joking with our Faith.  I believe there is a healthy, respectful form of this.  But go deeper here.  Think for a minute.  There is truth in this worth mining.  How far do we go with this? 
 
Behind kiddish jests or irreverent puns about God and His Son in particular there can lie an inheritance of irreverence.  Slowly the laughs can chip away at the sacredness and transcendence of Faith claims, bringing them low and close to the mud.  It is not hard to see the logical jump that can and often happens when we move from laughing about Christ in a joke to inadvertently casualizing Christ in life.  When this happens, we have entered a slippery slope of shifting from disciples worshiping at His feet to mocking bystanders who see Him as part of the regular landscape of life.     
 
This is all subtle.  There is deception here.  Awaken yourself to this. 
 
Joy and laughter are a medicine (Proverbs 17:22) but they can also become a hallucinogenic to our souls.  They have within them the capacity to degenerate into flippancy and irreverence.  This is Lewis’ warning from the lips of a devil.
 
This may sound prudish.  But here again is Lewis is spot on.  The simplest way to never have to question ones consumption of entertainment or what one laughs is to judge every judgement or correction as “Puritanical.”  “Well that may be offensive to you, but it isn’t to me” is a common phrase at this point.  Or the mantras of “spiritual maturity” or “that’s the way of the world” or “freedom in Christ” are conjured to expunge any sense of propriety or chastity in the realm of entertainment and laughter.  I will not fight this game.  Neither will Lewis.  But be aware that you are dancing in the realm of the Adversary.  He is elated that you are inundated and do not care.  He is ecstatic to your gilded over indifference. 
 
There is no lie here.  It is tricky to locate what are the acceptable or unacceptable levels of laughter and humor.  When does joy devolve into vulgarity?  This is not easy to gage and if you are looking for a list of movies, books, and TV shows that are acceptable or not then you are missing the point of the post.  We moderns love our check off lists of does and don’ts.  But the authentic spiritual life doesn’t work like that.  The key is not in a list but a consistent self-examination by the power of the Holy Spirit in ever facet of our lives, even the places we least expect or least want Him to check.  
 
Are you doing this with what you consume with entertainment?  Are you considering how Christ addresses that which you laugh at?  If there is no reflection at all, then you may be in the realm of devils.  If you are reflecting, then allow the Holy Spirit to continue to speak and guide you into His ways. 
 
3 But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people. 4 Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking, which are out of place, but rather thanksgiving.
Ephesians 5:3-4

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[1] Saint Basil of Caesarea, “On the Perfection of the Life of Solitaries” from Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 8. Edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1895) Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight. http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3202022.htm
[2] If you want a more technical or philosophical understanding of the nature of “humor” then consider: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/humor/ and https://iep.utm.edu/humor/
[3] G.K. Chesterton, “Humour” (1938) found at https://nonsenselit.com/g-k-chesterton-humour-1938/.  Original source is Chesterton, G.K. The Spice of Life and Other Essays, Edited by Dorothy Collins (Beaconsfield: Darwen Finlayson, 1964)
[4] Chesterton, et.al.
[5] G.K. Chesterton, “Cockneys and Their Jokes” in All Things Considered (1908), accessed from https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/All_Things_Considered/Cockneys_and_Their_Jokes
[6] C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters ibid, pg. 215-217
[7] G.K. Chesterton, “Cockneys and Their Jokes” in All Things Considered (1908), accessed from https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/All_Things_Considered/Cockneys_and_Their_Jokes
[8] http://www.uky.edu/~jjord0/ArisIII.htm#:~:text=Appetitive%20soul%20%E2%80%93%20This%20is%20the,itself%20a%20faculty%20of%20thought, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/medieval-emotions/#:~:text=He%20regarded%20the%20emotions%20as,of%20knowledge%20and%20rational%20will,
[9] https://www.statista.com/statistics/188944/us-consumer-spendings-on-home-entertainment-since-1999/
[10] https://www.statista.com/topics/1536/media-use/
[11] https://www.selectusa.gov/media-entertainment-industry-united-states
[12] https://www.statista.com/statistics/254115/favorite-movie-genres-in-the-us/, https://www.marketingcharts.com/television/tv-audiences-and-consumption-110704, https://morningconsult.com/2018/11/27/reality-is-americas-least-favorite-tv-genre-yet-people-are-still-watching/, https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2007/07/25/what-they-watch-online/