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A God who laughs

By Craig Bird

Jesus wept. We know that because the Bible tells us so. But did he laugh?

            God thunders, often. We know that. But does God have a sense of humor?

            God celebrated creation with a booming "That’s good!" But did the creation God called “good” include belly laughs and puns? Satire and irony? What about giggles and smiles? Or were those very human behaviors part of the legacy of that fruit-peddling serpent in the Garden?

            You might be surprised at what a low opinion of humor Christians have had over the years. Or maybe not.

            As early as the 11th century, the influential church leader John of Chrysostom insisted Jesus never laughed. Through the centuries, artists overwhelmingly have followed the saint’s argument. How many paintings have you seen where the Son of God grins from ear to ear?

            Can those who would be Christlike laugh and sin not?

            The Second Council of Constance in 1418 had a definite opinion: literally "Hell, no!" That medieval Christian council assigned to hell any minister or monk who spoke "jocular words such as provoke laughter." Well, actually, the council said, "Let him be anathema," which is a firmly non-jocular way of saying the same thing.

             No doubt, the stereotype of Christians as uptight and humorless is well earned.

But wait a minute! Rewind. Is there another side to this story? The Bible says so.

A divine sense of humor

Puns may be the lowest form of humor, but the pages of God’s written portrait, the Bible, are full of them. Unfortunately most don’t survive translation. But the play on words in Genesis between "man" (ish) and "woman" (ishsha) comes through loud and clear even in English.

            After telling the aged Abraham and Sarah they will give birth to a son in the geriatric ward, God adds a little twist to the story. That little surprise package, at whom Abraham and Sarah snickered in disbelief, will be named “Isaac” -- in Hebrew, “laughter.”

            "There is a real theological aspect here," says Mark Biddle, a professor at Baptist Theological Seminary in Richmond, Va. "Since we are created in the image of God and we have an innate sense of humor, could that mean God has a sense of humor too?”

Biddle cites many scriptures he thinks are funny. "Some are pretty obvious, but many are subtle and you need to tease out the Hebrew or Greek a bit," he explains.

            Prime example: Genesis traditionally recounts that Rebekah "dismounted from her camel" after seeing Isaac "meditating in the field." But, Biddle says, a strong case can be made that she "fell off her camel" when she saw Isaac "relieving himself." (Genesis 24:63-67)

            Then there is King Saul letting the rustic David pay his wedding dowry in Philistine foreskins (1 Samuel 18: 22-25). And later Michal, the wife thus purchased, rants satirically when her husband dances before the Lord with such vigor everyone visualizes that he isn’t wearing underwear (2 Samuel 6:20).

Et cetera. Et cetera.

Jesus obviously got the joke. He used humor frequently in his teaching.

            Jesus used "the weapon of wit and the saber of satire" in his running verbal battles with the religious power structure, according to Randall O’Brien of Baylor University, author of I Feel Better All Over Than I Do Any Place Else.

            "Humor was often the howitzer he used to shell the veneer of piety surrounding ‘Fortress Pharisee,’" he notes. "Who couldn’t help but laugh when Jesus exposed the arrogance of blindness of the religious leaders, calling them ‘blind guides,’ straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel…cleaning the outside of the cup but leaving the inside filthy…and like tombs, whitewashed on the outside but rotting on the inside?"

            Even the eminent theologian Garrision Keillor of “Prairie Home Companion” fame insists, "Christ gives his followers a satiric sense of the world." The upended values of the parables -- with the last becoming first -- are proof, Keillor says.

Dour Christians

But that’s not the picture of Jesus that most often comes to mind. As Elton Trueblood reminded Christians so forcefully in his 1964 classic work The Humor of Christ, we resist acknowledging that Jesus did such things.

Trueblood’s own journey to a laughing Jesus began years before. During family devotions, the famed Quaker theologian was "reading from the seventh chapter of Matthew, feeling very serious," when his four-year-old son began to laugh. "He saw how preposterous it would be for a man to be so deeply concerned about a speck in another person’s eye that he was unconscious of the fact his own eye had a beam in it."

            His son’s laughter, Trueblood admits, "was a rebuke to his parents for their failure to respond to humor in an unexpected place."

"Christians have been stereotyped as anti-fun, anti-laughter types who think it’s spiritual to look like you’ve been sucking a dill pickle all day," says Gary Dyer, pastor of First Baptist Church of Midland, Texas. "And we probably brought it on ourselves. Laugh and the world laughs with you. Scowl and someone will ask, ‘Are you a Baptist?’”

            Comedian and gospel singer Mark Lowry celebrates the belief that God loves it when we laugh. "What healthy father doesn’t love to hear his children laugh?" he asks.

Truth wrapped in humor

Christians have had their heroes of laughter. Two of the most popular in the last century were Jerry Clower and Grady Nutt, both products of Deep South Christianity.

            Clower, "The Mouth of Mississippi," didn’t equivocate. "There is only one place where there is no laughter," he was fond of saying, "and that’s hell."

            Nutt, a regular on the television hit Hee Haw billed as the Prime Minister of Humor, insisted that a humorless God “wouldn’t have created ostriches -- or Baptists." He said that the words of a plaque he found at a gift shop in Gatlinburg, Tenn., were “as true as any verse in the Bible: ‘Laughter is the hand of God on the shoulders of a weary world.’”

Clower and Nutt were arguably two of the most influential Christian comedians -- and the most commercially successful -- in recent history. Nutt died in a 1982 plane crash and Clower died of natural causes in 1998.

            One of those comedians who has followed in their professional footsteps is Dennis Swanberg, host of Swan’s Place, televised nationwide to 27 million homes over the Odyssey Channel. Like Clower and Nutt, Swanberg is willing to poke righteous fun at the often stodgy structures of Christianity. And while on staff at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Texas, he says, his primary task was "to get all these preacher boys to lighten up."

            Nick Foster, a humorist and pastor, was influenced by both Clower and Nutt. "My grandfather used to play his Jerry Clower records for me over and over and tell the stories himself," says Foster of Montevallo, Ala. "Then when I was a student at Samford University in the mid-70s, Grady Nutt was our spiritual emphasis speaker."

            The truth-wrapped-in-humor approach resonated with Foster when he launched his own career as a humorist. Now in his sixth year as a pastor, Foster uses humor extensively in his preaching.

"Humor is disarming," he explains. "It makes us deal with issues we wouldn’t face otherwise. Humor is more than a joke at the end of a sermon. It does not even necessarily produce laughter and it might even produce tears. A lot of the Bible is narrative, and lots of the narrative is funny. It makes the characters human. And if Peter and Paul are not human, then they don’t have anything to teach us."

            Joan Wolf Prefontaine says a willingness to appear foolish for the sake of the gospel is vital to real Christianity. Prefontaine, whose master’s thesis was on the image of the fool in Western art, says the church’s "need to be taken seriously" often prevents believers from taking seriously the call to be "fools for Christ."

            Living out such a calling involves much more than exercising one’s "dormant foolish faculties," she explains. "Being a fool for Christ means giving up arrogance, self-pity, fear, despair, envy and vindictiveness. It means being able to laugh at our own foibles, longings and pretensions, transforming the pain involved in ordinary life into a more joyous state."

Healing laughter

The power of God to restore joy to hurting souls is a common theme among Christian humorists today, many of whom have known tragedy firsthand.

            Comedienne Chonda Pierce, author of It’s Always Darkest Before the Fun Comes, lost two sisters in childhood -- one to cancer and another in a car wreck. Later her minister father walked away from his marriage and his family. Yet her favorite theme is "casting all your cares on Christ."

            Barbara Johnson, author of So Stick a Geranium in Your Hat and Be Happy, lost one son in Vietnam and another in an Alaskan traffic accident. A third son was estranged from his parents for 10 years while he pursued a homosexual lifestyle. Her husband nearly died in another car accident and spent years paralyzed.

            Anyone who walks by Johnson’s sales table at conferences will encounter a 200-pound pile of shimmering, blue glass stones, gifts to anyone who walks by as a to look for joyful moments in life.

            Perhaps the most single-minded effort to call Christians to their rightful life of joy is Cal Samra. He was a Michigan newspaper reporter whose constant writing on "the bad things in life" contributed to his physical and emotional breakdown.

            Banished to the warmer climate of Arizona, he wound up in several prayer groups with members of diverse Christian denominations. "It made a big difference when I really faced Jesus as the Joyful Christ," he explains. It also motivated him to found the Fellowship of Merry Christians in 1986 and launch The Joyful Noiseletter.

            His task is directed inward to the church, using humor as a bridge building/peacemaking tool to help the church work toward the unity commanded by Christ.

            April is the big month on Samra’s calendar. Latching onto April Fool’s Day, the Fellowship celebrates Holy Humor month. They encourage churches to restore the practice of the early church of celebrating Easter Monday, the day after Easter, and Bright Sunday, the next Sunday. Among the recommendations: play practical jokes on the pastor.

            Early church fathers such as Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa and even John of Chrysostom -- the one who said Jesus never laughed -- mused that God played a practical joke on the devil by raising Jesus from the grave. They even gave the joke the theological name of "risus paschalis" -- the Easter laugh.

            Samra approvingly quotes St. Francis of Assisi: "Leave sadness to the devil. The devil has reason to be sad."

            Take that, Second Council of Constance.

- Craig Bird, a free-lance writer in Asheville, N.C., bought a copy of Elton Trueblood’s The Humor of Christ 30 years ago. (c_mbird@hotmail.com)

Christian humor is ‘out there’ … on the Web

By Craig Bird

"Some of the smartest and funniest people on the Web are Jesus freaks," says Greg Hartman, the Christian humor guide for about.com.

            The Internet has been a boon for Christian satirists. There’s no shortage of aggressive, hard-edged humorists who are willing to offend in their attempt to get the Body of Christ to laugh at itself.

            "Sometimes I don’t agree with some of the language or some of their stories,” Hartman says, “but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate their intent or feel they should go away. Of course, they cross the line sometimes. But when you are testing the limits, sometimes you are going to cross the line."

            Hartman works for Focus on the Family and runs an e-mail humor service called "Fishers of Grin." He takes heat sometimes for his humor selections for the conservative Focus. He got ripped pretty good for a positive interview of Robert Darden, editor of The Door.

            The Door, formerly The Wittenberg Door, is probably the world record-holder for getting irate mail from Christians. The matriarch of over-the-top evangelical humor, The Door started as a magazine several decades ago and has since added a Web site.

"We have a whole network of seminary librarians who hand out The Door like its Playboy -- under the counter, plain brown wrapper," says Darden. "And we get sued a lot" -- especially by the televangelists the magazine pursues and skewers so relentlessly.

Exhibit A: The Door provides video clips of televangelists for an ongoing feature on the Comedy Central cable channel, including a clip of the wife of evangelist Benny Hinn telling an audience they needed a “Holy Ghost enema.”

            Darden, Door editor since 1987, is excited about the emergence of more Christian humor with an edge. "Most people who are attracted to our brand of humor feel they are out there by themselves. To find others like them is an encouragement."

Darden lives a double life as an English professor at Baylor University (don’t tell anyone). He also has written almost 30 books, including Mad Man in Waco, considered the definitive work on David Koresh and the Branch Davidians.

            “Before Franklin Graham was famous, a publisher wanted me to write a biography of him. But when [Graham] found out I was from The Door, he wouldn’t have anything to do with me. He told me, ‘These televangelists you’re investigating -- Tilton, Swaggart, Bakker -- God has anointed them. You do not have permission from God to touch God’s anointed.’”

            Darden disagrees. Honest critique is no threat to genuine faith, he says. "If all you have is a shallow faith based on personalities, it never was very good faith at all. The people who are the greatest Christians I know are people who have doubted.”

            Also dishing it out on the Web is Ship of Fools, a former British print magazine resurrected as a webzine. SOF labels itself "The Magazine of Christian Unrest" and serves up articles like "Putting the Fun Back Into Fundamentalism."

Editor Simon Jenkins says Ship of Fools is registered as a vessel of orthodox Christianity "but on a buccaneering voyage.”

"We’re trying to make sense of the faith which we love but which we also question. That critical look is both positive and negative-- the positive affirming what is true and good Christian belief and experience; the negative attacking false religion which masquerades as the gospel."

            The Web site also offers a discussion board, Shiptalk, which has become a popular port of call for humor fans. "We thought we were launching an Internet magazine but we wound up creating a community," Simon reports.

            Other Ship features:

-- “Loose Canons” chronicles the crazy side of church history.

-- “Signs and Blunders" preserves those Freudian moments when things go badly in church.

-- "Gadgets for God" is all stuff verified as actually for sale somewhere. Simon’s favorite items, he says, are the WWJD boxer shorts, the ones with the false fly, "which means if a Christian teenager is tempted beyond endurance, access is denied in any case."

Web sites rated:

www.Christianhumor.about.com

www.ship-of-fools.com

www.joyfulnoiseletter.com (G) The Fellowship of Merry Christians.

www.pastornet.net.au/jmm/ahmr/ahmr (G) From Australia, John Mark Ministries

www.wordcentered.com/glad (G) Serving the "bread of life in an entertaining way that is both funny to you and pleasing to God."
www.dennisswanberg.com (G)

www.marklowry.com (G) Don’t drink milk while viewing this site -- unless you want to laugh it out your nose.

www.dougmarlette.com/WillBDunn (PG) Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist offers e-mail delivery of the misadventures of Rev. Will B. Dunn.
www.montrosebaptist.org/humor (PG) "Fact is, most Christians do have a sense of humor. Unfortunately there are some hard-core misrealites in charge who equate a smile and a giggle with sin."
www.christianityastray.com (PG) On-line magazine of Christian satire and parody. "Whimsically contending for the faith now indigestible to the Saints."
www.thedoormagazine.com (PG-13) Venerated or berated, depending on your point of view. "Pretty much the world’s only religious satire magazine."
www.christianrecovery.com/humor (PG-13) "Affordable Outpatient Treatment for the Humor Impaired.”

www.dogchurch.org (PG-13) Virtual Church of the Blind Chihuahua. "The courage to be ridiculous before God."
www.LandoverBaptist.org (R) Landover Baptist Church. "The largest, most powerful assembly of worthwhile people ever to exist."
www.bettybowers.com (X) America’s Best Christian. "So close to Jesus he gave me his recipe for loaves and fishes."

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