Divine Laughter

Humor and the Foolishness of Proclamation

Karl N. Jacobson, Rolf A. Jacobson, Will Willimon

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781506468679
• eBook ISBN: 9781506468686
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Comedians tend to view the world somewhat askew or askance, and that view--a kind of hermeneutical lens for discerning the comedic in daily life--serves to frame, reframe, and even de-frame reality. Preachers do the same, viewing the world askance through a theological lens of discerning God in daily life. That theological view allows one to preach hope in the face of despair, seeing the world in terms of God's justice and declaring the promise of life out of death. Divine Laughter: Preaching and the Serious Business of Humor looks closely at both the cultural phenomenon of stand-up comedy and theories of humor, asking what preachers can learn from both.

Karl N. Jacobson and Rolf A. Jacobson offer preachers a means of growth in their art and an approach to reading Scripture both for its humor and through the lens of humor. The book models approaches to the biblical text that allow the Bible to be funny and that bring humor to the text. Divine Laughter brings the task of preaching into conversation with both the comedic parts of the Bible and the theological parts of the comedic, in order to bring a new kind of life to preaching. As a serious look at humor and laughter in the Bible, the book explores the theological implications of what it means if we think of God, Jesus, and even the Holy Spirit as filled with laughter. Preachers are invited to wonder at and chuckle their way through examples of God's laughter in the Bible, thinking about what that means for God's people, for the life of faith, and for preaching to God's people.

1

A Priest, a Rabbi, and a Pastor Step into a Pulpit

Preaching, Humor, and Stand-Up Comedy

What preachers do is more than a little bit crazy. “The foolishness of our proclamation,”1 as Paul put it, is quite literally all that we have to offer, and it is a strange enterprise.

• Preachers proclaim forgiveness.
• Preachers dare to speak with the power of God’s word and in God’s name.
• Preachers speak truth to power.
• Preaching—its task, its goal, the practice of honing it—is a peculiar vocation, almost unique.

We are going to make the assumption that many (if not most, or all) preachers want to improve; they want to grow as orators, hone their craft; they want to be the best that they can be in service of the gospel. And again, most of us preachers have had our various influences: homiletics professors, books about preaching or by great preachers, preachers whom we have heard and seek to emulate. But the time may well come (and perhaps already has for you, dear reader) when one needs to look outside of the discipline itself in order to advance one’s practice of it; think of it as interdisciplinary reflection.

So where can the preacher go for help? Who else stands up in front of a room full of people who have nothing in common other than that they are seated facing in the same direction and starts talking to them? While there may well be several options (from sports commentators to news anchors, perhaps even to politicians), we would suggest that the preacher can find no better rhetorical kin than the stand-up comedian.

Preachers and Stand-Ups

What preachers do is more than a little bit crazy, or, as Chris Rock puts it, freakish: “The ability to talk to a lot of people is freakish. It’s more freakish than being able to run fast, or dunk a basketball, or any of those other things. It’s freakish. Do you think Superman could talk to a thousand people? [To] get their attention . . . he has to bend something first. But to just get up in front of a thousand people and start talking . . .”2

Preaching and stand-up have this in common: the challenge of standing in front of a bunch of folks—many of them strangers, or at best acquaintances—and trying to reach them, touch them, and move them, never knowing what you will get from them in response.3 This is an inherent rhetorical challenge that is shared by preachers and stand-ups, and while preachers are rarely heckled during their preaching (directly), something similar can often happen during the coffee hour or over brunch.

But more than simply sharing a rhetorical challenge, comedians and preachers occupy similar cultural spaces. The culture in which we live and the context in which we practice our wild vocation need our attention in order for our message to come through as authentic and relevant.

In Preaching at the Crossroads: How the World—and Our Preaching—Is Changing, David Lose talks about the challenge of preaching:

If we are called to proclaim good news that is not just old news or the daily news but regularly surprises and even arrests our hearers, then perhaps preachers should not be surprised by the inherent and unending challenge of doing that. . . .

So if the task of fashioning a homiletic appropriate to our age eludes us at present, perhaps that’s because we haven’t yet sufficiently embraced the mysterious new world in which we live and to which we are called to preach.4

And as we have urged, “The church must speak in a fashion that is faithful to Scripture and tradition, but in a register that is fitting to whatever context in which it finds itself—in a way that translates the gospel message into language and symbols that can be understood.”5

So how might one embrace the mystery—not only of what preaching is but of what preaching is supposed to do? We suggest one way is to turn and listen to the art of stand-up comedy, because it models a different and helpful posture. The humorous is a register that offers a set of postures with which to perceive the world and speak truth to the world. Observational humor, politically charged material, quick-hitting one-liners, and even “shock” comedy are all part and parcel of the present cultural milieu. Again, from Lose, “Christian theology, at its best, embraces the mystery of the culture in which it finds itself so it can understand, appreciate, and ultimately speak into that mystery in ways that are appropriate and helpful.”6

Stand-up comedy is—to state the obvious—about humor. Its goal is to evoke laughter. And there are, of course, different kinds of laughter: laughter at something or someone; laughter about something; laughter under or behind; laughter that is joyful; laughter that is bitter, harsh, or sad; laughter that is reactive; and laughter that is invitational. Each of these types of laughter, and the various kinds of humor that may evoke them, may be discernable in the biblical text. So it seems to us that approaching the text and the task of preaching with a hermeneutics of humor in mind can orient the interpreter and the preacher first to the true or full nature of the text, and then to a different way of speaking God’s word, one that is “appropriate and helpful” in the present culture.

Further, comedians are, more and more, being taken seriously. The “fake news,” as Norm Macdonald called it, which started out on Saturday Night Live as “Weekend Update,” was social commentary masquerading as a send-up of a news program. This masquerade has become, in a very real sense, a legitimate means of delivering the news. From The Daily Show to The Colbert Report and now to Last Week Tonight, comedic takes on the news have become the primary or only means by which many get their news. Period.

It follows, it seems to us, that while not going so far as to turn preaching into stand-up comedy, we might learn something about the art of preaching from the art of stand-up comedy.

This all began for us as we listened to stand-up comedians. Simply put, we enjoy stand-up and are in the habit of listening in. And it should be no surprise that stand-up comics deal with religion, the religious, and the Bible a great deal. From Sam Kinison’s routine about Jesus and the resurrection (“Jesus is the only guy who ever came back from the dead and didn’t scare . . . everybody, man”7), to Bill Burr’s skewering of Christians for his sense of their inconsistency (“Jesus likes hookers and lepers . . . doesn’t like queers”8), to Jim Gaffigan naming the discomfort that arises when people talk to other people about religion (“Does anything make you feel more uncomfortable than some stranger going, ‘I’d like to talk to you about Jesus’?”9)—and there are, of course, many, many more examples.

Stand-up comedy offers more than entertainment. Stand-up comedians recognize and see clearly topics and their moving parts. Stand-ups often look at the world in particular ways, ways that we preachers will recognize as familiar. As we begin our reflections on stand-up comedy and preaching, and more fully on humor as a theological lens for interpretation in service of preaching, we turn now to three fundamental similarities between stand-up comedy and proclamation: seeing the world askance, the power of intrusion, and the practice of truth telling.

Seeing the World Askance

In his 2017 special, “Never Grow Up,” Bryan Callen made the claim (tongue in cheek, presumably) that while he has only one skill set—being funny—that one skill makes him funnier than all the great men of history. Not better than them, but funnier. “Great men,” he says, “aren’t funny.” He continues,

Even Jesus. . . . No, I don’t know, I’m just saying, he was awesome, and he was better and everything. I just don’t know how funny he was. . . . I’m sure, walking on water, amazing, but stand-up . . . this takes a long time.10

Comedians, as this bit shows, tend to view the world somewhat askew or askance, and that view—a kind of hermeneutical lens for daily life—serves to frame, reframe, and even deframe reality. This can also be a way of looking at the world theologically. Reinhold Niebuhr remarked that “the intimate relation between humour and faith is derived from the fact that both deal with the incongruities of our existence.”11

We would say, further, that humor and faith share a wrestling with and even a reveling in the incongruities of life and the “stuff” of faith: the biblical text, the apparent absurdity of faith, and the absurd people who claim to live a faithful life that demands things like loving others as much or more than oneself—which is crazy. Or forgiving your brother (ahem) as many as seventy-seven times, or seventy times seven, which, while surely necessary, seems less than possible. Or selling everything one owns and giving it to the poor in order to ease one’s passage through the eye of a needle—which is crazy, and less than possible.

The stuff of the life of faith is the stuff of incongruity. Think of those incongruities (!): A dead man has risen from the grave; this man is not just a human being but God as well. The claims about this man’s death—his death means that your sins are forgiven, his death means that you have life—are laughable. Ask Sarah or Peter, and one out of two thieves on the cross.

Many comedians are funny because they have learned to see and revel in small details in the world—and they’ve learned to notice what is funny in those details. And then they’ve figured out how to speak about those details in ways that make people become aware of (and laugh at) those details. Recall (or YouTube) Jerry Seinfeld’s famous bit about the missing sock. Or Jim Gaffigan’s great bits on Hot Pockets and bacon. Or Mitch Hedberg’s hilarious bit about when the family called from a restaurant waiting list (“Dufresne, party of two”) doesn’t respond, and after calling the name a few times, they move on to the next family: “‘Bush, party of three.’ Yeah, but what happened to the Dufresnes? No one seems to care! Who can eat at a time like this? People are missing! . . . We need help. Bush, search party of three! You can eat once you find the Dufresnes.”12

In a similar vein, the preacher must learn to see the work of God and the kingdom of God in daily life. And the preacher must then learn to speak about the kingdom of God in ways that make people become aware of the kingdom. Walter Brueggemann has called this skill “prophetic imagination.”13 There is a world in front of us. And the dominant epistemological worldview has taught us not to see either the agency of God or the kingdom of God in that world. Brueggemann writes, “The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.”14 Let those with eyes to see, see.

The Power of Intrusion, Both Comic and Theological

If the key to comedy is timing, as some have said, then its beating heart is surprise. Cicero talked about “expectation” in comedy; for Descartes, it was “surprise”; for Kant and Hegel, “incongruity.” Regardless of the particular term one uses to get at it, a fundamental building block of comedy is the juxtaposition of incongruities. The comedic, at its most basic, is the sudden resolution of a shared expectation into something totally other, or nothing at all. The resolution or transformation of expectation is a different way of perceiving and understanding reality.

The gospel itself is the greatest incongruity in all creation—the reality that the crucifixion and resurrection of the son of God is the moment when God was most present and fully revealed. It is the task of preachers to aid in the gospel’s intrusion into our world, to preach in such a way that people are given ears to hear and eyes to see the kingdom, to speak in such a way that it changes the way people see themselves and their neighbors.

As Niebuhr writes, “Humour manages to resolve incongruities by the discovery of another level of congruity.”15 And when that congruity—unexpected and surprising—is discovered, bitter laughter becomes joyful, hopeful laughter.

The most obvious—and the most dealt with—example of this must be the laughter of Sarah, who turns from bitter disbelief to incredulous joy (Gen 18). A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 A Priest, a Rabbi, and a Pastor Step into a Pulpit
• 2 “I Don’t Care Who You Are; That’s Funny Right There”
• 3 “No One’s Laughing at God; We’re All Laughing with God”
• 4 Who’s Laughing Now?
• 5 Wit, Sarcasm, and “Incarnation”
• 6 Preach like Peter, Pray like Paul, Laugh like Sarah
• Appendix: Two Sermons
• Notes
• Index