Notes Toward a Theology of Comedy

This may seem like a strange post to apply to our obesity discussion today, but I think that the bodily nature of our limitations and the comedy of what Francis of Assisi called Brother Mule (i.e. the body) make this material applicable. Enjoy.

"Humor is a grace. It's absolutely a grace because, if people laugh, willy-nilly they make commitments to what's going on. They make good commitments, too. They covenant. Laughter is a kind of covenant, a spiritual covenant."-- Walter Wangerin

"You will find that you survive humiliation/ And that's an experience of incalculable value."--Edward Chamberlayne in The Cocktail Party

1. Playfulness and a creativity are character traits and actions which the Christian can affirm that God created us for. God's playful creativity is expressed in the universe, and our human dominion of creation is also playful. Surely, then, we can affirm that we were created in part to enjoy the whimsical and ironic.
   
2. Good humor practices the virtue of truth-telling. Humor reverses our expectations, showing the wise to be foolish and the foolish, wise. This is a good thing, for we should always be about the pursuit of truth and honesty.
   
3. Peter Berger suggests that a comic debunking of society actually allows us to love our enemies because we take them less seriously than they do.We may learn to love the political braggart or the boasting literary type. We may have compassion on the hypocrite.
   
4. Comedy often stresses the burly, eccentric bodily world as a worthwhile emphasis. God's creation of the world and Christ's incarnation remind us that God created the physical, bodily world and called it good, even if it is now also subject to sin and corruption. The Christian is one who exists in this world with its eating, defecating, and procreating. Christian comedy, then, should affirm and laugh at human life.
   
5. Robert Roberts suggests that comedy's perception of incongruity arises from the "perspectivity" of the perceiver. There must be a vantage point from which something appears incongruous. He goes on to distinguish 1) "having a perspective," which is "to be capable of adopting" the perspective since it is "available or accessible" to you, from 2) "owning a perspective," which implies a tendency towards regularly adopting the perspective, and from 3) "adopting a perspective," which implies the actual activity of having a perspective present in oneself. In this sense, one can temporarily experience another perspective through humor without necessarily being convinced by or abiding by it in any habitual way.
   
6. Roberts also argues that this disassociation that humor produces makes humility possible, for the person who finds his or her own behavior funny is able to see its dangers. More specifically, for the Christian, there is always the incongruity between one’s sinful, current self which will only be complete in the eschaton, and one’s positional, justified self, the self that God sees us as in Christ.
   
7. Reinhold Niebuhr argues that our "provisional amusement" with the world’s incongruities must either move to faith and joy or bitterness and incredulity. Humor has its limits; if laughter seeks to deal with ultimate issues, it turns bitter because it is overwhelmed. Humor alone cannot find a way to deal with human sin and wickedness.