Christian Humour

There are Christians who hold that a strong sense of humour belongs a little to the Devil’s side of things; at least, I suppose that this is what they suppose when they condemn speech or books in which the sense of humour is strong, boisterous and rough.

I do not myself belong to their opinion. There is something very funny about anyone writing seriously about humour; yet that is what I propose to do, to nibble round the edges of the subject, as it were, because this subject happens to be on my mind.

I am inclined to think that our Creator is not humourless. I think He had a sense of humour which in our friends we might call coarse, when He created the elk and the eel and the sand-hopper and hippopotamus, and put them in the same world together.

And what was He thinking of when He created to His own glory Tyrannosaurus Rex, the gigantic flesh-eating lizard whom the earliest men on earth must have encountered and trembled at and run away from? Somewhere behind it I dare to detect a star-shattering laughter.

We would have gone about things so very differently. The works of man in comparison with the works of God are invariably tidy and hygienic and geometric. They begin and then they stop. They do not last long.

And they are hardly ever beautiful in their decay, whereas a piece of driftwood or a mountain grows more beautiful as the weather eats it away, and one of the most beautiful things any of us are likely to see is the skeleton of a bird.

Then there is that delicate matter of the means of generation with which He has provided His creatures. What would we have done about it, if we had had a say in the matter? Certainly many of us would not have given man, along with a rational soul, the same means of generation that the animals have.

But of course our Creator did not despise the animals, as so many of us do. He had made them, and He knew that His work was good; and He chose to let our way of begetting and conceiving children and expressing marital love be also a link with the mysterious animal kingdom, so that in love the highest and most humble things would be united.

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Yet I believe that the Creator knew well that there would be a tension in us between high and humble, between conscious and subconscious, between spiritual and animal elements; and that we would express this tension in humour.

True enough, all this is speculation. But at least the Puritan who keeps a straight face all the time in the presence of the incongruities of nature in himself and others may be gently accused of some lack of confidence in the unknown intention of his Creator. And the father who breaks wind in front of his eight-year-old son, and then laughs, may not only be a pleasant man for his son to be with; he may also be sharing implicitly a joke of the Creator.

Country people have generally been more prone to innocent ribaldry than townsfolk; and I do not think the matter is wholly unrelated to the deeper fact that country people often hold to their religion better and more tenaciously. Sharing some part of the life of the animal kingdom, they learnt almost from the time they began to think that God is not a prude.

In an appalling account of the saintly life of Dominic Savio, in a pamphlet apparently published in India and designed for the young, I read: ‘Dominic Savio warns his pals to keep away from foul mouths. . . . Dominic Savio tears up bad literature. . . . Dominic was all to all; after a lively recreation, he would entertain boys on the beauty of virtue by telling nice stories. . . .’

No doubt the actual Dominic Savio was a very different lad from the one created by his pious biographers. But the impression a young person would get from such a pamphlet would be highly erroneous. There is, I think, a natural humour which is in no way polite yet which does not actually violate either the virtue of purity or the virtue of courtesy.

I am making no defence of deliberate blasphemy or obscenity. But I remember how a priest, for whom I have the strongest friendship and respect, told me that he had worked when young among labouring men and been horrified by their casual conversation.

Perhaps he had reason to be scandalised. But I am more inclined to think that he failed to understand the nature of what he heard.

My own experience in labouring work has led me to the conclusion that such men often ease one another’s tensions by spasmodic outbursts of violent language, and by ribald communications; and that these forms of language have hardly any relation whatever to their moral state, but a very strong relation to the hardships of their employment. If they were uninterruptedly polite they would be of less help to one another.

People joke about many things – and especially, one could say, they joke about their wounds. There is, for example, the Jewish joke, defensive in character, which springs from a sensitivity to possible anti-Semitic prejudice, and in which the edge of irony is turned equally against the listener and the teller of the story.

There are the hospital jokes, about sickness; the jokes of soldiers in the page 549 trenches, about death itself; the prison jokes; the jokes that turn less on sexuality than on a grim recognition of the underlying hostilities that often exist between men and women. All these represent a human way of reacting positively to situations of danger; and the human race in general would be impoverished without them.

We Catholics tend quite often to joke about our religion; and this may be precisely because we take our religion in deadly earnest. As a result of the Fall of Man every human being bears a number of invisible wounds. And the jokes a man tells may often help us to understand him.

As an example of specifically Christian humour, I remember the quite well-known joke about the Emperor Nero. Nero’s wife was worried because his birthday was near at hand, and she did not know what to give him; but at last she had a brain-wave. She decided to have a hundred Christians crucified in the Emperor’s garden, so that this would be the first sight he would see when he looked out the window on his birthday morning,

And duly on his birthday Nero woke up and went to the window and looked out and saw his wife’s thoughtful gift. At first he was delighted. But then he realised that the Christians were all saying something but he could not hear what they were saying.

So he had a stool brought into the garden and planted beside the nearest cross. And he stood on the stool and tried to hear what was being said. But the stool was not high enough. So he had a chair brought. But the chair was not high enough either.

So he had a ladder brought, and climbed it, till his ear was on a level with the mouth of the crucified Christian. And then he heard what all the Christians were saying to him – ‘Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday to you!’

The fact I find this joke extremely funny will no doubt indicate only too clearly the kind of man I am. There are elements of sadism in it. There is an element of ironic debunking of the notion of the entirely happy martyr. There is an obscure insight into the permanent relation between Christianity and the State. Perhaps what Nero could not hear was the voice of God blessing him through the mouths of his crucified neighbours.

There is of course an element of shock and crudity; but I cannot see there is any element of actual blasphemy. A joke about the Crucifixion of Our Lord Himself would come into quite a different category. It is admittedly not a joke for young children; but it might cheer greatly a man who was lying in bed with some painful and permanent disability.

The function of a joke is often to burn gunpowder in the open air, where it can flare up without actually harming anybody. If there are people who have no gunpowder in their system, I do envy them a little their unusual natural serenity; but I am not one of them, and most of the people I meet are not either.

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In the long run our notion of the Christian life turns largely on our assessment of what Our Lord would approve or disapprove in the conduct and speech of His neighbours.

There are few indications in the Gospel narratives that He was an habitual humourist; though some of the parables have a delicate ironic twist. The painful humour that rises in us as a result of the Fall of Man would not perhaps rise up at all in the depths of His nature because His human nature was unfallen.

Similarly there are some jokes we might naturally tell which Our Lady would have seen no point in telling. But we may legitimately suppose that several local humourists were present among the guests at the marriage feast of Cana.

A number of the jokes of these Jewish peasants would have an erotic tinge; they would be ribald in a manner appropriate to a country wedding; and though the bride might blush, it would not be in humiliation or anger, for she would know that these were her own people, her neighbours, and that this was their oblique way of honouring her as a girl who had become a woman. She might say, ‘Oh, be quiet, Uncle Reuben!’ to a relative who had to her mind become a little crude; but that would be all.

And there would also be jokes about religion; for these were a deeply religious people. And there might be jokes about death or pain, for these people would have seen rebel patriots crucified along the roadsides, and shuddered and felt anger toward the occupying Romans, and later shared the bitter jokes of the oppressed.

There would be many jokes. And what was Our Lord doing in the meantime? Did He have an expression of suffering on His Face at the ungeometric, unhygienic, untidy minds of His creatures and neighbours? I think He sat and smiled. He may even have chuckled.

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