Is There Laughter in Heaven?
Why we laugh is complex.
It’s a topic which has been debated since the days of the ancient Greek
philosophers. Unfortunately, much modern comedy tends to be
nasty and vicious, about sex, the lavatory, or involves ridiculing other
people, whereas God’s desire for us is to love one another. So should it bother me that I can’t write
Christian humour?
But yet the Bible contains humour. "Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?" said
Nathaneal (John 1:46). Compare that with
the sort of jokes you hear in your town or village about people in neighbouring
towns and villages. There is much more
humour in the Bible, which we don’t get because it belongs to the age in which
it was written. Nevertheless, when a
holiday club leader in our next parish said that the opening chapters of
Jeremiah were about losing your underpants, she got the biggest possible laugh
from the five to ten year olds in front of her. Her interpretation was basically right, of
course, and the children remembered holiday club as being fun.
In his TV series Laughing
Matters (available on YouTube), Rowan
Atkinson asserts, amongst other things, that comedy is about character. Character
again? Isn’t this always the
essential thing? So humour isn’t always
about shocking people or putting them
down. Just as we laugh with our friends and family when they do
funny things, so we do with well-written, emphatic, fictional characters. Authors, Christian and otherwise, set their
characters up to go over the top, doing what we would like to do ourselves, but
don’t because we’re in the real world.
In one of my favourite Christian books, The Bridge to Nowhere, by Stephanie Parker McKean (Sunpenny
Publishing, 2012), the lovable, but clumsy, manner in which Texan Christian
detective, Miz Rice, tries to convert
apprehended criminals had me in stiches. We also share a smile characters exposing something
tiresome; in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead
Revisited, Lady Cordelia’s frustration at being told that the Virgin Mary insists
that Cordelia arranges her shoes in a particular order in her boarding school
wardrobe. We chuckle at word play: Carpenter from Nazareth seeks joiners is
my favourite.
So it is possible
to write Christian humour, which is funny and respects God.
Our vicar includes jokes in our Pew News, finding them on sites
like these: Holy Humour, Christians Unite Clean Jokes and Will and Guy’s Short
Christian Jokes and Stories.
Come on, click on the links.
All of them. You know you want
to…
… There. What a waste
of writing time! But what a great way to
draw people into church!
And there's the Balaam and the donkey story. That cracks me up every time. I liked this post, Rosemary. It's a subject which interests me very much. Laughter is God's gift to us and it's part of his character - I think Jesus had a wry sense of humour in dealing with stupid questions from disciples/Pharisees that I really enjoy. So, for me, there's no way there'll be no laughter in heaven. Of some kind.
ReplyDeleteI always imagine Jesus giggling as He said, "Each day has enough trouble of its own!" And I think C.S. Lewis was right when he said, "Joy is the serious business of heaven."
ReplyDeleteOne of my favourite drawings of Jesus is called The Laughing Jesus. I love the idea of Jesus laughing a real really laugh full of the joy of the Lord
ReplyDeleteOne of my favourite drawings of Jesus is called The Laughing Jesus. I love the idea of Jesus laughing a real really laugh full of the joy of the Lord
ReplyDeleteThanks, Lynda, Ros and Fran. I feel we need to protect laughter and humour.
ReplyDelete