Blessed are the humorists, for they will have the last laugh. We have just witnessed the visit of Helen Clark, New Zealand’s anti-nuclear Prime Minister to a US President who appears to be falling precipitately from every sort of pedestal, real or imaginary. David Lange once commented of Helen that she was so dry as to be combustible. No doubt she had a serious agenda for this visit, but such overdone sobriety simply tips one into levity. What on earth, we ask, was going on? What’s the possible worth of the silver stars this President awarded her for good conduct? Why cross the oceans to go to lunch with him? Now with Howard we know what’s going on…
What is it with humour? Is it a side-show in the theological market-place, or could it be right there near the centre? We instinctively distrust the humourless, and cherish those who disarm us, whether with their belly laughs or hard-won wry wisdom. But why? Is it that humour trips up the self-important, the moralizers and autocrats and logic-choppers who sometimes crowd the ecclesiastical paddocks. I guess we all enjoy a touch of schadenfreude? That’s taken him/her down a peg or two… !
We think of Erasmus during the Renaissance, tickling the sensitivities of a rather dowdy church. Getting away with murder, so to speak, in his Praise of Folly, giving earnest reformers wriggle room, even as he donned the convenient mask of the Fool. He stuck the stiletto in, but because of his humour lived on to tell the tale. Savonarola in Florence or Servetus in Geneva met stickier fates. Humour as the ecclesiastical can-opener.
Cynicism, the cultivated snigger, helps to keep us sane as we cope with dogmatic cul-de-sacs and institutional inanities. There’s limited leverage, though, in the long run, about such indiscriminately deflating humour. We’ve all met sad folk who meet every issue with the same ‘levity’. It may be a cautionary warning that Luke’s Beatitudes are rather ambivalent about laughter. Those who weep will laugh, they promise, but it seems the hee-hawers will get their come-uppance as well.
So where do we draw the line? In the past we used to ring the blasphemy alarm with altogether too much alacrity, claiming high-minded concern about God’s honour, when all too often it was our own self-esteem that was being pricked. Yet does the recent controversy around the cartoons depicting Mohammed suggest