Laughter

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Sermon Text

Religion and humor have a somewhat strained relationship. They tend to keep each other at arm’s length, eyed with suspicion. Not that religious people are against having a sense of humor, but is it foundational? Most churches and communities of faith would say “no.” But not all of them, and certainly not all Unitarian Universalist groups—where humor is sometimes explicitly identified as an important shared value.  

My views may have been tainted following eleven years as a UU minister in New England. The DNA in Puritan descendants is hard-wired to NOT let them laugh. I remember my first Sunday before the Berlin, Massachusetts First Parish Church. Looking out upon a sea of somber Yankees, I decided to tell a joke. No one responded. Not a single face changed expression. And I remember thinking to myself, “Gee… this is depressing!” 

Later… in time, I understood. That congregation had not laughed during worship in 200+ years. Their Puritan mentality saw it as undignified, a sign of disrespect, and a violation of appropriate solemnity. The cultural critic H. L. Menken once defined Puritanism as “the hunting fear that someone, somewhere might be happy.” But when, over the following two and a half years, I gradually introduced a lighter touch to our services, the people began to respond. In fact, about a year later I got pulled over for a traffic violation. The officer who pulled me over was Herman Caldwell, a native and very youthful Chief of Police. I had actually performed his wedding a couple of months earlier. Everybody in town called him Buster, so when he got to the window I said, “Don’t fine me too much, Buster, I’m just a poor preacher.” “I know,” he replied. “I’ve heard you.” 

What is the survival value of humor? Among the many theories, I like Aristotle’s: “No society is in good health without laughing at itself quietly and privately; no individual is sound without self-scrutiny, without turning inward to see where they may have overreached themselves.” 

“In individuals,” wrote the philosopher Frederich Nietzsche, “insanity is rare, but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs—it is the rule.” The trouble is, we tend not to notice cultural craziness, i.e., we tend to be oblivious to the myths we choose to live by. And a lot of those myths are crazy. The Rambo Myth. The Prince Charming Myth. A lot of people are becoming disenchanted with the American Dream Myth: Is financial independence falling out of reach for the children of the middle class? 

All these popular myths include some that are popular delusions, with ever so many paid hucksters to hype and hustle their truthiness. The greatest value of humor—its greatest religious value—is its ability to detect fraud, distortion, and chicanery, and to cut through paradox. Humor reveals absurdity—take  

• Charlie Chaplin,  

• the Marx Brothers, 
• Marilyn Monroe—a great comedienne, often overlooked because she had a voluptuous figure, 
• Or Laurel and Hardy. 

For all of them and for their fellow comedians…tie a shoelace—it breaks. Pull down a shade—it snaps back. Touch a vase—it shatters. Cut a lemon—it squirts in your eye. Put up a tent—it collapses. All with dire personal consequences. Similarly, with all of us, too. Not every time but often enough to burst the illusion of being all that suave and debonaire. 

Underneath, and percolating throughout all humor, it seems to me, is the realization that life is not an orderly, logical sequence. It’s not only unpredictable and sometimes messy, but it is full of absurdity, ambiguity, and contradiction. It’s enough to make anyone laugh—if, that is, you permit yourself to. Meanwhile, there are numerous simplifiers (i.e., simplified, one dimensional) people who would gladly tempt you with competing descriptions of reality. 

• Political leaders, promising a perfect society. 
• Academic philosophers, promoting a single and simple worldview; or 
• Systematic theologians, presenting a consistent, orthodox universe…. 

 Our vision here, however, is different. We have no ultimate truth to convey, unless it is the knowledge that paradox is built into everything. That reality is rarely black and white, attractively packaged and prepared for distribution. We believe, rather, more like the author/editor E.B. White who wrote: 

If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world, and a desire to enjoy (or savor) it. This makes it hard to plan the day. 

Note: it is not either/or. It is both/and. To savor the beauty and to seek to improve it. That is a paradox. 

A paradox running through the heart of all sacred traditions. But one that remains elusive to the Puritan, Calvinist frame of mind. Which can bed enough to make a grown man cry. Or—if you are a member of a Unitarian Universalist congregation—enough to make you laugh. Because humor is not inimical to our way of being religious and, we further believe that recognizing and sharing humor is creative.  

Thoughtful people depend on humor for emotional pleasure, intellectual insight, and social criticism. Even more: humor has been called “the ultimate civilizer,” since it corrects pride, dullness, rigidity, and oppression. Humor has also been called “prelude to faith,” since it thumbs its nose at calamity and provides a grounding for generating new hope. 

It was liberal Protestant theologian H. Reinhold Niebuhr and author of the serenity prayer who said, “Humor is the prelude to faith, and laughter,” he went on, “is the beginning of prayer.” Or consider the thoughts of Martin Luther, who wrote “if you’re not allowed to laugh in heaven, I don’t want to go there.” And that—despite protestations from many Baptists, from the founder of Protestant Christianity, whose sermons could actually be side-splitting. As were the descriptions passed down regarding Jesus. Despite the scowls of many Christians and the thick gloom through much of Christendom, its namesake was funny. He teased the Pharisees repeatedly. (e.g., logs in their eyes, blind leading the blind… into a pit, etc., etc.) 

As with so many heroes, Jesus’ humor was diminished by his interpreters over the years. So was Abraham Lincoln’s. We know of him as simply “a great storyteller.” But what of those tales? They were, to the story, hilarious. Many were also ribald… but the mythmakers eliminated most of those, for fear of creating too human a hero, too down-to-earth, too “one-of-us” a leader. And prophet. And President. 

So much of what Lincoln said, so much of what Jesus said, was humorous because they were both so human. And there is little more distinctly human than laughter. The Cheshire Cat, with its fadeaway grin, is a fantasy. The laughing hyena, with its discordant cackle: an imposter. There is only one creature in all of nature that truly laughs, and that is us. A glorious uniqueness, don’t you think? A redemptive leg-up on upcoming calamities. And a biological necessity, it seems to me, for a creature that could just as easily drown in tragedy. 

And this point should not be missed: Humor contends with tragedy. It is the great enemy of suffering. It is a healing agent. Longtime editor Norman Cousins, when hospitalized with cancer, turned to joke books and Marx Brothers films for therapy. His pain was reduced, his sleep was extended, the inflammation was controlled. In short, Cousins discovered proof for the ancient prescription that laughter is good medicine. 

Most leaders in both the church and the state do not encourage laughter. It destroys their propaganda. It ridicules their power. It mocks their personalities. In probing the contradictions of existence—the pervasive paradox at the heart of life—it subverts all earthly authority. Humor is a road towards freedom, a road of freedom. And it’s a road you here at ESUC can and should be proud to walk upon. Not just because it’s funnier. But because humor—in the face of life with all its foibles and mishaps, its pain and suffering, its abject terror—humor is ultimately a religious affirmation. It is a spark of hope and faith, revealing an amusement with life itself, an extremely healthy posture, and one beyond all tragedy. And it is an affirmation I encourage you to co-creatively weave into your upcoming, post-Stephen Furrer iteration of a great community, striving to become Beloved, and getting closer, step-by-step, every day.  

So may it be.  Namaste.  Shalom.  Salaam.  Amen. 

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