Abstract
Laughter is pervasive in Christian theological and liturgical traditions, breaking up human idolatries and totalities. This gospel laughter gives Christian ministry an essential orientation of “open seriousness.”
The imagery we use when talking about laughter is revealing. 1 We say we “break up” laughing. Or we exclaim that a joke really “cracked me up.” Or we report that the crowd erupted with laughter. Laughter shatters. It breaks up; it cracks up. It interrupts the neat totalities by which we often seek to control and make sense of our lives. 2 Laughter disrupts, even if just for a moment, the myths and rationalities by which the world is neatly ordered and managed. 3 Like the fool or jester, laughter tends to “melt the solidity of the world”; it interrupts the conventions and assumptions that are supposedly written in stone; it keeps reality fluid. 4 Indeed, we are often unable physically to control laughter; it seems to take over even our bodies. It often feels as if something is “laughing us.” 5
Not surprisingly, no single theory encompasses the phenomenon and meaning of laughter. Laughter has been analyzed from every conceivable perspective: evolutionary, physiological, medical, philosophical, ethical, theological, and many more. But no one has gotten a firm handle on it. Laughter eludes capture by any overarching theory. Say one thing about laughter, and a diametrically opposed claim may also be made. Laughter creates community. But certain forms of laughter also exclude from community. Laughter can aid in healing. But laughter can also destroy people. Laughter is related to comedy. But laughter also occurs in the midst of tragedy and trauma. 6 And comic laughter can itself be serious. Laughter is a form of resistance to injustice and oppression. But laughter can also be a means of domination and degradation. Even the claim that laughter “melts the solidity of the world” confronts its opposite: laughter can also be used to reinforce the solidity of the world and dismiss those calling for change. But this very fact suggests that laughter does indeed break up and crack up; it interrupts all the theories that seek to explain it or get control of it. Laughter is too fluid, too unruly to dogmatize; it fractures whatever system would seek to contain it.
The imagery used for laughter is similar to imagery that is often used to describe the gospel itself. Like laughter, the gospel fractures; it interrupts; it breaks in. These images have been highlighted in recent biblical and theological scholarship. New Testament scholar Roy Harrisville, for example, argues that the cross “fractures” all of the paradigms that seek to contain it, including the systems and narratives the biblical writers brought to it. The gospel creates an unmanageable anomaly that requires a revolution in thinking and living. 7 Of the Apostle Paul, Harrisville writes: “The apostle could not master his theology in any ultimate way because it never existed as a system; in fact, it could not, since the event at its core spelled the death of system.” 8 New Testament scholar Alexandra Brown speaks of the gospel “disrupting” and “dissolving” (melting!) the structures and conventions of the old order. 9 As a result, she writes, the Apostle Paul engages in an extreme, unsettling rhetoric that employs “unconventional and destabilizing pairings of opposites”—crucified Messiah, wise folly, weak power—in order to disrupt human assumptions of the old age. 10 From this apocalyptic perspective, the in-breaking of the new creation cracks up myths and rationalities of the old age that lead to death and sets believers in an unsettled threshold space between the ages. In this liminal space, the tension between the ages is not yet resolved, but remains a fluid reality in which we continue to be on the way to the new creation that has broken in, but is still unfulfilled.
In a similar vein, the Belgian theologian Lieven Boeve has developed a theology of interruption, drawing on the claim of Johann Baptist Metz: “The shortest definition of religion: interruption.” 11 For Boeve, the gospel is not a settled reality that we can bring under our control. Rather, the gospel shatters the boundaries of closed narratives and seeks to open us to others: “The whole metaphor and dynamic of the Christian narrative appears to be permeated with the interruption of its own narrative, its own identity, and the confrontation with the other, God. . . . The Christian narrative simply may not become a closed narrative. For precisely then God will break it open again.” 12 Interruption becomes a central theological category.
These common characteristics of laughter and gospel invite an exploration of the relationship between laughter and Christian ministry. This relationship is more profound than telling jokes in the pulpit or discerning humor in the Bible or affirming the comic dimension of the Christian faith. The laughter that breaks up and interrupts is a more encompassing form of laughter; it suggests an orientation for faithful ministry that is deeply rooted not only in the gospel, but also in its ritual appropriation through the centuries.
The central events in the gospel story—the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection—interrupt the structures and assumptions of the old order. Each of these events creates an unmanageable anomaly or incongruity: incarnate God, crucified Messiah, resurrected body. These seemingly paradoxical affirmations all express incommensurable realities that break up systematic, rational, and rhetorical attempts to contain or control them. Moreover, these events have generated different kinds of laughter, including rituals and festivals that embody and perform that laughter. 13 These traditions of Christian laughter remind us that the Christian faith resists human control; it is wilder and more unmanageable than many believers admit. To borrow a phrase from rhetorician D. Diane Davis, cited above, the Christian faith has been “breaking up [at]” human totalities and idolatries since its inception. A brief overview of these traditions of Christian laughter will suggest an essential orientation for Christian ministry.
Incarnation Laughter
Of all Christian festivals, those celebrating the incarnation have been most thoroughly characterized by laughter. Christmas celebrations have historically taken the form of carnivals or other carnivalesque rituals. Such festivals embodied the odd, new age that has broken into the world in Jesus Christ. While Christian carnivals today have been relegated to a few days before Lent, they actually grew out of the wild festivities of the Christmas season. 14 The Christmas festivals, most notably the Feast of Fools, celebrated in communal, embodied form the incarnation, in which God became flesh—carne. God is born as a human child to common folk; or, in specifically carnivalesque terms, a baby is made king. These festivities also embodied in popular, ritual form the topsy-turvy world of the Magnificat: “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty” (Luke 1:52–53). Jesus’ birth interrupted the old age with a radically new order that turned the world upside down. 15 And revolutionary ritual laughter erupted.
Dancing peasants. Anonymous.16th cent. Colored single-leaf woodcut. Staatsbiliothek, Berlin. Photo credit: Ruth Schacht/Art Resource, NY.
Performing this new order, Christian carnivals and festivals lampooned the ecclesial powers and parodied religious practices. The most well known of these Christian festivals, the Feast of Fools, involved uproarious inversions of hierarchical power and liturgical piety. Priests were mocked during the celebration of the mass. Boys took the place of the clergy, and often one boy was elected the “Bishop of the Fools.” The participants interrupted the liturgy with all kinds of inappropriate behavior, from dancing and drinking to obscene songs and nonsense prayers and mock sermons. They even brought donkeys into the church and insulted the congregation. 16 In a variation on the Feast of Fools, the Feast of the Ass, the people responded to each part of the mass by braying like a donkey. 17
Through their hilarious antics, Christian carnivals enacted one of the paradoxical, unmanageable mysteries at the heart of the faith: God incarnate in human form. The festivals subverted ecclesial hierarchies, challenged clerical pretensions, and celebrated the new social order inaugurated by Jesus’ birth and sung in Mary’s Magnificat. They challenged the narrow seriousness of religion with a dose of divine disruption and creaturely humility. The laughter of Christian carnivals, like carnival laughter more generally, subverted the old order of power and domination and embodied a new, revolutionary world characterized by equality and mutuality. 18
Crucifixion Laughter
Crucifixion laughter is more complicated. Indeed, it seems obscene to speak of crucifixion and laughter in the same sentence. However, in the Roman culture of Jesus’ day laughter was an important aspect of crucifixions. There were actually many crucifixion jokes. Crucifixion itself was a “coarse and vulgar joke.” 19 In this cultural context, the New Testament writers take the laughter associated with crucifixion and ironically turn it on its head. In the hands of the New Testament writers, Jesus’ crucifixion becomes not simply a coarse and vulgar joke but an extremely complex and paradoxical political joke. And in proclaiming this joke, the New Testament witnesses take the role and employ the rhetoric of the fool, a role the Apostle Paul adopts in First Corinthians.
The political joke was explicit in the act of crucifixion itself. From the side of the empire, crucifixion was intentionally a parody; it was a form of “parodic exaltation.” 20 Crucifixion occurred in a society that was fixated on matters of hierarchical rank. The wealthy and powerful elites were considered to be “high.” The poor, the slaves, and the marginalized were viewed as “low.” Maintaining these hierarchical rankings, along with the honor and shame associated with them, was central to the ordering of Greco-Roman society.
In this context, if the “low and despised” (1 Cor 1:28) overstepped their bounds and got above themselves, then crucifixion was the appropriate punishment. For crucifixion intentionally served as a coarse and vulgar parody of this breach of the hierarchy by those, such as rebellious slaves, who would not stay in their place. In this gruesome form of punishment, the crucified one is “lifted up” on the cross in a form of mocking exaltation. 21 Through this lifting up, crucifixion unmasked in a deliberately grotesque manner the pretension and arrogance of those who had dared to raise themselves above their designated station. Crucifixion mocked the victims’ pretensions by literally raising and fixing them in a tortuously elevated state until they died—driving the last nail (and a pun is actually appropriate here) into their lofty pretensions. This parodic lifting up of the condemned was the intention of crucifixion; the cross “was designed to mimic, parody, and puncture the pretensions of insubordinate transgressors by displaying a deliberately horrible mirror of their self-elevation.” 22
In addition, as a form of parodic exaltation, crucifixion, like carnival, was often linked with mock kingship. A common understanding of crucifixion was “enthronement,” and the connection between the lifting up of the crucified and the raising up of the king made for a good laugh. Mocking the crucified as a kind of royal figure was often part of crucifixion itself. Jesus himself was mocked by the soldiers as a king. They put a robe and crown on him and saluted him: “Hail, King of the Jews!” and knelt down in homage to him (Mark 15:17–20). At the cross, a sign was placed above his head reading “The King of the Jews” (Mark 15:26). While on the cross, Jesus was mocked by the passersby, as well as by the religious leaders: “Let the Messiah, the King of Israel, come down from the cross now, so that we may see and believe” (Mark 15:32). Such mockery was not only related to the charge against Jesus; it was intrinsic to the act of crucifixion itself. As in the parodic crowning of a king during carnival, the mocking crowd at a crucifixion engaged in a public, carnivalesque performance. The soldiers and the crowds all participated in the coarse and vulgar political joke.
Culturally and politically, crucifixions thus generated different kinds of laughter. For those in positions of privilege and power, for whom crucifixions reinforced their status, the cross invited mocking laughter that trivialized the horrific instrument of execution through which the elites maintained their dominance. For the “low and despised,” the cross elicited an uneasy laughter, a kind of gallows humor, that helped to blunt the horror of the punishment. 23
From the side of the New Testament witnesses, however, the situation becomes extremely complex. In fact, the biblical writers actually play a political joke on the empire’s political joke. According to the New Testament writers, the crucifixion of Jesus interrupts the empire’s parodic exaltation and invites people to discern something deeper happening on this particular cross. Moreover, Jesus’ crucifixion interrupts his parodic exaltation, not with an act of worldly power, which would simply mirror the deadly ways of empire, but with irony and laughter. The parody of Jesus’ mock enthronement, intrinsic to crucifixion, is itself ironically mocked. The one who is parodied as “King of the Jews” in his crucifixion is, according to the New Testament witnesses, in fact the Royal Figure. The cross is literally his throne. While the shameful slave’s death of crucifixion seems to be the decisive contradiction of the claim that Jesus is king, the opposite is true. Jesus’ crucifixion is his coronation. The real political joke is on the “powers of this age,” who mocked and crucified Jesus (1 Cor 2:8), but who unwittingly become participants in his enthronement.
At the heart of this proclamation of the cross is a classic rhetorical trick of the fool: ironic literalism. The entire gospel actually turns on this rhetorical move. Through ironic literalism, the fool (a jester, for example) takes figurative language literally; he or she adheres to the letter of a statement and ignores its spirit. And by taking the words literally, the fool actually turns the intended meaning on its head. Fools engage in this rhetorical maneuver all the time. Many examples could be given, but one will have to suffice: Amelia Bedelia, the housekeeper in the well-known children’s books by Peggy Parish. Amelia Bedelia is a master of ironic literalism, though, unlike most fools, she doesn’t intend to trick anyone. For example, Amelia’s employer tells her to “dust the furniture.” So Amelia gets some powder and throws dust all over the tables and chairs. Or Amelia is told to “draw the drapes,” so she takes out a pencil and sketchpad and proceeds to draw them. She is told to “pitch a tent,” so of course she throws all the poles and nylon into the bushes. 24 Goethe’s comment about the tales of the German trickster Till Eulenspiegel also applies to the stories of Amelia Bedelia: “[A]ll the chief jests of the book depend on this: that everybody speaks figuratively and Eulenspiegel takes it literally.” 25
Goethe’s comment also describes the rhetorical character of the New Testament witness to Jesus’ crucifixion. The empire employs crucifixion figuratively as a parody of exaltation. But the New Testament witnesses take the parody literally. The meaning of the cross becomes the opposite of what the empire intended. The parodic exaltation of empire proclaimed in a figurative way that Jesus was not a royal figure worthy of enthronement—no one shamed on the cross could be royalty. The New Testament witnesses, however, take the parody of exaltation literally and proclaim Jesus’ crucifixion as his enthronement. They crack up, break up, interrupt the empire’s parody with ironic literalism. As New Testament scholar Joel Marcus writes, “Here the mockery that has transformed kingship into a joke encounters a sharper mockery that unmasks it, so that the derision of kingship is itself derided and true royalty emerges through negation of the negation. For many early Christians, this reversal of a reversal, which turned penal mockery on its head, was probably the inner meaning of Jesus’ crucifixion.” 26 Through ironic literalism, the gospel witnesses “melt the solidity of the world.” They interrupt and crack up the old categories and assumptions about power and rule. They not only subvert the claims of the powers that be, but they also engage in a form of extreme rhetoric that, like laughter, “pushes the limits of knowing and explodes thinking’s border zones.” 27 A “gallows-bird” embodies the divine. 28
The New Testament witnesses thus counter the culture’s crucifixion laughter with new and different forms of laughter. On one level, their witness counters the empire’s dominating, derisive laughter with a revolutionary laughter at the subversive political joke Jesus plays on the powers of the world. The emperor has no clothes! The figure on the cross reigns! At a deeper level, however, the New Testament witnesses counter cultural and religious assumptions about power and rule with an unsettling, paradoxical laughter at the absolute anomaly, the inconceivable incongruity of a crucified Messiah. Disrupting Christian theology itself, this laughter takes us deeply into the paradoxes of faith; it fractures language and resists neat theological categories and assumptions. It profoundly cracks us up. As theologian Jacqueline Bussie has argued, this distinctive “laughter functions as an apposite extra-linguistic resource for expression of a theology of the cross because a theology of the cross is inherently paradoxical, resistant to linguistic expressibility, and resultant from a collision of narratives.” 29 For Christians, crucifixion laughter is the subversive, ironic, paradoxical laughter inherent in Good Friday.
Resurrection Laughter
Nowhere does the gospel interrupt the world’s assumptions as radically as in the event of Jesus’ resurrection. Jesus cracks open the closed tomb and shatters the power of death. Not surprisingly, in certain times and places in church history, laughter has played an important role in Easter celebrations. Resurrection has also been a laughing matter. The ritual is called the Risus Paschalis, the Easter Laughter. Although usually understood as originating in fifteenth-century Bavaria, the ritual has a complex history. 30 In this tradition, the minister tells jokes and uses double entendres and humorous antics, including obscenities and sexual innuendo, to incite the Easter laughter. 31 Laughter thus becomes an embodied response to resurrection and a liturgical symbol for Easter. 32
Although often criticized for its abuses and superficialities, the Risus Paschalis has been widely recognized and celebrated. In a sermon about Easter on Bavarian radio, for example, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) recognized the importance of the Risus Paschalis and highlighted the central role of laughter in Easter celebrations. This laughter, he proclaims, testifies “to the freedom of the redeemed” from the power of death. Ratzinger’s sermon, entitled “Sarah’s Laughter,” concludes, “Like Sarah, people who share an Easter faith can say: ‘God has made me laugh; everyone who hears me will laugh with me’” (Gen 21:6). 33
Protestant theologian Jürgen Moltmann has written widely and affirmatively about the Risus Paschalis. Easter, he proclaims, “begins the laughter of the redeemed, the dancing of the liberated . . . even if we still live under conditions with little cause for rejoicing.”
34
Moltmann even suggests that Paul’s famous Easter hymn laughingly exorcises death, the final enemy: Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?
35
Celebrating Easter’s homiletical jokes, Moltmann affirms Easter laughter as an expression of resistance to the powers of death. This laughter displays our freedom from the rulers of this age; it is the “beginning of the rebellion of the liberated against the bonds of their slavery.” 36 Such laughter shapes our eschatological hope: “The laughter of the universe is God’s delight. It is the universal Easter laughter.” 37
According to some theological interpretations, this Easter laughter celebrates another profound theological joke, which unites incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. The incarnate God, hidden in human form, plays a trick on the Devil. Like a wily trickster, God in Jesus lures the Devil into a trap by appealing to the Devil’s uncontrollable appetite for human beings. The Devil responds predictably and crucifies Jesus. Not recognizing God incarnate in Jesus, the Devil, like a greedy fish taking the bait, is tricked, taken captive, and overcome in the resurrection. 38 God tricks the powers that be. And the resultant laughter at the joke is not simply the laughter of joy and freedom in the face of the Devil, but also the laughter of resistance to powers of death in the world.
This kind of laughter also characterized another trickster figure—the African-American slave trickster, High John the Conqueror. Writing about High John, novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston declares, “The sign of this man was a laugh. . . . It helped the slaves endure. They knew that something better was coming. So they laughed in the face of things and sang, ‘I’m so glad! Trouble don’t last always.’ And the white people who heard them were struck dumb that they could laugh.” 39 This laughter of freedom and resistance “practices resurrection.” 40 And that is no laughing matter to the powers that be. 41
Weaving its way through incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection, Christian laughter is thus a pervasive dimension of the Christian faith. This laughter is deep and encompassing, disruptive and unsettling.
It is carnival laughter that interrupts the old hierarchies and celebrates a world turned upside down.
It is the revolutionary laughter of a political joke that exposes and subverts the powers that be.
It is the paradoxical laughter that takes us beyond the possibilities of speech and shatters our theological categories.
It is the laughter of freedom and resistance in the face of the powers of death.
The laughter of the gospel breaks up [at] human totalities and idolatries. It interrupts the myths and rationalities and conventions of the oppressive old age. And it invites us into the unsettled juncture of the ages where we might live freely and creatively on the way to the new creation. This laughter suggests an essential orientation for Christian ministry.
Ministry and Open Seriousness
As I have suggested, laughter plays a pervasive role in Christian theological and liturgical traditions. Laughter embodies the disruptive dynamic at the heart of the Christian faith. As should be clear by now, however, this laughter is not frivolous or trivial. Rather, Christian laughter is a serious matter. Like genuine laughter itself, Christian laughter “does not deny seriousness but purifies and completes it.”
42
It is the kind of laughter described by Mikhail Bakhtin: Laughter purifies from dogmatism, from the intolerant and the petrified; it liberates from fanaticism and pedantry, from fear and intimidation, from didacticism, naiveté and illusion, from the single meaning, the single level, from sentimentality. Laughter does not permit seriousness to atrophy and to be torn away from the one being forever incomplete. It restores this ambivalent wholeness.
43
This purified seriousness is what Bakhtin calls open seriousness. 44 This kind of seriousness is “always ready to submit to death and renewal. True open seriousness fears neither parody nor irony, nor any other form of reduced laughter, for it is aware of being part of an uncompleted whole.” 45
Faithful ministry is characterized by laughter’s open seriousness. Moses himself learns this lesson when he encounters the living God at the burning bush. Moses’ ministry begins with God’s radical interruption. Possibly uneasy with this interruption, Moses tries to get control of God by asking God’s name. In response, God engages in an unsettling act of ironic literalism. God literally gives Moses the divine name. But, ironically, God’s name preserves God’s freedom: “I am who I am.” “I will be who I will be.” “I will be with you as I will be with you” (Exod 3:13–15). There is a divine “Ha!” implicit and almost audible in the name “Yhwh.”
Ministry in the service of this free and living God will be characterized by open seriousness. Because ministry has to do with God, it is serious. And because it has to do with God, ministry remains open, for we cannot control God. Indeed, laughter may be the only way to engage seriously with the living God. God’s Spirit continues to blow where she chooses (John 3:8), disrupting seriousness when it becomes closed, dogmatic, and idolatrous. The incarnate, crucified, resurrected Christ continues to work through the Spirit, interrupting, fracturing, cracking up in order to move people toward the fulfillment of God’s purposes. Incarnation laughter, crucifixion laughter, and resurrection laughter are all expressions of the Spirit, who moves restlessly in the church and the world. Consequently, Christian ministry remains open to the disruptive surprises of the Spirit. Faithful Christian ministers laugh with open seriousness, welcoming life that is not complete, but is always “on the way,” always living in the dynamic and fluid movement between the old age that is dying and the new that continues to be born.
This orientation of ministry is particularly important today, not simply because we serve the living God, but because of the context in which we minister. Churches and denominations are in transition. The old ways seem to be dying, but there is no clarity about the new that is being born. Ministry takes place in a liminal space, an in-between, threshold space in which old identities are being left behind, but new identities remain uncertain and fluid. The death of the old can be frightening; it can lead to a kind of narrow, dogmatic seriousness. Circle the wagons! Fix the boundaries! Maintain orthodoxy! Uphold the tradition! The seriousness is warranted, for these are challenging times. But the narrowness is misplaced. There is no call for “closed seriousness.” Rather, ministry in this context calls for laughter’s open seriousness.
Faithful ministry today celebrates the open seriousness of carnivalesque incarnation laughter that cracks up the old structures of domination and welcomes new forms of community. This ministry dares the crucifixion laughter that fractures rigid, dogmatic systems and exposes the old-age powers for what they are—not the givers of life, but the agents of death. Faithful ministry embraces resurrection laughter that lives free from the fear of death and open to movements of the Spirit who is forming and re-forming the church.
The carnivalesque Jewish festival of Purim embodies these dimensions of laughter. A remarkable performance of open seriousness, the Purim ritual celebrates the victory of Mordechai and Esther over the evil Haman. 46 During Purim, the community reads the story of Esther as a political joke through which the powers that be are subverted by laughter. 47 Every time the villain, Haman, is mentioned, the congregation makes noise to drown out his name. The public reading of Esther becomes a form of political resistance to the powers of death. For the persecuted Jewish people, this laughter is serious indeed.
However, something else happens during the Purim celebration. The participants turn the laughter on themselves, as well as on their most sacred traditions and rituals. The celebrants revel in parodies of prayers and mock sermons. There are satires of the rabbinic teachers. Participants present plays poking fun at the members of the synagogue. Even the reading of Torah becomes the focus of laughter, as nonsensical verses are strung together or the words of the reading are scrambled. Like the Feast of Fools, Purim is a traditional ritual that parodies sacred traditions and rituals. Purim laughter is not the “reduced laughter” of mere sarcasm or mockery; it is not laughter directed narrowly at enemies. Indeed, one Talmudic dictum states that it “is the obligation of each person to be so drunk [on Purim] as not to be able to tell the difference between ‘Blessed be Mordechai’ and ‘Cursed be Haman.’” 48 In this spirit, the participants in Purim celebrate a different kind of laughter—the renewing, universal laughter that includes everyone in it. 49 The laughter of Purim recognizes the freedom of the living God, which enables the participants to laugh even at themselves and their own pretensions. Only through this laughter can the people be truly serious about God: “That is why the Talmud says that we fully accept Torah only on Purim, for only when we can mock the tradition can we fully accept it. Only then are we safe to do so—otherwise we make the tradition into an idolatry rather than a smasher of idols, into frozen-in-stone dogma of what once was rather a living faith.” 50
Like the laughter of Purim, Christian laughter finally invites ministers to laugh at themselves as they fumblingly seek to serve the living God. This laughter embodies not only the incarnation laughter that parodies our pretensions, but also the crucifixion laughter that fractures dogmatic certainties and the resurrection laughter that frees us from the fear of death and the need to control. This universal laughter includes everyone and keeps us alert to the dangers of laughter as mere resistance. Mere resistance becomes purely oppositional; it fixates on the “enemy” and is ultimately controlled by the very object it resists. Contrary to laughter’s open seriousness, mere resistance perpetuates binary systems of opposition—us/them, insider/outsider, friend/enemy—that offer no genuinely creative possibilities. 51 Captive to this kind of narrowly oppositional resistance, Christians can come to look very much like the enemies they oppose. Genuine Christian laughter can be distorted into exclusive, destructive forms of laughter, not unlike the empire’s coarse and vulgar crucifixion laughter. The result, as the cross reveals, is almost inevitably violence toward the “other.”
Genuine Christian laughter, however, includes everyone, even the church and its ministry. It is an unsettled, renewing, universal laughter that celebrates a reality larger than our finite selves. This disruptive and renewing laughter sets us free from the reactionary either-or mentality that remains captive to the very oppositional structures of power and domination that Christ has “cracked up.” 52 This laughter negates our negations and seeks a “third way” in which the conventional oppositional binaries are overcome and new possibilities of community and life are envisioned. 53 As the Apostle Paul proclaims, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female” (Gal 3:28). 54 Through this disruptive proclamation, the old-age binaries have been fractured. And the radically creative game of faithful ministry can begin. With a laugh.
Footnotes
1
Portions of this essay have been adapted and expanded from Charles L. Campbell and Johan H. Cilliers, Preaching Fools: The Gospel as a Rhetoric of Folly (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2012), and are included by permission of Baylor University Press. I am grateful to my co-author, Johan Cilliers, for his contribution on laughter for that book.
2
D. Diane Davis, Breaking Up [at] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000).
3
In this sense, laughter plays a role similar to lament, which also interrupts the status quo. Not surprisingly, laughter and tears often belong together. On the relationship between laughter and lament, see Campbell and Cilliers, Preaching Fools, 127–51.
4
Enid Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History (Gloucester, MA.: Peter Smith, 1966), 223. On laughter and fluidity, see also Davis, Breaking Up.
5
Davis, Breaking Up, 23.
6
See Jacqueline Bussie’s study, The Laughter of the Oppressed: Ethical and Theological Resistance in Wiesel, Morrison, and Endo (New York: T & T Clark, 2007), and her essay in this issue, 169–82. As Bussie demonstrates, comedy and laughter need to be distinguished. Comedy implies some kind of positive resolution, whether it results in significant laughter or not. The laughter that fractures and breaks up, however, occurs in tragedy and in irresolvable paradox.
7
Roy A. Harrisville, Fracture: The Cross as Irreconcilable in the Language and Thought of the Biblical Writers (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 4–6.
8
Harrisville, Fracture, 108.
9
Alexandra R. Brown, The Cross and Human Transformation: Paul’s Apocalyptic Word in 1 Corinthians (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), xxi, 13.
10
Ibid., 30.
11
See Lieven Boeve, God Interrupts History: Theology in a Time of Upheaval (New York: Continuum, 2007); Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society: Toward a Fundamental Practical Theology (trans. J. Matthew Ashley; New York: Crossroad, 2007), 158.
12
Lieven Boeve, “The Shortest Definition of Religion: Interruption 3,” The Pastoral Review 5 (2009): 18–19; italics mine.
13
Mikhail Bakhtin notes that these kinds of festivals are linked to the “breaking points” in nature and society. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (trans. Hélène Iswolsky; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 9.
14
See Max Harris, Carnival and Other Christian Festivals: Folk Theology and Folk Performance (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 8–9, 139–44.
15
Harris, Carnival, 9.
16
Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 96.
17
Bob Scribner, “Reformation, Carnival, and the World Turned Upside-Down,” Social History 3 (1978): 303–29 (317).
18
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais, 9.
19
L. L. Welborn, Paul, the Fool of Christ: A Study of 1 Corinthians 1–4 in the Comic-Philosophic Tradition (Early Christianity in Context; London: T & T Clark, 2005), 2. On crucifixion jokes, see Justin Meggit, “Laughing and Dreaming at the Foot of the Cross: Context and Reception of a Religious Symbol?” in Modern Spiritualities: An Inquiry (ed. Laurence Brown, Bernard C. Farr, and R. Joseph Hoffmann; Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1997), 63–70.
20
The following discussion is based on Joel Marcus, “Crucifixion as Parodic Exaltation,” JBL 125 (2006): 73–87.
21
See the references to Jesus’ being “lifted up” in John 3:14; 8:28; and 12:32–34.
22
Marcus, “Parodic Exaltation,” 78.
23
Welborn, Fool of Christ, 101.
24
25
Cited in Paul Oppenheimer, ed. and trans., Till Eulenspiegel: His Adventures (New York: Routledge, 2001), lxiv.
26
Marcus, “Parodic Exaltation,” 87.
27
Davis, Breaking Up, 8.
28
Welborn, Fool of Christ, 180.
29
Bussie, Laughter of the Oppressed, 122.
30
For a helpful account of the history and character of the Risus Paschalis, see Michael O’Connell, “Mockery, Farce, and Risus Paschalis in the York Christ before Herod,” in Farce and Farcical Elements (ed. Wim Husken; Ludus: Medieval and Early Renaissance Theatre and Drama 6; Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 45–58. O’Connell’s article also examines the role of laughter in dramas of Christ’s passion.
31
Bussie, Laughter of the Oppressed, 20.
32
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), “Sarah’s Laughter,” in Images of Hope: Meditations on Major Feasts (trans. John Rock and Graham Harrison; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), 51.
33
Ratzinger, “Sarah’s Laughter,” 51–52.
34
Jürgen Moltmann, Theology and Joy (trans. Reinhard Ulrich; London: SCM, 1973), 50.
35
Ibid., 51. See 1 Cor 15:54–55.
36
Moltmann, Theology and Joy, 51.
37
Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology (trans. Margaret Kohl; Philadelphia: Fortress), 339.
38
Gustav Aulén, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of the Atonement (trans. A. G. Herbert; New York: Macmillan, 1969), 52–53. These are classic themes of trickster tales. See Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes this World (New York: North Point Press, 1998), 17–80.
39
Zora Neale Hurston, “High John de Conquer,” The American Mercury 57 (1943): 450–58 (450).
40
See Wendell Berry, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” in Collected Poems (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985), 151–52. Berry highlights laughter as a way of practicing resurrection, and he concludes his poem with the image of a trickster.
41
For a dramatic depiction of resurrection laughter and its threat to the powers that be, see Eugene O’Neill’s strange and remarkable play Lazarus Laughed: A Play for Imaginative Theater (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927).
42
Bakhtin, Rabelais, 123.
43
Ibid.
44
Ibid., 122.
45
Ibid.
46
My account of Purim relies on Michael Strassfeld, The Jewish Holidays: A Guide and Commentary (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 187–98.
47
For an excellent account of laughter and resistance in Esther, see Kathleen O’Connor, “Humor, Turnabouts and Survival in the Book of Esther,” in Are We Amused? Humour About Women in the Biblical Worlds (ed. Athalya Brenner; London: T & T Clark, 2003), 52–64.
48
Megillah 7b, quoted in Strassfeld, Jewish Holidays, 189.
49
Bakhtin, Rabelais, 11–12.
50
Strassfeld, Jewish Holidays, 198.
51
Davis, Breaking Up, 136–61.
52
The Talmudic dictum about drinking on Purim until the distinction between Mordechai and Haman is lost also suggests a breaking up of binary oppositions.
53
Davis, Breaking Up, 141.
54
Cross dressing, including by priests, was a common practice in carnivalesque Christian festivals, unsettling the fundamental binary of male and female.