Abstract
“Laughter is the best medicine.” So the folk wisdom puts it, and psychological and medical research in this case suggests that there is something to the claim. But the contributions of laughter—of humor in its various guises—to human flourishing run much deeper, as the essays in this issue of the journal attest. Human experience entails engagement with the harmful and tragic, with life-crushing and oppressive forces. What place is there for laughter in the face of suffering? Does recourse to humor amount to a denial of painful reality? Or might laughter instead serve as a vehicle not only of coping and survival but also, sometimes, of stout resistance?
Aptly, Juliana Claassens chooses the book of Job to probe the power of humor to reframe the experience of tragic suffering and oppression. In the context of extreme suffering, when language cannot express the despair experienced by a victim of trauma, tragic laughter emerges as a means of resistance. So while there is a very thin line between the tragic and the comic, Job’s response to calamity may foster courageous hope in many readers who likewise have experienced a world coming undone.
Surveying the entire biblical canon and finding only sparse use of humor (and then often in the form of cruel mockery), Michael Patella nevertheless seizes upon the image of the “eighth day” to cast a spotlight on the eschatological joy ushered in by Christ’s resurrection. Despite the reality of suffering and destruction, the final word does not belong to evil and death. People of faith therefore need not be intimidated by the powers of darkness; rather, the “eighth day” makes possible a laughter that, while not denying evil, does provide the “antidote to evil.”
The essay by Jacqueline Bussie draws from the memoir of Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee, the Genesis narrative of Sarah, and anthropologist James Scott’s notion of “hidden transcripts” to make a case for laughter’s liberative role in engendering ethical and theological resistance. The laughter of the marginalized aids them in reclaiming hope and dignity despite oppression’s dehumanization. In laughter, resistance is “made audible”; it allows the oppressed to fight back against both the system that oppresses them and the despair that oppression inflicts.
Chaya Ostrower’s ethnographic research allows readers to listen in on interviews capturing the stories told by fifty-five Jewish Holocaust survivors. Humor of varying types—aggressive, sexual-scatological, social, defensive, and intellectual—helped them cope with unrelenting terror and unspeakable atrocities. Humor served primarily as a defense mechanism for persons living “in the very heart of darkness and horror.” Their stories are “a fabric of horror stories interwoven with strands of macabre humor”—humor that did not alter the circumstances but did allow these survivors to preserve a sense of their own humanity.
Charles L. Campbell acknowledges the two faces of laughter, which can be a means of both domination and resistance to injustice. Laughter can include or exclude, nourish or destroy community. Nevertheless, gospel laughter that challenges human idolatries can give Christian ministry an essential orientation of “open seriousness.” This is not simply oppositional resistance but a universal laughter that breaks down oppositional binaries and includes all. It is a laughter that celebrates a reality larger than ourselves.