Was Jesus ever trying to make us laugh?

It was fascinating to hear that the Pope had invited a large group of comedians to an audience at the Vatican and I loved the photographs that appeared of him with Whoopi Goldberg. We didn’t hear much about what was said, but in the past the Pope has been heard to talk about praying for a sense of humour. I hope he had enough time to listen to the guests, including our beloved Ian Hislop, as well as address them.

It can be painful listening to a priest modelling a homily on his favourite comedian’s delivery, but some of the techniques for holding an audience surely overlap. Sometimes you hear the same personal anecdote told by different priests, or being used repeatedly by the same priest. I think there may be a classic book of funny stories regularly handed to the newly-ordained, possible title “Rolling in the Aisles”. I often wonder about Jesus’ delivery of his teachings, and especially about how much we might be missing. He must have been enormously attractive to listen to and he must have made people laugh, because otherwise they would not have stayed, as we know they did, long after mealtimes, even in lonely places with the night coming on. But we don’t have any obvious jokes.

I suspect this is partly because the people writing the Gospels were thinking of them as a serious account of someone who had died in horrible circumstances (even though he came back later), and humour would have seemed to undercut the narrative. People will often talk about a dead or absent person, remembering their humour; but usually if you ask them to write something down, they will tell you something serious or impressive. Sad poets and dramatists are always taken more seriously, but a really good writer uses humour as well as deep emotion.

So much comes from the delivery. The greatest of our actors are magnetic whatever they are telling us, but of course cultural expectations and understandings shift over time; one reason why the comic interludes in Shakespeare’s tragedies are often cut in stage versions is because we can no longer hear or see in them what the original audiences did. “It’s the way he tells ‘em”, we hear about a classic comedian, and if you try to tell jokes yourself, you quickly discover just how important that is. Timing, inflection, a pause, a raised eyebrow – all these things can be effective or fall absolutely flat.

There may be jokes in the Gospels that we are simply missing. Sometimes we have to try to read almost behind the text, especially when it’s something Jesus says which comes across as unpleasant or unexpected, such as the brush-off of his mother and brethren in the Gospel recently (Mark 3.31ff). He’s not talking to his family directly; they may not even have been in earshot, but we know that he wouldn’t say something nasty, so there must have been an element of what I can only call “stage business” which would have made it not offensive. It’s very rare to have any details of surrounding circumstances, which might almost be such as stage directions, attached to any of Jesus’ words. This is why the accounts of the evening of the Last Supper stand out so clearly, because we have so much information about what he was doing with his hands and gestures while speaking, and it’s not surprising that our holiest rituals are designed to mirror them as exactly as we can, even down to the foot-washing on Maundy Thursday. But most of the time, all we have is words, and not even a full transcript: “The world itself could not contain the books that would be written,” the last words of John’s Gospel.

If Jesus told jokes, they would not have been spiteful, negative or misogynistic. The apostles regularly express surprise when they come across him chatting with a woman, but he himself clearly sees this as normal interaction, unusually for his time. He would not have poked fun at the poor or the sick. He invariably has enough wit to get himself out of a tricky question when dealing with the religious authorities or the occupying power – that neat use of a coin as a prop, when asked about unjust taxation, Matthew 22 and Mark 12. His comments about the people he meets, such as the woman at the well, are not dismissive or hurtful, even though “he tells her all she ever did” and clearly knows that her reputation is shockingly bad, and he is equally gentle, though direct, with the woman taken in adultery. He creates lively imaginary dialogue as part of his parables, but it’s never sneering or casually unkind. I’ve heard quite a few sexist cracks in sermons, but never in the Gospel when Jesus is speaking.

I can’t help wondering whether we are missing some element of humour in Jesus’ response to the Syrophoenician woman in Mark 7.  Jesus’ comments about taking the children’s bread and throwing it to the dogs is at the end of a conversation we do not have, and her reaction is not umbrage, anger or despair. She is not cowed or silenced; she stays engaged and even seems to agree before trumping his comment with her own, and then being dismissed with a warm accolade to return to her healed daughter.

We never see Jesus being dismissive, except once, to Peter or treating anyone in a slighting way. Even when he cleanses the Temple, he is quoting Isaiah and Jeremiah, not being abusive. Nowadays we hear about comedians “punching up” or “punching down”: taking on the powerful is OK, but you may not make fun of any disadvantaged group. This attitude can obviously be taken too far, but the principle is sound. Most Catholics don’t have a problem about jokes at the Church’s expense, because it is a massive and powerful institution, though we naturally prefer the jokes to be made by Catholics because at least they should get the facts right. I find absolutely nothing offensive in Life of Brian, because it’s not actually about Christ, or God, or the Church, it’s a satire on human weakness and our tendency to miss the point. God and the Church are both big enough to be able to cope with being laughed at anyway; it is their being dismissed as irrelevant which is far more dangerous to human health and happiness.

People taking themselves too seriously is also dangerous, especially if they are powerful. Here satire such as Life of Brian really scores, and is thoroughly justified, because this is one of the roots of clericalism. Priests being regarded as a separate order of beings who cannot be questioned, teased or laughed at, is a deeply unhealthy approach which can damage us all. We dearly love and also make fun of our parents; this is normal and healthy, and should apply to priests as well. Our Church authorities, however powerful they are, are not God. Human beings all need to be able to laugh at themselves. One of the biggest elements of a sense of humour is a sense of proportion.

It’s clear from his remarks as his Passion approaches that Jesus is very aware of the difference between his power as a Galilean dissident and his power as the Only-Begotten Son of God; this is the substance of his exchanges with Herod and Pilate. But until this stage of his life, Jesus sits very lightly to his absolute authority. He doodles in the dust – the woman taken in adultery; he makes little mud pies and smears them on a man’s face – the man born blind; he stops the storm with just a word; he stands in the doorway against the rising sun so Mary Magdalene doesn’t recognise him. Is he teasing her? Is he teasing Mary his mother at the Cana wedding?  I think this encounter actually reads more such as a normal family interaction, where a junior guest at a wedding, who doesn’t seem even to have arrived with his mother, but come along separately with his mates, is roped in to help in a slightly awkward situation. I think that first exchange reads such as an aside between the two of them, trying not to be noticed so as not to embarrass everyone else. It’s not a refusal or a rebuke aimed at Our Lady. say the notes in my old RSV New Testament; I think it’s more “What are you asking me for, what do you think I should do?”, while he’s just wishing he were somewhere else. The miracle itself is low-key and off-stage, until the moment when the steward tastes it and says to the bridegroom, “Why on earth were you hiding the good stuff, planning to drink it later?”

Translating humour into another language is already extremely difficult. This is one reason why I think the Asterix translations are so brilliant; they are equally full of jokes in both French and English, which is outstanding work. They are of course modern translations of a modern text. Sometimes, in multilingual assemblies, jokes have to go through two translations, and you can watch one group getting a joke later than the others – there used to be an EU joke, “The Danes laugh last”, with the nationality varying according to the point you were trying to make. Translating humour across two thousand or more years and different cultures is even more difficult, if not impossible. It’s taxing to find people who genuinely find Plautus or Aristophanes funny on the page, though I cherish the memory of a student production of Lysistrata which was extremely funny, thanks to the comedic skill of a friend who is now a serious and reputable Jesuit – my lips are sealed, I promise. But the authors and later the translators and interpreters of the Gospels are definitely not trying to make anyone laugh. I just wonder whether sometimes Jesus was. 

Kate Keefe composes musical settings for the Mass and writes about the psalms. You can follow her on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.