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A man suffering enflamed sexual visions visited a psychoanalyst, who knew instantly that the patient needed considerable help. So he retrieved his briefcase full of inkblot sheets and began showing them to the patient.
“It looks like sex,” said the patient. Every new inkblot he saw looked like sex, he said.
Being a psychoanalyst, his doctor was unsurprised. “My friend,” he said, “you have a problem of the mind, but it’s one that I can fix.”
“I have a problem?” asked the patient. “You’re the one showing me all the dirty pictures.”
I’m not sure where I first heard this joke, though I definitely recall Bill Murray’s character telling it in the film What About Bob? That his character was a chronic neurotic telling the joke to the medical professionals trying to cure him only layers the humor.
Because I was born to a family with a penchant for sly teasing and forced to inherit said penchant, I love wicked little ironies like that inkblot joke. And I also feel conflicted about the attraction, if the word wicked didn’t give it away. What is irony if not skilled, deft mockery? And what is mockery if not a hilarious avoidance of the love I’m called to give as a Christian? Please, Dearest Editor, answer my queries in your next advice column, so long as you use heartfelt small words and don’t mention “enflamed sexual visions.”
The Christian feels bad about enjoying jokes, and so he asks himself questions so pearl-clutching that he can’t help but laughing at them also. Y’all, there is no escape.
There’s also no escaping the fact that the Bible singles out foolish mockers for consistent rebuke, especially in Proverbs. To paraphrase that old Bible-thumper Freud, if a biblical proverb isn’t about moronic mockers or the people who refrain from being moronic mockers, it’s about sex.
20 Sayings Against Sinful Mockery
“The mocker seeks wisdom and finds none,” reads Proverbs 14:6, “but knowledge comes easily to the discerning.”
And verses 7-9 then round out the image of hapless fools knocking against stupidity until their foreheads are painter’s palettes: “Stay away from a fool, for you will not find knowledge on their lips. / The wisdom of the prudent is to give thought to their ways, but the folly of fools is deception. / Fools mock at making amends for sin, but goodwill is found among the upright.”
19 passages of varied lengths and acidity warn against mockers, fools, and other proud-hearted miscreants in Proverbs. They share a general strand of wisdom—prideful mockers speak rashly and with an intent to birth strife, while they themselves refuse to have ears or hearts for instruction, either for themselves or for others. They just relish devastating others and pursue it with the keenest words for the job.
If only we weren’t still the same strife-hungry people. At the risk of sounding like a visionary saying things never before heard among men, many jokes today are proudly mean-hearted and simply devised for mean-hearted laughter.
And yet, these criticisms of an unteachable heart that speaks unkind mockery suggest, inversely, that an alternative type of humor exists: mockery from kind intent, with an eye toward revelation by rebuke. Notebooks at the ready, please, everyone—I can and will quiz without warning.
1 Argument for Christian Mockery
Revelation by rebuke hews closer to satire than many mini-Tipper Gores want to admit (though much of what we call “satire” today diminishes the word). Do I want to wade into that mudfight here? No, no I do not. Because, as any law-abiding, Sunday-school-attending child of the Lawd must, I have to start with Jesus Christ’s example first.
Because Christ confronted many people—usually the Pharisees, Sadducees, and scribes who tried treating Him like a gumball—with revelatory, ironic wit. Our church has been teaching the gospel of Luke for nearly a year, and so every Sunday we get to examine the timing of Christ’s lessons: He often taught in response to hostile, bad-faith questions from Israel’s religious leaders. His words are true across all time, but their kairos (ancient Greek appears without warning!) also meant they have a combative humor aimed at the moralistic hearts of those who opposed Him. Christ mocked their self-justifying pride, to then make the mockery into the font of His teachings.
Take Luke 11:37-54 (hopefully with greater pleasure than the religious leaders did). Jesus, having accepted a mouse-trap invitation to dine with some Pharisees and experts in the law, handles His opponents with sly humor before harshly rebuking their pride, beginning here in verse 38:
“But the Pharisee was surprised when he noticed that Jesus did not first wash before the meal. Then the Lord said to him, ‘Now then, you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness.”
The holy routine is only warming up. Here’s verse 42: “Woe to you Pharisees, because you give God a tenth of your mint, rue and all other kinds of garden herbs, but you neglect justice and the love of God. You should have practiced the latter without leaving the former undone.”
His biting mockery here is humor by exaggerated contrast—the “cup and dish” contrasted with the unwashed heart of wickedness, the “mint, rue and all other kinds of garden herbs” contrasted with the “justice and the love of God.” Christ highlights the earthly alongside the eternal in overblown language, and their discrepancy mirrors the discrepancy of the Pharisees’ sinful hearts and “righteous” behaviors, revealing just where they have sinned.
(Sorry to explain the Holy Joke. But the Committee of Self-Appointed Internet Essayists, Critics, and Quibblers informed me by dove that I must or else I’ll lose my membership, along with both my hands.)
But this mockery isn’t even the funniest part of Luke 11. That happens in verse 45, where one of the scribes at the dinner marks himself a moron by inviting Jesus’s rebuke:
“One of the experts in the law answered him, ‘Teacher, when you say these things, you insult us also.’
“Jesus replied, ‘And you experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them.’”
It’s the equivalent of a child who, when seeing his father spanking his brother for misbehavior, accuses his father by saying, “Spanking him isn’t fair! I did the same thing also, and I’m innocent!” Naturally, the father would counter the child’s argument by taking him upon his knee and spanking him also. This scribe, no doubt resplendent in his regal robes and beardedness, tries to catch Jesus in the exact pride that He has been rebuking. Jesus, glad to prove the scribe correct, then mocks him in turn. It’s true to Christ’s teaching, and it has the slapstick timing of a comedy puppet show.
But Christ doesn’t mock these men for the approval of His followers or His own pleasure. He rebukes them to teach where they have failed, in the hope that they and others would repent. Here’s that heart of love, the alternative to the hardened hearts of Proverbs: the heart that pours out scalding humor from a place of kindness.
Jesus wasn’t laughing these men. He loved these hypocritical religious leaders, just as He loves us in our own sins. He instructed them in their sin with acidity, just as He sometimes does to—and for—us. His words were plenty inflammatory and offensive to the Pharisees and Sadducees, since He caught their sins in their unflattering entirety, but His words weren’t mean-hearted. And (not coincidentally) they were also hilarious at times.
To Scotland! (Where Mockery Meets Hypocrisy in Verse)
The Scottish poet Robert Burns relished a similar satire against the pieties of his day. He was a Scot, after all, and being a Scot joins you to one of Europe’s great traditions of humor.
My parents once met this illustrious tradition in a Edinburgh street, and it was wearing a thong. A large, pasty Scotsman was walking towards them in only that choice garment, and as my mother tells it, he was strutting like a landowner through his peasants. His friends flanked him as he walked, which makes the thong-ed Scot a true Danny Zuko among his Thunderbirds from Grease.
If he had lost a bet and wore his consequences, you couldn’t tell it from his face held high. But he was quite cold, as you could tell from his exposed nipples. He and his entourage went on down the street without a sideways glance or a single hoot for anyone at all, which is the foundation of any good humor and certainly that of the Scottish.
Burns himself laid several bricks upon that foundation, though I can’t confirm that his methods included a public thong. Daniel Kalder, writing about the poet in the essay “Scotland Has Lost Its Sense of Humor,” lauds the poet’s “deep disdain for authoritarian piety,” specifically against his Calvinist leaders. That essay bemoans how many Scots refuse to mock or question their imposed COVID-19 restrictions, but I see Burns in a grander tradition than puckish earthly rebellion: revelation by rebuke.
Take “Holy Willie’s Prayer,” which Burns wrote to puncture an archetypal self-righteous Calvinist via verse. The monologue doesn’t bust any guts, but it does slice a few chuckles:
“Yet I am here a chosen sample,
To show [that] Thy grace is great and ample;
I’m here a pillar of Thy temple,
Strong as a rock,
A guide, a shield, and an example,
To all Thy flock.
“O Lord, Thou knows what zeal I have,
When drinkers drink, and swearers swear,
Singing here and dancing there,
As do all social classes;
For I am kept, through fear of Thee,
Free from all these sins.”
The key word here is “I.” Willie, the poetic persona whom Burns is mocking, prays to the Lord but revels only in himself. When the poem exaggerates this habit, its hypocritical folly is revealed, and any laughter it earns at Willie’s expense rebukes those hypocrites who live just like him.
Caveat incoming: Burns likely didn’t intend for Calvinist hypocrites to turn from their failed Christian witness—he was slandering an actual Calvinist (actually named Willie) with this poem and circulated it in private only. But his means, if not his intent, are like those which Christ used.
Most ironic humor doesn’t seek the end that Christ does, since many (and the best, I snipe) forms of fiction and poetry are written as an end unto themselves and without utilitarian goals. I can withdraw the means of ironic jokes, but are those enough?
To Africa! (Where Mockery Meets Colonialism in Fiction)
The means, mean or not, are enough for me to enjoy the comedy of colonial manners that happens toward the end of In a Free State, by V.S. Naipaul. This shaggy novel ends with a novella-length story set in an unnamed central African country, where two British citizens named Linda and Bobby drive through the rapidly de-colonizing society and its tribal power struggles.
The strongest part of the story is the threat of violence, ever present but, like crocodiles, submerged until the last moment. But Naipaul also writes pitiless jokes about the characters’ prejudices, to heighten the fear of violence by contrast. When you might have your teeth kicked in, quibbles over the best driving route or the cleanliness of table linens make the sudden violence, well, more sudden and infinitely more violent.
No character, black or white, holds racist gripes or irrational mistrusts which remain intact by the end. But because Linda and Bobby are white English citizens and thus believe themselves above the fray of the “primitive” unrest around them, they receive the most lacerating mockery.
Linda, whose racism is unconcealed, sounds more hilariously disconnected from her circumstances with every word she says. Like every good patsy, she winds up totally at the mercy of the black people she so denigrates. Bobby, however, gets the harsher, funnier joke. Seemingly tolerant, he takes offense at Linda’s racist beliefs and speaks affectionately to the Africans they meet.
But his racial egalitarianism is only skin-deep. Bobby, ever the tolerant ally, condescends to the black people around him by the babyish pidgin-language he speaks with them, and in his view of their behavior: they shouldn’t be held responsible for their violence against one another, he implies. Their moral agency is negligible compared to his own, or Linda’s, for they are mere blacks. So when Bobby impotently tries to seduce young African men while posing as their white benefactor, he can’t know how grotesquely hilarious he is. But we do, as the readers. And when Bobby (and not Linda) is beaten within an inch of his life, it’s earned punishment you can almost laugh at. Like I said, Naipaul’s irony is pitiless.
It’s also understated, like most humor I prefer. After all, I’ve attended many Baptist and Church of Christ churches in my day. Jokes should be like worship and children: discreet, if not totally silent.
Enter the Catholics
What Naipaul practices through In a Free State (though he himself was as faithful as an apostate) is a form of fiction long associated with Catholic writers: the comic novel that presumes and embraces the existence of ridiculous sin. The novelist and translator Trevor Cribben Merrill, in his essay “Three Lessons in Beauty,” names the trend succinctly: “The literary form of Catholicism is comedy.”
Merrill links novelists of the faith to comic writing because the comic arises from the fallen, sinful world which Christianity presupposes. To flesh out this maxim, he grafts in similar thoughts from other Catholic writers. First up to bat is the poet Dana Gioia, who said in an interview with Image that his favorite Catholic novelists were also “comic writers who luxuriate in humanity’s fallen nature.” And in the same vein, Merrill echoes the impeccably-impromptu lecture of novelist Martin Mosebach:
‘The foundation of the Catholic world view is the conviction of the irreformable imperfection of the fallen world of original sin, in which every kind of grand and lofty endeavor at some point fails miserably. T.S. Eliot called the Catholic religion the ‘philosophy of disillusion’—not to expect from the world that which the world cannot give. Thus, comedy is the really Catholic form of literature.”
These quotes unwrap those means of Christian humor, which seems to understand the world as a beautiful vessel fallen into sin and thus hilarity. That world, with the regularity of an ill-set watch keeping regular time, grows lofty endeavors that fail miserably and thus receive laughter. The world is a hilariously sad place, at its worst. The “great” things we attempt in this world, especially when we convince ourselves of their infallibility, are likely to thud against the fallen world and then break, yolkier than a duck egg, onto our own faces.
We receive enough failures, enough hardships, until we almost have to laugh at ourselves and with one another. It’s the same effect of many satirical rebukes, I’d add.
My mother keeps a phrase in her pocket that summarizes this nicely: “If you don’t laugh, you’ll cry.”
She herself, like my nearest and dearest family members, laughs heartily and not just at her children. We laugh at ourselves, and we laugh together. It’s why we still like each other as our third generation adds squalling new members.
Good Trouble in Kind-Hearted Misery
Those thudding and duck-yolked faces are the irony implied in the word comic. It’s the “incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result,” to pilfer Merriam-Webster.
In comic fiction, the expected result is anything other than the failure that befalls the character. To her, this failure feels incongruous. But to the reader, it seems fated, like an oncoming wagon seen far across a plain.
And the collision of delusion and failure often presents a rebuke. That Christ fella, recall, rebuked everyone but especially prideful leaders, Burns rebuked Calvinist hypocrites, and Naipaul rebuked colonial prejudices. These two last rebukes were harsh and unaffectionate towards their victims recipients. Writers can be razor-edged little urchins on the page, and warm-hearted rebukes clothed in irony are hard to find. But they exist. They’re often my favorite fiction.
One short story I’ve reread, and referenced for my own fiction, and considered inking into embarrassing places on my body, is “Pardon Edward Snowden” by Joseph O’Neill. It opens O’Neill’s compilation, Good Trouble, and so it visits good—and wryly hilarious—trouble on the protagonist and his gossamer-thin ego.
“The poet Mark McCain received an e-mail, which had been sent to numerous American poets, inviting him to sign a ‘poetition’ requesting President Barack H. Obama to pardon Edward Snowden,” reads the opening line. Much of the story appears right here: the unease of tying poetry to politics, the finnicky language of details (notice the former president’s middle initial like a red-pen correction), and the discreetly absurd (the non-word “poetition” used as an act of resolute conscience).
Mark McCain, you see, is drawn into America’s gravest query circa 2016: whether to add his minor poet’s name to a half-page advertisement in The New York Times. Other poets add their names. Other poets, including Mark’s friend E.W. “Liz” West, have not been invited to sign the poetition at all. And so, the impotent introspection of Mark and other poets, their self-created grandeur pinpricked just enough to claim self-awareness, their vapidity in the face of actual political consequences, and their sheer pettiness unfurl like a delectable banquet in O’Neill’s satire. In all this whether and wherefore, the circumstances of Edward Snowden himself, then stranded in Russia while persecuted by the U.S. government, go unmentioned.
Our protagonist, Mark, proves the most ridiculous of this very crowded field. He’s easily bested by a short-story writer in a poem-writing contest that Mark himself devised. He mourns the 2016 Nobel Prize given to Bob Dylan for poetry (Liz recalls that Mark, “in common with many men of the pen she knew, had been knocked flat,” unable even to share his thoughts on Facebook). And his default feeling is mild-mannered derision: “Strange,” Mark thinks, “just how draining an effort of tact was required to get through the day without bad-mouthing another poet.”
Mark, you see, is in a crisis whose weight buries Snowden and the American surveillance state. “It had been months since he’d produced, or even wanted to produce, a word of poetry,” O’Neill writes. This poetry-less poet turns to writing “pensées” instead. They are what you’d expect from a poet secretly exploring his mental neuroses during the 2016 election: “How little I associate writing, properly undertaken, with the generation of the written,” begins one pensée. The others are equally self-oneiric, however much Mark chooses to involve Bertrand Russell, Denis Donoghue, or Friedrich Nietzche.
In the end, Mark writes a poem that derides every word of itself as a cliché. He does not sign the poetition. The poet Mark McCain (now earning the use of his full name by his great resolution) “rose up from his chair,” and “silently and exultantly he roared, Never give in. Never not resist.”
Into what is Mark refusing to give? What will he never not resist? Silly questions for the herointellectual Mark McMain, whom O’Neill leaves triumphantly wriggling on his back like an overturned weevil. This humor is as understated but potent as the ten-dollar words that O’Neill places like landmines in the prose.
And yet, O’Neill also tempers his excisions of Mark and the other self-righteous (there’s an alt-Christian band name for you) with affection for their poetic hearts. The retelling of Mark’s mourning period over Dylan’s Nobel, overblown to hilarity, slides gently and deftly into the paradise of his first experience with poetry:
“…thinking back to the seventeen-year-old who, wandering the public library of Forsyth, Missouri, inexplicably leafed through a tattered Norton Anthology and for the first time came truly face-to-face with a poem’s mysterious verb-visage. He still remembered the one that did it for him—Roethke’s “The Waking,” funnily enough. So take the lively air, / And, lovely, learn by going where to go, he recited to Liz.”
When Liz responds to Mark in kind, the two friends see one another truly, something they generally can’t do throughout the story:
“Yes, Liz said, I know exactly what you mean. Frank O’Hara did it for me, she said. Which one? Mark asked. Liz said, “Animals,” to which Mark replied, We didn’t need speedometers / we could manage cocktails out of ice and water, and Liz wanted to hug her friend.”
These two passages betray something fragile nestled beneath the satire of “Pardon Edward Snowden”: affection for these poets, for their basic insecurities. Those same fears also spawn the writerly egotism O’Neill ridicules, but the story doesn’t lose a begrudging heart for them.
It’s a warm heart, giving that warm-hearted rebuke I like most in ironic humor. The depth of O’Neill’s kindness does depend on how you feel about grown men reciting poetry without warning. I’ve heard that proctologists and hitchhikers dislike that kind of thing.
And O’Neill’s heart isn’t warm enough for cuddling: did I mention that Mark was “outed as a cuckold and outed from his house” well before he received the poetition? There’s no shortage of Mark’s misery for our entertainment, even if our laughter isn’t completely heartless.
And not that O’Neill means the story to rebuke the actual pretension-packed poets of the world for their own revelatory betterment, because—one more time for everyone in the back—most comic fiction doesn’t aim for social renewal as Christ did. That’s just fine, it might even be the preferable option for mortal writers. But the means are shared: irony with an affectionate concern for the ironized, which is more than enough for my own understanding and my own fiction.
The Words and Laughter of the Comic
Comedy that keeps a heart (and perhaps a cushioned seat) for the butt of the joke shares the vision of the poet W.H. Auden in his essay “The Globe”: “In Christian comedy the characters are exposed and forgiven: when the curtain falls, the audience and the characters are laughing together.” He addresses the basic, elephantine question of humor: am I being laughed at, or laughed with?
When Auden claims that “Christian comedy is based upon the belief that all men are sinners; no one, therefore, whatever his rank or talents, can claim immunity from the comic exposure,” his thoughts foreshadow those of Merrill and Mosebach. Who, when paired, sound either like a New Jersey law firm or a classical music duo.
“Christian comedy believes we are forbidden to judge others,” Auden continues. If not to judge ourselves for our fallen human nature, then to “luxuriate” in that nature, as Gioia says? Is this how we can laugh with our jokes’ subjects rather than at them? They aren’t judged, though our shared laughter doesn’t mean they’re excused.
Though it may surprise you given my great seriousness, I myself am often laughed at. Almost always, those laughing are my parents, siblings, and spouse. We share a constant ribbing humor, no matter the occasion or subject. If we were observed like wild macaws by a biologist, we might even be labeled “verbally abusive” and “callous.” It is how we speak and laugh together, and I love it.
Not that I’ve always loved it. When I was a child, I sense I was being laughed at, not laughed with. It was paranoid defense of my insecurities, which, like the picking of the nose, every child does. At that time, I wasn’t yet mature enough to understand a humor that maintained its heart, nor to disguise my fears in humor like healthy adults do. As I said, it was all very normal.
My behavior, of course, was also normal and undeserving of mockery. During one barbecue with family friends, I came in from the backyard and walked face-first into the closed sliding glass door. It had somehow appeared before me, totally without warning.
My parents, sitting inside with the other adults, looked to the window, no doubt expecting that one of the milling dogs or a large lost bird had smacked against the glass. There I stood, dazed. My parents’ friends looked between me and my parents in alarm. My parents, with the timing of seasoned stage actors, broke into laughter.
Their laughter rang in my ears for a long time after that (unless the ringing was my untreated concussion). In that moment, I was undoubtedly being laughed at. Hearing them laugh, even seeing them double over with laughter, felt unkind. Even if they were laughing at how I’d failed to open a door with my face.
Then, I hadn’t yet learned to laugh at myself. But, as only families can, my family taught me by example. I picked it up. It’s a healthier, truer way to exist. And in my family I received no other option, frankly.
We’re lucky to laugh together often, and we’re luckier to laugh at ourselves often. Both require mockery—teasing from the great, toughened affection that only close loved ones can share. This loving mockery is one of our languages. It’s one of our checks on the excesses of our personalities, delivered not with tears or snarls but with giggles, shrugs, and the sense of our redeemed sins.
So I laugh at my brief stint as a battering ram, and I even retell it in greater detail for captive readers who didn’t ask for it. Because it is hilarious. And it’s a thumping example of my family’s own idiosyncratic version of Christian mockery, laughter by sinners and with sinners.
And if you need the quality of your sliding-glass doors tested, you know where to reach me. I will accept only novels or Texas-style barbecue as payment, along with the expected icepack.
Ahead of today’s essay, I’d planned to include many other writers and elements: John Cheever the cosmic joker, G.K. Chesterton (a Catholic writer dubbed “the prince of paradox”), and even how the prophet Elijah laid into the prophets of Baal in 1 Kings 18 (that recommendation came from William Collen, a Stylist reader and indispensable writer).
Someday I’ll sneak Cheever into this newsletter. Someday I’ll read Chesterton beyond his poignant Englishman’s epigrams. Today, I couldn’t stuff more names or jokes into this essay. As they do in real life, my written anecdotes and opinions sucked air from those around them to the point of suffocation. But at least I get to keep my spot in the Committee of Self-Appointed Internet Essayists, Critics, and Quibblers (along with both my hands).
Was there any joker, from the Bible or from fiction, that mocks like a Christian? Let me know in the comments—feel free to include a jokey jab, if you want. It’ll tell me that you enjoyed today’s reading.
Thanks for being here, y’all. I’ll be in touch again on April 21, when I tangle with that shaggy old Russian moralist-master, Leo Tolstoy, for your viewing pleasure.
I think of Isaiah 44:9-20 where the prophet points out the ridiculousness of idolatry with imagery that often strikes me as a little funny.
“He burns half of it in the fire; With this half he eats meat; He roasts a roast, and is satisfied. He even warms himself and says, “Ah! I am warm, I have seen the fire.””
- Isaiah 44:16 NKJV
The same tree becomes fuel for the fire and a “god” to worship and yet the idolater totally misses the irony of it all.
Excellent. There is also a difference between the humor that puts we prone-to-hubris mortals in our place, which you describe, and the humor which belittles, which I would argue is always off-limits. However there can be a fine and too-easily-crossed line between the two.
Perhaps the difference lies in the relational element. Humor that mocks is, especially in the Bible, meant to hold one up to a higher example ("you shouldn't worship idols / be legalistic / etc, and you know this, but you won't admit it so I'm going to roast you"), but the belittling humor is exclusionary ("you are and always will be the other").