Text and Talk
March 29, 2025 – Zoom Only
“A TIME TO WEEP AND A TIME TO LAUGH”
A Grossly Limited Look at Comedy and Humor
Via Paul Johnson, GK Chesterton, and Peter Kreeft
Nancy Lovell
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“Humor will save the world,”Fr. Paul Murray, O.P., says in Light at the Torn Horizon, a book of poetry. Peter Kreeft uses Fr. Murray’s line to open chapter nine—Humor and Jesus—in his 2022 book HA!: A Christian Philosophy of Humor. Dr. Kreeft’s book came to me as I was reading Paul Johnson’s Humorists, subtitled: From Hogarth to Noel Coward. So two books on humor. Or should I say, one about humor—something a person may perceive and express—and one about comedy, with its ideas of structure and performance.
Kreeft is a philosopher; Johnson’s turf is history. Kreeft’s chapters examine humor within timeless concepts like Health, Truth, Beauty, and Suffering . . . and Jesus. The last third of his book simply tells jokes in categories from “religious,” “Irish,” and “Jewish” to One-Liners and Philosophical jokes.
While Kreeft shows how humor applies, Johnson traces comedy through some of its stars. In the way that three of his books—Intellectuals, Creators, and Heroes—survey their subjects through cases in point, Humorists considers comedy through the wits who embody it or would seem to. (Ironically, some were privately despondent.) Since a couple of names in Johnson’s table of contents surprise me, it’s worth noting his complete list: Ben Franklin, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Rowlandson (for both satirical and bawdy prints), Charles Dickens, Toulouse-Lautrec, G.K. Chesterton, Damon Runyon, W.C. Fields, Charlie Chaplin, Laurel & Hardy, the Marx Brothers, and James Thurber. His final and very-British chapter is “Noel Coward, Nancy Mitford, and Class.”
(My question: Was Mark Twain an oversight?)
Johnson uses terms like “dark,” “bawdy,” “satire,” and “sarcasm.” Kreeft’s lexicon leans to healthy, happiness, holiness, truth, and goodness. Kreeftconsiders humor’s source in the Creator. Johnson looks at it through humans looking at the human condition.
“Laughter is like dreams,” Johnson says early on. “We know as much about it now as we did five thousand years ago, and no more.” The Old Testament’s twenty-six laughs, he says, show no pattern and fail to explain why we laugh. The first recorded laughter, in Genesis 18, around 1500 BC, came when a visitor told ninety-year-old Abraham that his wife, Sarah, would have a son. Sarah, eavesdropping, bursts out in laughter.
Johnson calls her response—“After I have waxed old, shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also?” the first dirty joke. God calls it ungrateful, and Sarah tries in vain to backpedal.
Laughter is no joke,” Johnson says, because there’s no such thing as a simple laugh, or even an innocent one. The most common version, especially collective laughter, means someone’s distress, perplexity, or discomfort. He quotes Matthew Arnold in Empedocles on Etna: “The gods laugh in their sleeve / To watch man doubt and fear.” Homer says the gods laugh all at once, outright, at man’s peril. In Leviathan, Homer defines laughter as “nothing but sudden glory arising from a sudden conception of some eminence in ourselves by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly.”
Humorist Max Beerbohm said public humor delights in suffering and contempt for the unfamiliar. Author and journalist Arthur Koestler spoke of “something nasty about a laugh . . . irrespective of its sophistication or those enjoying it.” The Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert of S. Africa, Koestler said, would laugh to see a fatally wounded springbok continue to jump and kick.
It gets darker. Henri Bergson, the French-Jewish philosopher, said all laughter is an unavowed intention to humiliate and so correct our neighbor. Mirth, he said, is the collective punishment of society on the unsociable individual.
Jean-Paul Sartre told Johnson in 1953 that his, Satre’s, ability to make people laugh saved his life at school. The laugher intensified, Satre said, if he could direct it at a particular little boy even more miserable and friendless than he was, so that’s what he did.
As for the physicality of laughter, which Proverb’s 17:22 compares to taking good medicine, it’s said to improve our intake of oxygen-rich air, stimulate our heart, lungs, and muscles, and increase our brain’s release of endorphins.
Somewhere Freud is nodding at that. He also said laughter is a release from tension. Koestler more darkly called it a trigger release from repressed sadism, sexual arousal, and so on. His contemporary arbiters of taste found laughter vulgar or offensive—poor form for a gentleman. Jane Austin seemed to think the style of a person’s laughter said something about social standing. Goethe believed a woman could laugh but a man should keep a straight face. Pre-WWI, the commander of the Death’s Head regiment of Hussars told his officers to keep their laughs “short, sharp, and manly.” “You are not tradespeople, Jews or Poles,” he said.
The Germans appear to have been model non-laughers. Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke was said to have laughed only twice: once when told that a certain French fortress was impregnable, and once when his mother-in-law died. Martin Heidegger is said to have laughed once. At a picnic with Ernst Junger, Junger leaned over to pick up a sauerkraut and sausage roll, splitting his lederhosen with a tremendous crack; Heidegger was only human.
All the best German jokes, said Stephen Spender, who tried to write a book about interwar Berlin, are unconscious.
In that spirit, Freud liked puns, which Karl Marx hated—including Engles’ puns. In Paradise Lost, Milton famously placed we’d consider an off-color pun about an elephant. Charles Lamb, for his part, named puns one of the great tripods of life’s pleasures, with drinking gin and smoking. He hoped “the last breath I draw in this world will be through a pipe and exhaled in a pun.”
Leave it to Anglo-Saxon kings—and the Normans and the Plantagenet rulers—to officialize jesters and songmakers. In the early Tudor period, 1485 to 1547, King Henry VII, never known to smile, let alone laugh, set up the Office of Revels. The master of the revels was a high court post held by an aristocratic and permanent official named Richard Gibson, an impresario and history maker himself. Johnson goes into detail about Gibson, “to make the point,” he says, “that behind the laugher of the ages are dull, industrious little men who made all possible and well-run organizations which provided the platform.”
Shakespeare was first to not only to make jokes but to write movingly, and illuminatingly, of those who did it for a living. Johnson says the eulogy of Yorick, which Johnson put into the mouth of Hamlet in the graveyard scene, is a milestone. The catchphrase, that mighty tool of mirth and easy memory, was invented in the 18th century. If I’m not mistaken, it’s antecedents were in politics.
What provokes laughter? Simple. “Chaos contemplated in safety,” Johnson would say, in the way disturbances in the bowels of the earth lead to earthquakes, geysers, tidal waves, and avalanches. Chaos comes in many varieties and therein lies the art of humorists like Hogarth and Thomas Rowlandson, W.C. Fields, Laurel & Hardy, Groucho Marx, Evelyn Waugh, and James Thurber. . ..
Besides the chaos variety, Johnson says, other humorists “look for and find, and analyze, the worrying exuberance, and sheer egregious weirdness of the individual human being and present them vividly and accurately for our delight.” We call that observational comedy. For that Johnson cites Toulouse-Lautrec, GB Shaw, Runyon, Dickens, and Chesterton. Still other powerful humorists catch the interplay between different classes, races, nationalities, and ages. His cases in point: Noel Coward, Charlie Chapin, P.G. Wodehouse, and Nancy Mitford. In an age of political correctness, he adds in 2010, many types of this kind of humor are censored or punished.
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Humor is essential, G.K. Chesterton said, to understanding how life, society, and human nature can at the same time be both absurd and meaningful. For Chesterton, humor was not its own end. “I never in my life said anything merely because I thought it was funny,” he said, “though of course I have an ordinary human vainglory and may have thought it was funny because I said it.”
To his thinking humor should be always and everywhere welcome, especially in religious discussions because Christianity properly understood was the last haven of secret jokes, “the smile on the face of a tortured world.” He shared an era with Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, Arnold Schoenberg, Gustov Holst, and Winston Churchill. But only Chesterton and Churchill, Johnson said, combined deadly serious purpose with an outstanding sense of humor, in part thanks to skipping college. “Both . . . were able to develop their individual personalities without Oxbridge inhibitions and affectation,” Johnson said. Churchill, though, was an activist and a pragmatist where Chesterton was liable to lock himself into his imagination and idealism. Chesterton “was born to believe.”
And born to be lost, his wife, Frances, might add. The evening of their honeymoon he set out to get something and got hopelessly lost. Frances once received a cable from him saying simply, “Am in Market Harborough. Where should I be?”
A favorite of both Johnson and Kreeft, Chesterton seems to straddle the gulf of unkindness separating the evolution of comedy and the Spirit of humor. Chesterton and Shaw, his famous sparring partner, proved the potency of humor many times. “I am proud of him as a foe,” Chesterton wrote of Shaw, “even more than as a friend.”
Once in a famous debate, Shaw patted Chesterton on his huge belly and said, “What are you doing to name it when it’s born?”
“If it’s a boy, I’ll call him John,” Chesterton said. “If a girl I shall name her Mary. But if it’s gas I shall call it George Bernard Shaw.”
Humor and joy and God were of a piece for Chesterton. He’d quote Thomas Carlyle’s “Men are mostly fools,” adding, “Christianity, with a surer and more reverend realism, says they are all fools.” But to Chesterton fool was another name for jester, and Christianity brought out the jester in man.
“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting,” Chesterton said in his perpetual quest to crowd infinite wisdom into one-liners. “It has been found difficult and left untried.”
“A characteristic of the great saints,” Chesterton said in Orthodoxy, “is their power of levity. Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly. . . . Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity. One ‘settles down’ into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay self-forgetfulness . . . for solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.”
“The act of laughing at something shows that you understand its limitations,” Chesterton said in Orthodoxy. “It shows you can see what is exaggerated and what is out of proportion.” Kreeft included Chesterton, author and essayist, in his list of “One Hundred Greatest Philosophers.”
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What about Lewis? C.S. Lewis is known less for quips and humor than his grasp of joy. In The Screwtape Letters, Uncle Screwtape defines laughter under the headings of Joy, Fun, Jokes, and Flippancy. “Emotional froth,” Screwtape calls fun—too closely related to joy. Johnson added that fun walks a line when used as a pretext to introduce sex, or mockery, or irreverence.
So comedy can be cruel. And laughter masks and unmasks dark desires . . . and yet, and yet. “All who go to hell, like the Devil, have no sense of humor,” Kreeft says. “They cannot let go of their sins and laugh at their own stupidity . . . they cannot go along with God’s great joke. They are scandalized by God’s great laughter: salvation and simple seriousness are mutually exclusive.
“What God did in Christ to save us is the greatest of all tragedies in the services of the greatest of all comedies. The Cross is both the most horrific evil and suffering that ever happened AND the greatest joke every told, the one played on the Devil.”
No part of this essay does justice to its subject. The most I can do is stir a little conversation and hope to send you to the books I’m quoting. I close with a passage from Kreeft’s HA! on the things that make us both laugh and cry.
Philosophy and jokes should not be alien to each other, for the point of “the love of wisdom” is wisdom, and the point of jokes is laughter, and both wisdom and laughter serve the same end, namely human happiness. And I mean by “happiness” not the shallow, modern meaning of mere subjective satisfaction but in the deep, classical sense of “eudaimonia”: objectively true completion, fullness of being, flourishing. We are not complete, not completely real, if we lose our sense of humor.
Here are seven of the greatest and most mysterious things in life. They are also seven of the things that make us the happiest:
- Beauty
- Mystical experience
- Romantic love
- Music
- Humor
- Sanctity, i.e. genuinely self-forgetful altruistic love
- Wonder and worship in adoration of God
(Note: What about friendship?)
These are seven essential and not accidental properties of human beings that distinguish us from all the other animals. As Chesterton said, “Alone among the animals, man is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter.” Many philosophers and scientists have written about all five of these properties, but no philosopher has ever given an adequate explanation of any one of them. They are all mysterious, and express themselves paradoxically, by tears that weep and laugh at the same time, like Sam Gamgee’s foretaste of heaven at the end of The Lord of the Rings:
“And . . . to Sam’s final and complete satisfaction and pure joy, a minstrel of Gondor stood forth, and knelt, and begged leave to sing. And behold! He said: ‘. . . I will sing to you of Frodo of the Nine Fingers and the Ring of Doom.’ And when Sam heard that he laughed aloud for sheer delight, and he stood up and cried, ‘O great glory and splendor’ . . . And then he wept. And all the host laughed and wept, and in the middle of their merriment and tears the clear voice of the minstrel rose like silver and gold, and all men were hushed. And he sang to them, now in the elven tongue, now in the speech of the West, until their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness.”
We are that host—Kreeft says—who laugh and weep together. We weep because Tolkien’s art has done its highest and holiest task: It has broken our hearts. CS Lewis wrote:
“Have you not seen
In all our days
Of any human work or art,
Our truest and sincerest praise
Means, when all’s said, ‘You break my heart’?”
When the heart breaks, blood and water flow out. When we laugh, we become fluid. And we overflow our container. The container is the self. The self, paradoxically, cannot contain itself. It has overcome the most serious law of all, the logical law of identity, that a thing is itself, that X is X, and not non-X. But sometimes X is non-X, and that’s hilarious! Of course I don’t understand it. That would spoil it.
I’ll close, as Kreeft did, with this from Chesterton.
Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian. . . . The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual.
The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed his tears. He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of his native city. Yet He concealed something.
Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet he restrained something.
I say it with reverence: there was something in that shattering personality that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when he walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied it was his mirth.
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