When was the moment that you learned how to play?
Not: when did you start playing?
When was the moment that you figured out playing was fun?
Maybe I’m way too in my head, but I remember as a kid sitting in a classroom and watching this kid named Keith joking around with a sorta dorky kid. Keith loved to joke around. He was definitely the class clown in our early years. And from what I recall he was never ill-intentioned when he poked fun at someone. I remember feeling like he would let you in on the joke.
I was the shy kid. So not only did I not talk to anyone but no one really talked to me. And instead I would just watch and observe. My personality type from the jump was one that had to be learned. Where some kids naturally start crawling to get to their mother, I probably was more of the kid who started crawling and was looking down at my hands and feet like “why am I walking around this place like a dog? Why can’t I walk like that(looking at normal humans walking upright)?”
With being the observer that I am I noticed that Keith when he poked fun at people, not only did he invite you in on the joke but the kid who was the butt of the joke could even start laughing at the situation. People liked Keith because he made the room fun. He made the room laugh.
What’s interesting to me as I overanalyze this whole dynamic of kids goofing around in a classroom is that kids play so much but it’s not because life is unserious.
Anyone who has worked with kids for any given period of time knows that children can carry a lot on their shoulders. In a classroom you never know what a kid is coming to school with. You have no idea what is left for them to return to when they get home. Trauma starts at a young age and that is why comedy is often birthed in these moments.
A child’s way to survive horrible circumstances is not to get a job, go to therapy, or remake your identity. A child’s way to survive is to turn their world into a playground.
This is why kids are notorious on Christmas Day for unwrapping their brand new Mongoose bike out of the box and after a couple minutes of pedaling, finding a way to turn that box into a house or a rocket ship or a hiding place to scare the living day lights out of their mom.
Comedy is playful. It is likely one of the first instincts we learn as humans to do. To play with the environment we are in.
Know Your Enviroment
You know that moment where you are sitting in church and there’s a kid sitting on the pew in front of you who just stares at you. You are trying your hardest to focus on the sermon that this pastor has labored over for the past week but it’s hard not to play with this kid.
It’s hard to be serious in not only a situation like a church service that requires you to be serious but has the obstacle of a prop that calls your attention way from the seriousness you are existing in.
Every room if you are aware has sometime of prop. A tool, a device that lends itself to comedy. Sometimes this prop is the other human who is so abnormal from the rest of the group that they don’t even realize how out of place they are. But you do. And you cannot help but to call attention to the oddball scenario that exists in the room.
Or maybe you have a prop like a pair of bunny ears. There’s no reason a normal human person should wear bunny ears and try to have a serious conversation with you but if you see a pair of bunny ears or a pair of funny glasses its hard to resist the urge to put these props on as if it is completely normal for you to wear them.
Props are gifts from God I believe. They are the elements in the room that God has placed amongst us to remind us to play.
Because we often forget.
Life gets hard and burdensome.
We need some kind of relief and too often if you are like myself you find yourself getting caught in the current of taking life too serious.
This is why Jesus’ little line about being like a kid resonates on so many different levels for me.
So what I want to do now is help you see some of the humor you can find in the Bible.
Laughter is a gift from God. It’s a specific emotion and ability built into us as humans that turns bad situations good.
So the way I want to share about the humor you can find in your Bibles is by breaking down a few different types of comedy and then providing some biblical examples to help you make the connection.
The types of comedy I want to share with you are:
- Satire
- Prop
- Observational
- Dark Comedy
Now to be clear there are other types of comedy out there in the world but these four are the ones I want us to focus on for our task at hand.
Satire
Satire is a comedic device where a person uses irony or exaggeration to poke fun at something very real. Satire is closely related to parody and the beauty of this form of comedy is its ability to give an alternative take. It holds a mirror up to reality in a way that looks very similar but where it differs highlights the absurdity of whatever is real. And at times, satire is more real than reality itself.
The best example of this is the movie Shrek. Shrek is a story poking fun at the common and most well known fairy tales Disney has to offer. Where Disney pumped out Cinderella, Snow White, and Rapunzel all finding their Prince Charming and living happily ever after; the story of Shrek is about what happens when Prince Charming is actually an ugly ogre. What happens when sleeping beauty was locked in a tower for so long she was fully awake when Prince Charming finally showed up. Or what if Prince charming did not come on a noble steed but rather with a talking donkey?
Shrek pokes fun at the common fairy tale trope at every angle. This is why the movie starts off with Shrek reading you a fairy tale out of a book only to finish by ripping a page out, slamming the book shut and wiping his butt with it. And that’s why it was so popular. We all knew thanks to Disney how the story should go, but Shrek stopped giving us the fairytales and instead gave us an alternative take. It taught us the best lesson about expectations and what to really be looking for in a partner.
The story of Jonah is much the same. The book of Jonah according to critical scholarship suggest the story is parody/satire. It’s telling a story about a prophet, a man of God. But at every turn where you think you know what a man of God would do, how he would act, you are given the exact opposite.
Jonah should be the prophet who when called by God to go preach to the Ninevites does what he is called to do. That’s what a faithful man of God would do. That’s how the story should go.
Instead, the story pokes fun at the reality of prophets being mere men. They too fall short. They do not follow the commands of God like you would expect. And at every moment you have a feeling that maybe Jonah has learned his lesson you get caught laughing and saying audibly “what the heck is wrong with this guy?” Because he once again fails to follow God’s commands.
Where a prophet when he is called by God should respond with immediate obedience, Jonah responds with disobedience. Where a prophet would go to Nineveh, Jonah goes the opposite direction towards Tarshish. Where a prophet would repent of their sin, Jonah repents and then back tracks. Where a prophet would look down with joy at God saving people, Jonah looks down in anger wishing for wrath to come upon them. Jonah is a book that uses satire to poke fun at how the story “should” go, and meets us where we are. And this is where the power of satire can come in because if you are like me then you relate way more to Jonah’s disposition than to how the prophet’s story should go. The satire, the comedy felt more like reality than the fairy tale.
Prop
Steve Martin may be one of the best/most famous prop comedians in our lifetime. He literally got his start doing magic tricks and wearing bunny ears while in a suit on stage. Steve came up in the comedy scene before he made it big with his ‘Cheaper By The Dozen’ films, or the “Only Murders in the Building’ or ‘The Jerk’, ‘Father of the Bride’, ‘Bringing Down the House’, the list could go on and on but the point is what we know him for today is not how he started off. He started working in Disney Land constantly bouncing between the two magic shops. This is a form of comedy that I have already mentioned about before. It’s the form of comedy that uses props, little devices or tricks in order to land the joke. For Steve, you could see him using balloon animals, an arrow through the head, juggling or playing a banjo as props for his comedy routine.
There is another character in the Bible who uses a prop to poke fun at his opponents. This character goes by the name of Elijah.
In 1 Kings 18 we are set up with a scene with Elijah being the last remaining prophet of Yahweh for the people of Israel. And as the people of Israel gather along with the 450 prophets of Baal Elijah issues a challenge. His challenge is one that will definitively prove who the one true God is.
So the scene is set, both groups are given a bull, chopped in pieces, placed on some wood but not lit for a fire. The challenge that will prove which god is the one true god is that both parties will petition to their god and ask for a fire to be sent down on this bull they have prepared.
This seems like a very serious moment. Their faith, their religion, their identity is on the line. And you are on the edge of your seat wondering whose god will show up? Whose god will have their back?
Elijah though immediately starts off having some fun with this challenge.
He starts off willfully taking the disadvantage. He says “Since you are so numerous, choose for yourselves one bull and prepare it first. Then call on the name of your god but don’t light the fire.”1
The people call out to their god Baal and there is a deafening silence. To ease the awkwardness of calling out to someone who isn’t there, the people start dancing around the fire. Just imagine that for a moment. The embarrassment these people must be feeling. Their grasping for straws and the challenge just started.
The author goes on to say:
At noon Elijah mocked them. He said, “Shout loudly, for he’s a god! Maybe he’s thinking it over; maybe he has wandered away; or maybe he’s on the road. Perhaps he’s sleeping and will wake up!”2
Notice the prop Elijah set up to tease the people with was the fire. The people are crying out to the sky for their god to light a fire and when he doesn’t they choose to dance all through the night around the burn pile in hopes maybe this will please Baal enough to show up. Elijah having some fun teases them. He proposes that maybe Baal is too much in his head or has gone for a walk. Maybes he sleeping and needs the people to be louder in order to wake up from his nap.
The story goes on with the people cutting themselves and the scene suddenly takes a violent and bloody turn. The people are desperate. And soon Elijah decides to land the plane.
So he calls the people over to him and he repairs the altar. But he does not just repair the altar and gets it ready for Yahweh to light it up. Elijah then takes a turn. He sabotages the fire pit. He tells the people to pour gallons of water all over the wood and the bull and even creates a trench of water around the altar. He lowers the odds of a fire being able to be lit.
He calls on Yahweh and a fire comes down and consumes the altar and the text says “it licked up the water that was in the trench.”3
Elijah had fun through this apologetic masterclass. He poked fun, he used a prop, he went out of his way to be the underdog in order for God to get all the glory for the fire. What I love about this set up is how Elijah raised the stakes but also lowered himself in order for Yahweh to show up in an even more profound way.
Paul says in 1 Corinthians:
Instead, God has chosen what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God has chosen what is insignificant and despised in the world—what is viewed as nothing—to bring to nothing what is viewed as something4
If Yahweh lit the fire as is, that would have been impressive and won the battle but because Elijah had fun introducing Yahweh to people raising the stakes and taking the role of someone at a major disadvantage made the testing hit just a little bit harder.
Because teasing someone can become bullying very fast. But Elijah teases but then makes the challenge for himself a little bit harder. He lowers himself in the battle of the gods. In a way he lets his opponents in on the joke.
When it comes to apologetics this is a good lesson to one “let God show up”. But also, you can tease, you can poke fun at but if you do so in an arrogant way you just come off as a jerk. Elijah won the people over because when they were at their lowest, he got lower. He drenched the fire pit in water giving them a leg up.
When it comes to apologetics, the art of defending your faith, we must remember that we are for the people not against them. Throughout our entire conversation, our dialogue, our debate the one thing that should be the most amplified in our rhetoric is not that we know more but that we are rooting for our opponent.
Observational
One of my favorite comedians of all time is Sebastian Maniscalco. Sebastian is known for his observational/physical style of stand up comedy. He serves as the straight man in a world that is full of weirdos and crazy feats that challenge the neurosis of the normal man.
Throughout his stand up routine you see the world through his lens. And as he is describing the world he lives in you are in awe at every twist and turn wondering “what the heck is wrong with people?!”
It’s hard to not observe the craziness of the world we live in today. Things feel like they keep getting weirder.
A good example of having a first person point of view that turns out to be pretty comedic is the story of Abraham’s life. You know, Father Abraham who had many sons?
Abraham is the pillar of the top three religions birthed out of the Middle East and yet the pillar for the big three is also a bit of an idiot.
Throughout his story you find yourself scratching your head, in awe and shock, and busting out laughing because “why did he just do that?”
My favorite piece of comedy from Abraham’s life story is about how he lied to the Pharaoh about who his wife is.
In chapter 12 of Genesis the scene is set up with a famine hitting the land requiring Abram(his name at the time) and his wife Sarai moving to Egypt because the famine was too much to ride out. As they are about to enter into Egypt Abram leans over to his wife not to say “baby, welcome to our new home” but to say “I know what a beautiful woman you are”…so that I don’t die “please say you’re my sister so it will go well for me.”5
At this point in the story you pause. You shake your head and think “what a wild pitch that was to make” but you keep going because this is an ancient book and ancient people did some weird things.
Like you could probably predict as the normal person you are, Sarai agrees to this plan to act like her husband’s sister only to have the plan fall into place the exact way it was designed.
Abram wanted his wife to act like she was a single hottie with a body in the land of Egypt yet assumed, at least you’d think, that no one was gonna try to get with her?????
Pharaoh sees Sarai’s beauty, takes Abram on his word that this woman is his sister and brings her into his household…
Pause.
God has to step in a get Pharoah’s attention with plagues in order to stop Abram’s very dumb idea from going any further. It’s crazy because for Abram to be the father of our faith. The patriarch, you end up reading this story rooting for Pharaoh because he seems like the only one who acted rationally.
But of course the Bible would not be the Bible without some repetition so if you skip ahead further on Abram’s life to where he is renamed ‘Abraham’ in Genesis 20 we come across our father plotting the same dumb idea.
I say dumb idea so much because it was dumb. There is no way around it. So again, Abraham travels to a new land again and when he was staying with Gerar he says his famous line that of course will have no bad consequences to follow: “She is my sister”.6
King Abimelech hears this and again because Sarai is so beautiful she is brought into the King’s household.
God again has to step in and reveal to the King in a dream that the woman he just brought into his household is a married woman. At this point in the story you just have a sigh of relief that God stepped in. A sigh of exhaustion with Abraham’s character because how did he think this would go?
Did he think this would go better than the last time?
Is Abraham so ready to move on that he is begging someone to take his wife?
Who knows? And that’s kind of the point in observational humor. We look out at the world in all of its craziness and ask the question “what the heck are you doing right now?” Because people do the dumbest things. And they do them over and over and over again. And that’s part of the beauty in the Bible is that you will read about these characters making the same horrible decisions over and over again and the goal is not for you to sanitize the story and make it kid friendly like VeggieTales. The goal is not for you to turn the idiots in the Bible into heroes.
The goal is for you to recognize you do the same thing. Maybe you haven’t walked into a job interview bringing along your wife just to tell your potential employer “hey, you see that hottie over there, she’s my sister and you can have her if you give me a nice job with great benefits!”
But I’m sure you find yourself making thoughtless decisions time and time again expecting different results and ending up with God having to get your attention through other means because you are just as stubborn and dumb as any of the silly stories you end up reading in the Bible. In your reading of the Bible you are not David like Matt Chandler says. Instead you are the butt of the joke. You are the weirdo in the grocery store, you are the guy or gal in the room who every one is laughing at not with because you are doing some weird jui-jitzu levels moves with no real training.
But sometimes comedy can get a little dark. I love dark humor. I love comedy that can get offensive. I love humor that crosses a line that’s not acceptable in every room. I love jokes that make people question “is Austin a sick person?” So let me introduce you to dark comedy.
Dark Comedy
SNL alum Bill Hader shocked the world when he left his goofiness on the stage at 30 Rock and really made a reputable name for himself when he starred in the HBO series ‘BARRY’.
Barry is the story of a depressed hitman who on a mission to take out his next target finds himself in an acting class and finding joy in a profession so far the opposite of what he’s built his life on.
Throughout the series you see Barry wrestling through this double life he is living. One moment sniping the heads off of bad guys to delivering a wonderful performance as he channels all his pain and rage from murdering people into the play that would be a make it or break it for his love interest.
Dark comedy is very specific. It involves the ability to make someone laugh with the ability to play with tragedy and gore.
Some popular examples would be the stand up comedian Anthony Jeslenick, the Marvel movie ‘Deadpool’, or the Sitcom ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’. Dark Comedy is humor that plays with the darkest moments in our lives. Death and the most horrible things imaginable in this life are not off the table when it comes to the jokes.
One story in particular stood out to me when I was thinking through how the Bible can represent some dark comedy. And if you’re new to the Bible this is a great place to start if you think the book as a whole is uninteresting.
In 2 Kings we come into contact with a prophet, the successor of Elijah. This new prophet’s name is Elisha. Similar but different.
And with this story I think we need to just read the text, pause, and then read some more.
He went up from there to Bethel, and while he was going up on the way, some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him, saying, “Go up, you baldhead! Go up, you baldhead!”7
What a line! These kids see this bald headed Prophet and they let the insults loose. If you’re new to comedy this is what we call “roasting”. You may be familiar with it since Netflix has revitalized the art form and just released their newest addition targeting Kevin Hart. Side note, if you want to hear some dark comedy, just go watch that roast.
The problem with roasts and comedy in general is you may be free to say whatever you want. Whatever jokes you want to make are all on the table. One of my personal favorite comedians Andrew Schulz makes this argument that comedians are free to say whatever joke they want but the audience is also allowed to be offended by whatever joke they hear. Both groups have the right to say and feel whatever it is that they say and feel. 8
One of Andrew’s co-hosts on his ‘Brilliant Idiots’ podcast named Charlamagne though adds a little more to that conversation by having repeatedly said in response to Andrew’s take that what we say has consequences. So in the context of our modern day America where freedom of speech is a high value especially amongst comedians, the other side of that coin is that people have the right to be offended and whoever is the offender needs to be mindful that the offended might also hold you to your words. Whether right or wrong, joking or serious. Words do matter.
And in the case for these young boys, their words mattered because Elisha responds by turning towards them, “cursed them out in the name of the Lord”9, and as he is walking away from the situation two she-bears come out and “tore forty-two of the boys”. Chris Rock only thought getting slapped was the worst thing that could happen to you doing comedy.
But this is where reading the Bible with a comedic lens can give room for some of the tougher stories we come across. Instead of ignoring moments like this in your Bible or sanitizing them in a way that makes Esther look like the Virgin Mary; there is another way to read our Bibles.
Honestly.
When we honestly read our Bibles there will be moments where we get angry, or sad, or confused, or we just laugh out loud. Emotions are not inherently evil. God gives us this ability to feel and when we take that ability away from our Bible reading then we miss the point in the stories.
What is Comedy?
Jordan Peele says:
When you tap into something that you’re not supposed too talk about, there’s an exultant that comes with it. There’s an explosion of pent up energy and pent-up expression that has just been bounding up around inside of you. And that is the essence of why comedy and art…is important.10
The Bible is not all comedy. But it does have comedy within it. And one tool that has greatly impacted my reading of the Bible and helped to make the experience richer was when I fell in love with comedy.
Comedy gave me a lens to see the world through. It helped me accept the reality of the pain we experience in this world and turn what is real into a playground.
There is a sad distortion of what it means to be a Christian that has seeped into our bones I believe way more than we realize. This distortion is that as a Christian we must take life too serious. Comedy is then pushed to the side and treated as a distraction. And when it is used, it’s used at its lowest form.
As Christians I think we lost the art of having fun. We became so focused on what we cannot do and on the guilt we should feel that we forgot to turn this world into a playground. We forgot to become like a child. Children play with whatever is in front of them. And as Christians I think we are called to that. We are called to give people an alternative lens on how to see the world. Where culture has taught people to see themselves as a victim and to see their trauma as knotches in a belt or a loaded bag meant to weigh you down, the Christian worldview teaches us to redeem all things. Comedy is just one of God’s tools to do that with.
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