Catholic Exchange

Death and Laughter

Written by

Mark Shea

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My wife Janet lay there next to me, propped up on one elbow and rolling her eyes. The only thing worse than a dumb joke is a dumb joke you've heard before. So I sat little Luke up on my chest and said, “I don't know, Luke. I thought it was a good joke. What did you think?”

He instantly barfed on me.

Janet fell over backward laughing and eventually slid off the bed in her convulsive hysteria. It was several minutes before I could get a coherent word out of her.

I looked at Luke, grinning his two-tooth grin. “Everyone's a critic,” I said.

Laughter is uniquely human. Dour philosophers have spent millennia trying to figure out what distinguishes us from the beasts. If they weren't dour, they would have known: nothing else in nature cracks up at jokes. Oh sure, hyenas laugh. But this has as much to do with humor as a parrot reciting the Lord's Prayer has to do with worship. Hyenas laugh at jokes, but they don't get them. Only we do.

That is because only we humans notice incongruities are funny. Things that seem odd together are always funny. Also, things that are serious are funny while things that are lightweight are not. It is much funnier when Pope John Paul peeks through his “Junior Bird Man” hand goggles than when a clown does it. The joke is funny because the Bishop of Rome is serious. Likewise, sex is funnier than accounting because sex is more serious than accounting.

So is death, which explains all those jokes about St. Peter and all the odd hilarity of black humor from Hamlet all the way to that moment in Titanic when the Irishman mutters, “Music to drown by! Now I know we're in first class!”

C.S. Lewis once said that most of Christian theology could be proven by the fact that we tell dirty jokes and that there is something uncanny about the dead. Dogs, observed Lewis, do not see anything funny about being dogs nor about making puppies. They approach sex as they approach dinner, with a businesslike attitude. We humans, in contrast, find ourselves continually “half shocked and half tickled to death” by the whole thing, says Lewis. It's as though our spirits are not quite at home in our bodies—as though we are fallen and don't quite know how to govern this strange house of which we have been left in charge.

Similarly, Lewis notes it is silly to say we dislike corpses because we are afraid of ghosts. We could just as easily say we fear ghosts because we dislike corpses. What we actually hate is the division of what ought not to be divided: a human person ripped apart into a corpse and a ghost. It is the ultimate incongruity, and it is not funny — which is why we make so many jokes about it and laugh nervously.

But God laughs triumphantly at death. He laughs because the dead were pulled out from under the devil's feet and Old Scratch took the ultimate pratfall, to be left spluttering at his own cosmic and comic stupidity in falling for God's ultimate practical joke: destroying death from inside out. So let us, who are in the image of the God who laughs, laugh too. The joke, to be sure, is on us who all had a hand in crucifying Christ. But it is, far more, for our benefit whom God has raised up with him to know the joy of him who “sits in the heaven and laughs” (Psalm 2:4).

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  1. Guest Avatar
    Guest

    Laughter and death have another apparent contradiction between them that only gets resolved when you dig deep. Laughter comes not just from that which is funny but also from that which is joyful. Such as weeklong family outings to some backwoods cabins in central Ohio in the late spring, accompanied for a week by a host of other families with their natural-born and adopted children in tow. Such was my joyous lot growing up, and while I cannot remember a great many details, I can remember vividly the atmosphere in the central cabin where the families gathered for guitar sing-alongs and where the kids played late into the night while adults whiled away the hours speaking amongst themselves, wholly bereft of concern for the kids not because they didn’t care but because they all knew that somewhere, another mom or dad or older brother or sister had an eye out. I also remember the cafeteria-style tables and benches where we ate the meals that the older folk prepared in the kitchen. I even remember the joy of walking through that kitchen and stopping for a time to watch or to “help” (and I’d wager my help caused not a few groans from the elders who would then have to suffer it). All of this is joyful, the times, the customs, the wiling, the play, the families, my brothers and sisters, my dad. My mom.

    She died the day I turned 13, and we never went back to those Adopt-a-Child-Today camp outings.

    The larger point, though, is this: in remembering our dead, we cannot easily separate our sadness from our joy. They overflow together, passing into and out of each other, and so we find ourselves at times in the inexplicable position of crying our eyes out as our smiles beam to those around us. There is no real contradiction; that is why it must be understood only as apparent. True religion understands this: we are glad and proud at the memory of our dearly departed even as we are sad – and sometimes even angry – because we miss them. And these emotions boil up together and churn within us, steadfastly refusing to be resolved in anything that the moderns might call a “healthy way.”

    This is really no different from the contradiction of the Cross itself: by entering into death, Jesus conquered it from the inside out, as Mark so astutely observes. And so there can be no joy or laughter that denies the requirement of the Cross. The two go together, as inseparable as twins. We need to remember this more, not less, and especially so as we are stroked with the reminders that we are “Easter people.” Indeed we are, but if these reminders are proffered as a way to diminish the reality of the Cross, then they are empty and nonsensical and false. Joy and laughter and sadness and anger go together. And so death resolves itself in God, who offers us smiles and tears at the same time.

  2. Guest Avatar
    Guest

    While jokes are human territory, it may be that laughter is not:

    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7348880/

     

    Unlike hyena vocalizations, these noises are associated specifically with pleasant experiences, such as playing or being tickled.

     

     

  3. Guest Avatar
    Guest

    So a dog's panting is analogous to a human's laughing?

    Now, that's funny!

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