April 22, 2014
Dear St. Paul’s Family,
Amid the somberness of this past Lenten season, I recently picked up a book for some lighter reading. It’s called The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny by Peter McGraw and Joel Warner. It is an account of a researcher and a journalist who traveled across five continents and conducted nineteen experiments across 91,000 miles to answer the basic question, “What is humor?”
Think about the last time you laughed heartily at a joke, or a story, or something you witnessed. What made it funny? The absurdity? The timing? The surprise? And do you think that what you thought was funny would be equally hysterical to others?
Those are the kinds of questions that McGraw and Warner tackled, in a series of wonderfully rich, often hilarious episodes around the world. Without divulging too much of their escapades, I’ll just share one of the their foundational ideas that grounded their work. To explain what makes things funny, Peter McGraw developed a theory called “benign violation.” In essence, something is humorous when it 1) violates an expectation, 2) does so in a benign way, 3) and does so simultaneously.
In other words, we find something funny when something is wrong, unsettling, or threatening, but is at the same time seems okay, safe, acceptable.
Consider these examples:
· You watch a person fall down the stairs (violation), but is unhurt (benign).
· Someone tells you a joke: “Why don’t you ever see elephants hiding in trees? Because they’re really good at it.” (A violation, because it tricks you with a twist. But it’s benign, because it deals with an absurd scenario).
· Or this joke: “Why did the monkey fall out of the tree?” (A violation to the monkey) Answer: “Because it was dead.” (Benign, because no actual monkeys were harmed in the telling of this joke.)
I decided to put McGraw’s theory to the test using a joke that Rev. Bob Blair, a local retired pastor, once told me in between one of our racquetball games at the Wellness Center:
Did you hear the one about the cannibal that ate a Jewish Rabbi, a Baptist Preacher, and a Methodist Pastor? Later, he had an ecumenical movement.
I laughed at that one for days. It was a violation, of course, because the idea of a cannibal eating anyone is pretty horrifying, and the topic of excretion is fairly unsettling. But it was also benign because it is a fictitious story, and because the new association with ecumenicalism makes the unsavory ideas of cannibalism and bodily function safer to consider.
RISUS PASCHALIS
At any rate, I concluded reading The Humor Code over this past weekend, coinciding with what the fifteenth century Christian church eventually regarded as the greatest joke every played on the devil: the resurrection of Jesus on Easter morning. Five hundred years ago, a Bavarian priest inserted into his post-Easter sermon a bunch of funny stories about how the devil tried to keep the doors of hell locked against a Christ who was descending into it. His stories were both violations (discussions about Satan and Hell) and were benign (Christ was ultimately triumphant). The priest’s congregation erupted into uproarious laughter, and the tradition of Risus Paschalis (or, “Easter Laughter”) was born.
Today, a growing number of churches celebrate the first Sunday after Easter as “Risus Paschalis,” or “Holy Humor Sunday.” They invite parishioners to stand and tell their favorite jokes, preachers tell funny stories, people wear silly costumes, and children are invited to engage in humorous activities throughout the morning. It is all based on the grand theological notion that on Easter morning, God pulled the ultimate prank on the devil, and gave rise to the most joyous punch line in human history:
After Jesus died on the cross, seemingly granting victory to evil, wickedness, and suffering in the world (the violation), God raised Jesus from the dead, granting us new life, freedom, and hope (the benign).
Peter McGraw said one more thing about humor that I found interesting. Humor serves a purpose in our evolutionary progression. Our ancestors developed laughter as a survival mechanism. The use of amusement and humor was used to “signal to the world that a violation is indeed okay,” and that an imminent threat need not be of concern. McGraw believes that laughter emerged as an instinctual way to show us that a perceived threat is actually a false alarm – for example, that a rustle in the bushes was the wind, not a sabre-toothed tiger. “Organisms that could separate benign violations from real threats benefited greatly,” he says. [1]
That’s what Easter laughter does for us. It takes the gravity of sin, the severity of evil, the threat of suffering, and declares, “False Alarm!” It concludes that what seemed to be an imminent threat is really just harmless. The violation is benign. Death has not won. Christ is victorious.
So, go ahead and laugh.
Grace and Peace,
Magrey
The Rev. Magrey R. deVega
St. Paul's United Methodist Church
531 W. Main St.
Cherokee, IA 51012
Ph: 712-225-3955
Email: mdevega@sp-umc.org
No comments:
Post a Comment