On Divine and Human Laughter
Gerard van Honthorst, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Before we human beings come to ourselves as selves or reach the ‘age of reason,’ we delight, we rejoice, and we laugh. Sometimes we laugh when we are surprised or captured by the wit of a funny joke, other times when we delight in the misfortune of our enemies. Sometimes we laugh when we are confronted with the absurd, so as not to cry, other times when we are placed in a uniquely awkward situation. And yet, even though we may sometimes find ourselves enthralled with laughter in such circumstances, laughter invariably bursts forth from the deepest recesses of our being when we are overcome with the ever-ancient and ever-new joy of existence and life. Like breathing, laughter is spontaneous and effortless; we laugh without thought of some more appropriate response.
As Ecclesiastes 3 explains, there is a time to laugh in our lives, just as there is a time to be born and a time to die, a time to mourn and a time to dance. Just as God creates the universe in accordance with divine wisdom, separating the heavens above from the earth below and the terrestrial waters from the dry land, all in order to create the conditions needed to parade his panoply of creatures across time and space, so, too, does he wisely arrange human life in such a way as to make space for the full range of human experiences, laughter included.
And yet, we often take laughter for granted: laughing at a joke, the misfortune of others, the absurd, or the gratuity of being without thought as to why we laugh at all. What, then, is laughter, and what secret might it simultaneously conceal and reveal about God, the universe, and our very selves?
Of the many attempts to explain laughter, undoubtedly the least funny and satisfactory explanation comes from René Descartes, the notorious 17th-century ‘Father of Modern Philosophy,’ who – in an essay entitled “The Passions of the Soul” – explains it thus: “the blood… inflating the lungs suddenly and repeatedly, causes the air which they contain to be constrained to pass out from them with an impetus by the windpipe, where it forms an inarticulate and explosive utterance... And it is just this action of the face with this inarticulate and explosive voice that we call laughing.” With this, Descartes attempts to explain laughter as a set of physical processes, but in so doing he loses sight of the experience and nature of laughter itself. Descartes was a reductionist of the highest order, and such people do not laugh.
Beyond Descartes, who attempted to explain how we laugh, various ancient philosophers sought to explain why we laugh. Plato, for example, explains in his Philebus that laughter derived from comedy is caused by a mixture of pain and pleasure, for we delight (pleasure) in the misfortunes of others (pain). Consider here one of Jim Gaffigan’s classic self-immolations: “I'm bald, blind and pale. I'm like a gigantic recessive gene.”
Like Plato, Aristotle writes in his Poetics that “Comedy… is an imitation of people who are worse than the average,” and we laugh as a result of their perceived inferiority. When one carries this to excess in order to get a laugh from one’s audience, he is a “vulgar buffoon,” and, when we “cannot say anything funny [ourselves], and are offended by those who do, [we] are thought to be boorish and dour,” but when we learn the art of joking in a tactful manner, we are considered witty. Laughter, then, if it is in accordance with reason and virtue, ought to emerge from the golden mean of responding to a joke that is funny but not sordid.
And, finally, Cicero in On the Orator writes that laughter most frequently arises from hearing “something offensive [said] in an inoffensive manner” or when “we expect one thing and another is said; here our own disappointed expectation makes us laugh. But if something ambiguous is thrown in too, the effect of the joke is heightened.” Indeed, it is, Cicero; indeed, it is.
Still, we are left wondering what laughter is and what it might signal about who God is and what we are?
Here, we should leave the philosophers behind and turn, instead, to the self-revelation of God, creator and redeemer of heaven and earth, for it pertains to wisdom to understand all things in light of their highest principle and cause, which is divine goodness, wisdom, and love.
If we turn to the pages of Scripture, we see that God has quite the sense of humor, for he is, along with the human authors, a true author, and, as the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, explains, the human authors of Scripture “consigned to writing everything and only those things which He wanted.” The humor of Scripture, then, is the humor of God, and it breaks through in all sorts of places.
King Solomon compares a man who meddles in other people’s quarrels to one who takes a passing dog by its ears in Proverbs 26, and, dear reader, before trying this yourself, be sure to find a dog that’s old, tired, and toothless.
The Prophet Elijah in 1 Kings 18 mocks the false god Ba’al and his prophets by saying, “Cry aloud, for he is a god; either he is musing, or he has gone aside, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened.” A tired and sleeping god who must be shouted out of his morning nap! What a god!
In Malachi 2, the titular prophet, speaking on behalf of God, proclaims that God will curse the blessings, rebuke the offspring, and “spread dung upon [the] faces” of those priests who do not listen and glorify the name of God, for their sacrifices have become like dung in the sight of God! The hilarity of this observation needs no commentary.
And, as Fr. Charles Kestermeier, S.J., points out in his essay “Humor in the Bible,” Sts. Elizabeth and Zechariah’s neighbors and family tried to communicate to Zechariah with bodily signs and gestures in order to confirm John’s name, even though he was merely dumb and not deaf! The Lord has a sense of humor, and it is not beyond his divine majesty to make us laugh.
Laughter, according to the medieval German Dominican, Meister Eckhart, is metaphorically divine, for the life of God consists of an unspeakable joy shared between divine Friends – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – and the experience of joy is the deepest and truest font of laughter, which precedes the ability to discern the wit of a joke or stave off the at-times absurd nature of life in this fallen world. “Do you want to know what goes on in the core of the Trinity?” asks Eckhart.
I will tell you.
In the core of the Trinity
the Father laughs
and gives birth to the Son.
The Son laughs back at the Father
and gives birth to the Spirit.
The whole Trinity laughs
and gives birth to us.
With this, we are brought much closer to understanding the deeper nature and ultimate cause of laughter than any of the aforementioned philosophers could take us, for it is the Christian revelation of the Trinity, the eternal communion of divine life and love, which most deeply and satisfactorily explains the totality of created reality, laughter included.
Since we are made in the image of God, we are made for God, and God shares his gifts and life with us, similar to how the Father and Son eternally share the Holy Spirit, who is the divine Gift and Bond of Love, as St. Augustine teaches. The primordial human response of laughter, then, is the spontaneous apprehension of the gratuitousness and goodness of God’s love for us made manifest through the gift of creation, which declares his glory and manifests his care and concern. Laughter, in other words, as a universal human experience, is a sign that points beyond itself to that which is most true and real: divine love.
It is a pastime of some theologians to conjecture about what would or would not have existed before the Fall if our first parents had not committed that fatal original sin and fallen from grace. St. Augustine, for example, writes in his City of God that women would have experienced pain-free childbearing, and St. Thomas Aquinas writes in his Summa Theologiae that lions would still have eaten lambs and there would have been a social hierarchy in society. But would there have been laughter in the paradise of Eden?
In light of the Christian revelation of the Trinity, it seems clear that childlike laughter springing from an encounter with the gratuitous goodness of God made present to us through his creation would have not only existed prior to the Fall, but it would have also been present to an unimaginable extent and degree, for, ever since the Fall, “we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we,” writes G.K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy. It is for this reason, among others, that Christ instructs his disciples in Matthew 18 that “unless you…become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Laughter, Chesterton speculates, was the “one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth,” which Christ, instead, reserved for his hidden moments of prayer to the Father, for his joy and mirth would have been overwhelming for his followers and disciples.
Laughter, then, continues to be not only a divine gift of our fallen-though-not-depraved natures but also an intuition of and participation in the very life of God, which is uncreated life, giftedness, and joy, and we would do well to partake as often as we are able, lest our hearts of flesh become like those of stone or we turn the wine of the Christian life into the waters east of Eden. “In the core of the Trinity the Father laughs and gives birth to the Son. The Son laughs back at the Father and gives birth to the Spirit. The whole Trinity laughs and gives birth to us.”
[This essay originally appeared in the Spring 2024 print issue of Joie de Vivre. To order this issue or purchase an annual subscription, click the “Subscribe” tab above.]
Jordan Haddad, Ph.D., is a Professor of Dogmatic Theology at Notre Dame Seminary and the President of the St. Louis IX Art Society.
