Laughter

December 4, 2023

“I once had a pet snail. He could move around quite handily, so I decided to enter him in a snail race. He didn’t do as well as I had hoped, so I figured if I removed his shell he could go faster. It didn’t work. It only made him sluggish.” 

You just read our elder son’s favorite joke. Our family is full of them, along with the laughter and groans they produce. When our kids were younger, we would sometimes sit around the kitchen table for hours, listening to the tales Nate and Matt told of their school adventures, the stunts they pulled that were always on the edge of propriety and always funny, like the time Matt sold his teacher’s new car. She wasn’t a good teacher, and it was pretty funny, but we insisted he apologize and pay for the ad he took out in the paper. We could tell dozens of similar stories, but we aren’t sure the statute of limitations has run out on some of them.

In a serious conversation not too long ago, Matt told his mother that one of the things that kept him on the right side (although not by much) of the law was that we laughed at their antics instead of getting all worked up over them. I know some people who thought they were typical preacher’s kids gone wild, and perhaps in some ways they were; Jessie excepted; she was our angel (Matt’s going to love that sentence!). I think the one thing that saved them was our insistence on respect from them. We got it, and they gave it to most of the adults in their lives. The ones that didn’t get their respect probably didn’t earn it.

Some Christians by contrast, are so dour that you would think they had been baptized with pickle juice. Life is so serious that fun and laughter are a foreign language to them. I don’t think that is of God. C.S. Lewis, in the epigraph to his book “The Screwtape Letters,” quotes Luther:

“The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.” The devil knows nothing of real joy, of the belly laugh of a good joke, or the simple fun of our family around the kitchen table, laughing till the tears rolled down our cheeks.

In the Screwtape Letters, Lewis says the only kind of laughter that the devil knows is flippancy, that sharp cutting laughter at what is sacred and holy. This is not the nervous laughter in the face of serious matters, the joking of soldiers on the front line or the patient facing major surgery. Laughter in such serious times is a primal reaction designed to reduce the tension of the moment. Flippancy about serious matters is designed to circumvent the tension so a s to escape its ability to convict and challenge. I have to admit I’ve too often responded to a serious conversation with flippancy, an inappropriate joke or comment that kept myself and others from the deliverance and help they needed at the moment. At such times, I have become the adversary (the literal meaning of the name “Satan”) of God and the grace and truth he intended to bestow.

So in these often dark and troublesome days, laugh! Take joy in the ridiculousness of much of what is happening in the world. Laugh at your own foibles, knowing that the God who made the platypus might just be laughing with you. But avoid flippancy. Don’t use the joke to avoid the work of Christ in you or in others. That laughter is devilish. All the other is from our Creator and Redeemer God who when he created the world and all in it, said, “It is very good.”