From Faith to Fun: The Secularization of Humor

By Russell Heddendorf

Abraham and Sarah were presented with a paradox when God told them they would have a son in their old age. Paradox in the Old Testament plays an important part in the dialogue between God and the Jews.

In the New Testament, paradox is prominent in Jesus' teaching and helps to explain the Christian understanding of salvation.

Today paradox arises when religious meaning of traditional culture conflicts with secular meaning of modern culture. Heddendorf argues that a subversive quality in humor gradually replaces traditional values with new cultural meanings. The resulting humor becomes a substitute for faith.

As this secular humor becomes functional for society, it finds its way into many areas of the culture. This process of secularization in humor moves from faith to fun and, finally, to fun as faith. The result of this secularization could be called a "fun culture." Redemption of this culture, Heddendorf asserts, should be a continuing concern of the church.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Sep 26, 2008
• ISBN: 9781498275941

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From Faith to Fun

The Secularization of Humor

Russell Heddendorf

2008.WS_logo.jpg

FROM FAITH TO FUN

The Secularization of Humor

Copyright © 2008 Russell Heddendorf. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Wipf & Stock

An imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

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isbn 13: 978-1-55635-202-7

eisbn 13: 978-1-4982-7594-1

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1: Enter Isaac!

Chapter 2: The Power of Paradox

Chapter 3: The Technique of Humor

Chapter 4: And God Laughed

Chapter 5: Jewish Joy

Chapter 6: The Therapeutic Trend

Chapter 7: The Fun Factor

Chapter 8: Secular Fun

Chapter 9: Sacred Fun

Chapter 10: From Fun to Faith

Chapter 11: Conclusion

Bibliography

For

David and Ruth Ann,Who know both faith and fun—and the difference between them.

Acknowledgments

Contrary to general opinion, the writing of a book is not the singular effort of the author. At various stages in the process, others became involved to provide the resources, stimulation, and technical knowledge needed to complete the project.

Thanks, then, to the Board and Administration of Covenant College for a sabbatical to start the project and to the students in Comics and Culture who, over a ten year period, provided the fertile environment which nurtured the book. Thanks, too, to Tad Mindeman and the library staff of Covenant College, especially Ethan Pettit who always found a book or article when it was needed.

I am especially grateful to my son, David, who used his editorial expertise to smooth over problems in the text and to Bill Campbell, Frank Lombardy, and Matt Vos who applied their technical knowledge of the computer in helpful and essential ways.

A special note of gratitude is reserved for the publisher, Wipf and Stock, and its staff, who saw more potential than problems in the book and guided it to the results presented here.

Finally, my thanks to Harriet who patiently accepted and supported her husband’s curiosity in a topic which often required more faith than fun in its exploration.

Introduction

Humor is one of the ways employed by the Hebrews (to adjust to life in a foreign culture). They take a word and by changing a letter give it a totally new sense. . . . They play on words in such a manner as to ridicule the text or person or to achieve a very different effect. . . . Thus the Hebrews are set in the midst of cultures: they do not shut themselves off from them, they know and use them but they make them say other things. This is the subversion of culture.

—Jacques Ellul
The Subversion of Christianity

At the end of the nineteenth century, religion was still a dominant factor in our cultural worldviews. The Protestant majority, though uneasy at the wave of immigrants entering the country, was confident enough to refer to the approaching twentieth century as The Christian Century. Traditional values still controlled our thinking, and there seemed little reason to believe that would change very quickly. If daily life was experiencing some dis-ease in urban centers, for the most part it was not threatening. Rooted in the past, the routines of living needed no explanation. There was a seamless web in social living that was seldom challenged by external circumstances. In general, society enjoyed a rhythm to life, a social harmony reflecting a sense of well-being in the culture.

When circumstances did threaten that fabric, they were usually given religious labels and interpreted accordingly. Natural catastrophes and personal losses were still viewed as acts of God and accepted as such. The culture was more than a way of life at this time. It had a past and, more importantly, it had a purpose shaped by that past. People had a sense of continuity and believed the future would be a natural unfolding of the nation’s history. The idea of culture remained faithful to the assumption that people shared a common meaning and were shaped and motivated by it in daily living.

But culture cannot thrive on such a limited, albeit positive view of the world. In addition to an enabling meaning and purpose, culture requires boundaries which limit and channel human initiative. Whether we think of culture expressed as art, religion, politics or even everyday life, we understand there is a certain order there that provides us with a stable, unified view of the world. Restraint is part of that order which must balance freedom if a culture is to maintain the orderliness which is part of its definition. We could say a culture enjoys good health when people share that orderliness merging freedom and restraint which shapes the national character.

By the mid-twentieth century, a subtle change in thinking reflected a certain dis-ease encroaching on the culture. In one of the most influential books of the century, David Riesman’s study of the changing American character pointed to the rise of a new social character in conflict with the old.¹ The changes occurring in human relationships were molding the culture in unpredictable ways. People were gripped by a new anxiety that the culture had irrevocably changed. Two decades later, Alvin Toffler picked up this theme in his revolutionary study of the technological revolution.² Looking to the future rather than to the past, he took the public’s eyes off Vietnam and directed them to the explosive changes straining the cultural foundation.

Other cultural critics pointed to a variety of erosive forces in American society. Christopher Lasch saw narcissism as a cultural phenomenon which devalued the past and limited the culture’s capacity to face the future.³ Others noted the changes taking place in America’s religious scene and, explicitly or implicitly, pointed to secularizing trends.⁴ The celebrated work by Robert Bellah and his associates underscored the cultural conflict between our need for community and the individualism promoted by modern life.⁵ This conflict, symptomatic of the cultural disorder of our time, was no longer questioned at the end of the century. It was with that understanding that James Davison Hunter could confidently write about the culture wars and the forces shaping them.⁶ And so the discussion continues.

We have now moved beyond our earlier naivete and no longer assume that culture is neatly structured and cohesive. In the last half century or so, it has become apparent that erosive rather than integrative factors are having a greater influence on American culture. The Sixties, especially, highlighted some of those forces subverting culture as we knew it. Since then, more benign forms of radical change have put traditional values at risk. It is for that reason Christopher Lasch could describe the United States as a ‘cultureless society.’⁷ Culture may now refer not to refined tastes and expressions but to the fact that the traditional expectations which defined our culture no longer exist. Worse, nothing has successfully replaced those expectations to provide cultural cohesion and structure.

This book is an attempt to come to grips with the problem of a fragmented and often dissolute culture. It suggests that humor has been a subtle but potent force in the changing of American culture in the last century. Initially, it contributed to our sense of national identity and cultural awareness. More recent forms of humor, however, have been subverting that culture, largely by introducing new expectations devoid of moral meaning as we have known it. Precisely because humor is associated with benign, healing qualities, its negative influence has been ignored or not understood. This other, erosive influence of humor is a major concern of the book.

Ellul’s description of the use of humor in ancient Israel draws a parallel for us today. We experience rapid social change as foreign cultures that buffet us with conflicting demands. Like the Hebrews, we are caught in this change and cannot escape it. And like the Hebrews, we use humor as a palliative. Language, which has provided so much of the meaning of our culture, now undergoes new and creative uses. We play with words and images as the Hebrews did and, as a result, alter the meaning of the world we live in. Consequently, much that had a serious meaning is trivialized and rendered insignificant.

With Ellul’s work as a foundation, this book proceeds with three basic assumptions:

1. that humor, as we use it today, has gained greater cultural importance while negatively influencing culture during the last century,

2. that orthodox religion has been changing while losing its traditional meaning in the culture,

3. that there is a connection between these two trends.

Much of orthodox religion, like the Hebrew faith, was based on a God’s-eye view of the world. In everyday life, religious faith bound people together and gave them purpose and direction as they tried to interpret life from God’s point of view. When that interpretation was threatened by some personal or cultural crisis, religion and its traditional answers were often challenged. At such times, religion could offer renewed hope by providing a new sense of good humor that countered the forces of evil threatening people and their cultural assumptions.

But when means other than religion are used to adjust to cultural crises, as was the case with the Hebrews, the culture is gradually subverted. One way to deal with crises is to deny their seriousness. Like the Hebrews, we can ridicule the text or person to gain the effect we desire. Rather than responding to a foreign culture with faith, the Hebrews made fun of it. Today, we also use humor to question a serious view of the world and use the cultures about us to make them say other things about the traditional meanings of our social experiences. At such times, faith may be replaced by other social expressions which ease the adjustment to cultural crises.

No doubt humor has always provided a cultural prop to adjust to difficult social changes. But this use of humor has been especially used and often abused in the twentieth century because of three major cultural trends:

4. the increased importance of paradox in culture

5. the increased importance of therapeutic thinking

6. the decreased importance of the traditional meaning of language

The book argues that each of these trends may be countered by religious faith or cultural humor. When the culture is enriched with a godly view of the world, crises may be countered with faith. But when this view is weakened, a more secular response will rely on some cultural form of humor to respond to crisis. Humor is not one-dimensional; it has a multitude of meanings which may be used to respond to different forms of crisis. Holocaust humor (more commonly referred to as ghetto humor), for example, was used as a survival device in German concentration camps.⁸ Comedy, however, is the ultimate civilizer in a dull, insensitive world and is widely used as a means of adjusting to conditions of modern living.⁹

Fun is the form of humor that flourishes in an increasingly secularized society because it meets many of the needs of such a society. Since the eighteenth century, the meaning of fun has moved from a negative connotation of foolishness to its current positive usage to connote escape or freedom. At first this escape was from the boredom and tediousness of daily living. But the term gradually came to justify any escape from chafing expectations. As this meaning of fun gained popularity, it became part of the tool kit offered by culture to cope with modern life. And in the process, fun became a substitute for faith.

This last point is important since it places humor in the debate concerning the place of secularization in modern society. There is a majority of scholars who believe secularization is no longer a force in the modern world. Indeed, they point to emerging forms of religious expression as testimony that religion is still important to people and influences their thinking and behavior. Others who are probably in the minority use more orthodox forms of belief and practice as benchmarks to measure religious change. For them, secularization is an ongoing process that continues to challenge and erode traditional religious meaning in the world.

How one interprets these two conflicting points of view largely depends on the meaning of religion that is used. If religion is defined as a response to whatever one considers to be meaningful in life, then the former group is probably correct; new religions form as we respond with hope and enthusiasm to sports, political programs, or even body building regimens. But if religion is defined more narrowly to refer only to a response to a transcendent God, then the latter group has a stronger claim. Religion, then, is more clearly understood as a faith which places its trust outside human and cultural influences and secularization involves the erosion of that faith. While the issues here are important for academic debate, they are less relevant for our interests which are more concerned with humor as a powerful cultural force which should be taken more seriously than it is.

The book opens with God’s promise to Abraham and Sarah that they will have a son in their old age. Faced with this paradox, they respond to God’s promise with laughter instead of faith. The importance of paradox in modern life is developed in Chapter Two which emphasizes the roles played by religion and humor in responding to paradox. Chapter Three describes humor as a technique that is used to gain something while masking possible negative consequences. We also learn that humor, paradoxically, may support a culture at the same time that it subverts it.

Chapters Four and Five turn to the Bible and Jewish life for an understanding of the religious meaning of humor. Since there is a dialectic of the sacred and the comic in religion, there is always a hint of redemption in the comic. Laughter may then become a sign of spiritual victory. Jews, for example, accept laughter as a gift to help them interpret the paradox of their spiritual journey and to experience joy in it.

Religion is developed in Chapter Six as part of the shift to therapeutic thinking in the mid-twentieth century. The resulting therapeutic culture harbors a transition from restrictive to permissive thinking, from a traditional culture of restraint to a modern culture of freedom. Chapter Seven introduces fun as a critical element in this new way of thinking. Problems may appear more illusory than real when interpreted by fun and deviance, when masked by fun, may lead to social disorder. Chapters Eight and Nine present fun as functional for both society and religion and identify a sacred element in fun which suggests a transcendent quality in life. But transcendence is less apparent in a secularized society and Chapter Ten warns of the greater likelihood that fun will become a new form of faith in the modern world. Chapter Eleven offers a critique of fun as we experience it today.

With this critique as a basis, the book concludes on a positive note. The more we understand fun and how it influences modern thinking, the more likely we are to take it seriously and the more seriously it is taken, the more likely it will be resisted. The more likely, too, that we can separate cultural fun from other forms of humor in our understanding. Then, perhaps, the relation between religion and humor will become clearer and we can appreciate how faith becomes fun or, if you will, how fun becomes faith.

1. Riesman, The Lonely Crowd.

2. Toffler, Future Shock.

3. Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism.

4. Carter, The Culture of Disbelief and Eck, A New Religious America.

5. Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart.

6. Hunter, Culture Wars.

7. Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy.

8. See, for example, Oster, Holocaust Humor.

9. Sypher, Comedy, IX.

1

Enter Isaac!

Man’s very position in the universe is incongruous. That is the problem of faith, and not of humor . . . Humor is the prelude to faith, and laughter is the beginning of prayer.

—Reinhold Niebuhr

Abraham fell face down; he laughed and said to himself, Will a son be born to a man a hundred years old? Will Sarah bear a child at the age of ninety? . . . So Sarah laughed to herself as she thought, After I am worn out and my master is old, will I now have this pleasure? The Lord said to Abraham, Why did Sarah laugh and say, ‘Will I really have a child, now that I am old?’ Is anything too hard for the Lord? . . . Sarah was afraid, so she lied and said, I did not laugh. But He said, Yes, you did laugh. . . . Sarah said, God has brought me laughter, and everyone who hears about this will laugh with me.

—Genesis 17:17; 18:12–15; 21:6

From Abraham’s point of view, God had presented him with a paradox—indeed, an apparent impossibility. God told Abraham that he and Sarah, in their old age, would have a son, Isaac, to fulfill the covenant made earlier. Abraham could do several things in response to that announcement. He could accept God’s statement as true or deny it as an impossibility. Abraham’s laughter suggests he didn’t take God’s promise seriously. New life, he thought, could not be brought from old bodies.

Sarah shared Abraham’s disbelief as she listened to the conversation between Abraham and God at the tent flap and laughed to herself. However, her laughter was followed by fear, as though she knew she had made a wrong response. She realized she had inadvertently mocked God’s power and authority. She could have responded with faith and believed God’s promise would be fulfilled, but she didn’t. Her laughter, joined with Abraham’s, reveals the human response that trivializes God and His promises when faith is missing.

People today are not that different from Abraham and Sarah. We need to make sense of our experiences, especially those that seem to make no sense. We need to classify them as desirable or undesirable, as likely or unlikely. Predictability and order are important to us if we are to meet our individual goals and interact well with one another in the process. Our future plans and expectations depend on living in a world that responds to natural laws. Abraham and Sarah shared the same expectations. The idea they could become parents for the first time after a century of living was, undoubtedly, a frightening notion. It seemed so preposterous that they laughed at it.

Our human response to everyday experiences focuses on this natural order which most of us take for granted. There is also the social order that we try to control for our benefit. We’re disconcerted by anything indeterminate which cannot be classified within these two orders. Anything from everyday experiences that cannot be explained is perceived as threatening or discomforting. We want to believe such inexplicable incidents, but often we can’t. At other times we would prefer not to believe.

One possible response to the inexplicable is to take such experiences seriously. We want to understand before we go on to the next experience. But in the process, we may become bogged down in a laborious search for answers. Since our daily lives cannot tolerate many of those searches, we rarely seek the necessary truth in such matters. And if no search is made or no answer is found, there is no final closure to the experience. We’re left with a void to fill with our daily imaginations. Indeed, many such incomplete experiences clutter our lives.

Humor as Response

Another possible response to the problem of indeterminacy is humor. Instead of taking some hermeneutical problem seriously, we may dismiss it as trivial or fantastic. If some experience falls outside our daily pattern of living, there is no clear reason to believe we should be concerned with it. It might be a problem for someone else, but not for us. It’s also possible that it might not be a problem at all. If we should take the experience seriously, it then becomes a problem we have to deal with.

Laughter offers a quick and convenient response to an uncomfortable experience. Often, without thinking, we dismiss the experience as one that does not need our attention. If there is something about the experience that is foreign or, at best, marginal to our lives, it may be considered inconsequential. Thus, laughter provides some assurance that the incident is not to be taken seriously, and we need not feel guilt or a sense of irresponsibility for not dealing with it. Put more simply, laughter may help us to feel good about a bad situation.

Laughter also offers a casual way to gain support for our beliefs about unexplainable or troublesome situations. Since laughter is very contagious, it becomes a means by which a group may define a situation as trivial. Laughter may act as a lubricant in socially difficult and uncomfortable situations. Without arguing or cajoling, we gain some sense that our laughing companions agree that our interpretation of the situation as frivolous is reasonable. Indeed, we may gain a good bit of prestige in our group when others continue the laughter we started.

Ultimately, laughter says something about our response to the possibilities of life. It tells us what we can accept as true and what we might reject as implausible. After Sarah laughs, God implies her faith is lacking when He says, Is anything too hard for the Lord? Her laughter becomes a theological statement when it mocks God’s omnipotence. Indeed, humor may take the place of faith whenever it is directed at the unseen possibilities about us.

Think of laughter as a screen or filter that sifts through the meanings of life. It helps to define those elements to be taken seriously and those that are not. As Reinhold Niebuhr states, Laughter is our reaction to immediate incongruities and those which do not affect us essentially. Faith is the only possible response to the ultimate incongruities of existence which threaten the very meaning of our life.¹ These immediate incongruities exist on an elementary level where humor plays for the sake of playing. This type of humor may be trivial, frivolous, or even, on occasion, irresponsible.

Humor and Faith

On another level, humor performs a more serious function. It maintains an inner tension as it considers the human scene, self-consciously reflecting on the foibles and failures found there. It takes seriously the paradoxes of life and seeks to give them meaning. Rather than resolving the tension, humor stretches it to the fullest. On this level, the comic spirit accepts the struggles and suffering of life and mixes them with hope.

A third level of humor transcends these immediate incongruities and shows us what Niebuhr calls the ultimate incongruities of existence. There is a sense of victory when understanding on one level pushes us higher to another level. Faith is always present here, energizing the comic spirit with confidence and assurance. When grounded in this faith, laughter resonates with security and assurance.² But devoid of that faith, laughter may be hollow and empty of meaning.

How we laugh, what we laugh at, and when have implications for the way we interpret these immediate and ultimate incongruities. It’s serious business. I suspect we spend too much time on the first level and know very little of the other two. Especially in modern life, the trivialization of culture