Biblical Humor and Performance: Audience Experiences That Make Meaning

By Peter S. Perry and David Rhoads

What's so humorous about the Bible? Quite a bit, especially if experienced with others! Nine biblical scholars explore their experiences of reading and hearing passages from the Bible and discovering humor that becomes clearer in performance. Each writer found clues in their chosen biblical text that suggested biblical authors expected an audience to respond with laughter. Performers have a powerful role in either bringing out or tamping down humor in the Bible. One audience may be more disposed to respond to humor than another. And each contributor found that experiencing humor changed the interpretation of the biblical passage. From Genesis to Revelation, this study uncovers the Bible's potential for humor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Aug 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666711318

David Rhoads

David Rhoads is emeritus Professor of New Testament at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. He is author of Reading Mark: Engaging the Gospel (2004).

Book preview

And Now for Something Completely Different

An Introduction to Humor and Biblical Performance

Peter S. Perry

Sarah said, God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me. (Gen 21:6)

The Bible is humorous. Those of us who have gathered to write this book have chuckled while reading a passage, remembering it, or imagining a scene. We have observed others smiling, even laughing loudly, while listening to a reader. These are not isolated experiences but, in some cases, they have been replicated by others experiencing the same passages.¹ Repetition suggests there is something more substantial than a single strike of fancy or creak of the funny bone. What is it about the text that evokes a humorous response? Why can one reader be funnier than another? Why do some find passages humorous and others do not? How does the experience of humor change how the biblical text is interpreted?

This book is a collection of essays that broadly agree that

1.There are clues in some biblical texts indicating that authors expected a humorous response from an audience.

2.A performer may consciously or unconsciously choose signals that amplify or suppress the idea that the specific audience should take a passage humorously.²

3.The audience’s predisposition, memory, knowledge, goals, relationships to the performer and other audience members, and perception of the situation play an essential role in whether audience members experience and respond to a spoken passage as humorous.

4.Audience members (and the performer) may subsequently interpret the passage differently as a result of a humorous response.

In other words, we are claiming that humor is an essential part of experiencing the Bible. However, humor cannot be understood as determined by the text alone. One of the key insights of biblical performance criticism is that the meaning of a passage is a complex, dynamic interaction of text, performer, audience, and situation and is not determined by any one aspect in isolation. In a similar fashion, a humorous response is not assured based solely on the words uttered but depends on the interaction of all four aspects.

In this way, studying humor is an ideal way to explore the dynamics of performances of the Bible. From the church fathers to the present, humor in the Bible has been ignored, suppressed, or undetected by many readers.³ Some have insisted there is no humor to be found in the Bible, but methinks they doth protest too much.⁴ Biblical performance criticism helps us to explain humorous responses as some combination of conscious or unconscious decisions by performers,⁵ preferences or predispositions of audiences, and perceptions of the larger communication situation. The essays in this volume demonstrate that the clues for humor may be found even if those otherwise convinced are not laughing.

This Introduction presents a brief overview of biblical performance criticism (abbreviated BPC), humor studies, and traditional humor theories to further orient readers before summarizing each chapter and pointing towards continued research.

Biblical Performance Criticism

Before saying more about biblical performance criticism, let’s imagine part of a performance. Someone is standing in front of a group of a hundred people and reading aloud from a book:

Then Jesus went home, and the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat. When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, He has gone out of his mind. And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons. And he called them to him and spoke to them in parables, "How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come. But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered. (Mark

3

:

20

–

30

)⁶

When the reader whispers to the crowd that Jesus has gone out of his mind (3:21), he imagines himself representing the people who gossip to each other that Jesus has gone crazy. Then, the performer assumes the confident tones of knowledgeable teachers who try to rationalize Jesus’ power over demons, pronouncing, He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons (3:22).

Next the performer assumes the role of Jesus and gestures for people to gather round before shaking his head and chuckling in disbelief, offering in an incredulous tone, How can Satan cast . . . out . . . Satan? (3:23) followed by a quick laugh. Many in the audience also laugh.

This was a real instance of a performance I gave with a congregation, an example of the practical mode of biblical performance criticism.⁷ Biblical traditions are performed in synagogues and churches and on TikTok and YouTube on a weekly, if not daily, basis. One reader may stand behind a lectern and read in monotone with eyes glued to the page. Another may have the passage memorized and use both hands to gesture. Both are performers, that is, persons who transmit a tradition (in this case, a passage from Mark’s Gospel) for an audience in a particular situation through a particular medium. A performer, a biblical tradition, an audience, and a situation—these are the four primary aspects of a biblical performance to be analyzed.

Biblical performance criticism is both a means to understand communication events of biblical traditions and a method to explore meaning-making through performance. By performance, we mean a communication event re-presenting traditions for an audience.⁸ As a means for understanding communication events, BPC reframes biblical traditions within the Mediterranean oral/scribal cultures and situations familiar to their first audiences. For example, while scribes and educated elites in the first-century likely sometimes studied manuscripts silently and privately, most people would have experienced stories of Jesus’ exorcisms read aloud and in a group. Yet, even a solitary scribe soundlessly examining ink on parchment would hear the passage read aloud in his memories and would imagine the faces of those who previously embodied it and the people who were there when he experienced the reading. BPC shifts the focus of analysis from the private experience of the text in isolation to the communication event and its complex dynamics.

As a method for exploring meaning-making through performance, some BPC practitioners try different ways of performing the same text in order to observe responses within both themselves and their audiences. It is one thing to assert that a particular performance (words spoken with particular tone, emphasis and volume, and accompanied by facial expressions and gestures) may produce a certain response in an audience; it is another thing to actually try it and see how a real audience responds. Below, I discuss actual meaning-making of my performances of Satan casting out Satan, including both the observed effects of humor and the different ways audience members responded to my performance. Using BPC to explore how audiences make meaning complexifies the ways we as scholars draw conclusions about how audiences respond!

The Probability of Humor

Actual performances demonstrate that we cannot speak definitively of a particular response, but only of relative probabilities. The probability of a particular response is dependent on an audience’s predisposition, memory, knowledge, goals, relationships to the performer and other audience members, perception of the situation, and the strength of emotions attached to each of these propositions.⁹ Let me use the episode of casting out demons in Mark 1:21–28 as example of a text that provides an important source of memories for audiences later experiencing Satan casting out Satan in a performance of Mark 3:20–30. Please do not expect any chortles in the following discussion. The example of Mark 1:21–28 is not humorous but sets ideas in an audience’s mind that are necessary to find humor in Mark 3:20–30.

After an audience hears the story in Mark 1:21–28 of Jesus casting out an unclean spirit from a man in a synagogue, it is highly likely that most audiences will agree with the proposition that Jesus is an exorcist, if they understand exorcist¹⁰ to minimally refer to a person who rids another of demons and evil spirits. While they may hold this statement to be true, the strength of the statement will vary for audiences based on whether or not they perceive demons as a problem in their lives. An ancient audience member who feels the involvement of spirits, good and evil, in everyday life, may value Jesus as exorcist highly, which may lead to particular attitudes, values, and behaviors, such as frequent prayer to Jesus for aid. For a modern audience member who may not believe that demons or spirits exist, the statement that Jesus is an exorcist may be true but of no significance and have no implications for their life. Biblical performance criticism helps to predict the probabilities of responses for a specific audience and the potential strength of that response to a passage.

Likewise, when assessing humorous responses we speak of the probability of humorous responses rather than about an ideal or definitive response. Although some scholars may hunger for certainty, words such as may/may not and more/less likely and higher/lower probability express this contingent and dynamic understanding of a performance. Rather than saying deterministically, The audience would laugh, we might conclude, It is more likely that this specific kind of audience would experience a humorous response than not. While we may argue that the author intends a humorous response based on textual clues and reconstruction of the author’s audiences, this should be taken as an argument for high probability for that particular audience finding humor rather than as an expectation that humor will emerge across all performances, performers, and audiences. While we can suggest a humorous response may be more likely than not for some ancient audiences and kinds of performances, predicting the strength of responses depends on more than textual clues. Further evidence may be suggested by a modern audience’s response.

Relating Ancient and Modern Audiences

The relationship between ancient and modern performances is a point of contention both within and outside BPC scholarship. Modern scholarship has rightly rejected the reductionistic and anachronistic equivalence assumed in previous generations between contemporary audiences and audiences in the Ancient Near East and Greco-Roman world. Careful analysis of archeological and epigraphical evidence has recontextualized the traditions of the Bible in ways that both defamiliarize and illuminate, for example, the social and individual practices around demons and unclean spirits. It is no surprise, therefore, that scholars are allergic to claims that a modern performance may help us better understand ancient performances.

Yet, this allergy to modern performances also has turned away noses from smelling the roses, so to speak. I have argued elsewhere¹¹ that the basis for comparing ancient and modern performances must begin with common factors: human bodies and human cognition. The common features of the human body provide the basic somatic alphabet that a performer, ancient or modern, may use along with sounds created by the mouth¹² to communicate with an audience. Following cognitive linguistics, we will refer to words as well as nonlinguistic sounds, gestures, and facial expressions as signals or stimuli. The human face, with eyes, eyebrows, nose, cheeks, lips, jaw, and chin; the neck, shoulders, arms, and hands; and the torso, waist, legs, and feet each offer a further way that people within a culture—and between cultures—may communicate. It should be a commonplace that communication across cultures begins with the body, signals both with sounds and with noiseless movement. BPC, with its emphasis on communicating traditions through embodiment, is ideal for analyzing and experimenting with how biblical traditions are communicated across cultures, including between ancient cultures and contemporary cultures.

We can also assume a common cognitive structure for ancient and modern audiences. The insights of cognitive linguistics developed over the last century have been refined and demonstrated to be true across cultures, ancient and modern.¹³ Generally speaking, modern communication theories agree that all human beings use signals to lead their audiences to infer premises and conclusions, enriching a gesture or word with information from memory, observations, and experience. Among others, Relevance theory (RT) is my preferred communication theory for a number of reasons.¹⁴ First, RT asserts that ostensive signals imply the speaker’s intent to communicate. In other words, the very act of communication carries the assumption that the speaker/author has chosen signals she believes will lead her audience to the conclusions she desires. This does not mean that she has judged accurately, but that we as observers can make this assumption. Second, to be more specific, RT claims that speakers will naturally choose signals (including nonverbal signals such as facial expressions) that they believe will guide their audiences to anticipated effects for reasonable effort by that audiences. By effects, RT means that hearers experience strengthening or weakening of both propositional (such as Jesus is an exorcist) and nonpropositional effects (attitudes and emotions, such as fear or confidence). By effort, RT refers to the role of the hearer in consciously and subconsciously processing the signals, decoding and enriching them in parallel in order to predict the speaker’s intent and to draw conclusions. The relevance of a signal to an audience has to do with its effects produced by a hearer’s processing. This balancing of effort and effect allows us even as observers reading an ancient text to compare the probable processing for audiences based on reconstructing their memories, observations, and experiences, and then predicting the effects based on reasonable effort. For example, above we made generalizations about how different audiences may process the story of Jesus casting out the unclean spirit based on their beliefs and attitudes towards demons. While not all authors in this volume are explicit about their communication theory, to varying degrees and by various methods, all are reconstructing ancient and/or modern audiences in order to predict their processing and potential effects.

Humor further provides another point for comparing ancient and modern performances of the Bible. Humor in human communication is considered universal,¹⁵ and this can be demonstrated in the Ancient Near East, in the Greco-Roman world, and even in twenty-first-century Australia and United States (believe it or not). Each chapter in this book demonstrates that the detected humor is culturally situated and, unsurprisingly, is sometimes far removed from modern audiences. Yet, the awareness of potential humorous responses among ancient audiences has fueled interest among present-day translators, scholars, and readers for helping modern audiences experience something similar. This is not to say that humorous responses are completely identical. However, if a scholar reconstructs an ancient performance scenario that seems likely to produce a humorous response, we can attempt to produce a similar response in modern audiences at that line or passage.¹⁶ What does the modern performer need to do to produce a similar effect? What is the strength of the audience’s response? In turn, when a majority of modern audiences consistently demonstrates a humorous response to a line, it raises the question of whether an ancient audience might also have a humorous response and under what conditions. Studying humor and performance of the Bible allows for deeper exploration of the relationships between ancient and modern performances.

Ingredients for Humor: Opposing and Overlapping Frames

Some in biblical studies continue to suggest there is no consensus on a definition of humor or on an understanding of its dynamics.¹⁷ However, humor studies has significantly developed over the last half-century and has yielded a more unified consensus of how humor works based on studies in linguistics and cognitive science.¹⁸ Victor Raskin’s Semantic Mechanisms of Humor (1985) summarized previous humor research into three categories, incongruity, superiority, and release, and found linguistics provided a compatible framework for understanding all three. That book, later augmented and refined with Salvatore Attardo (1991) and others, claimed that humor can be analyzed by the same tools that are necessary for representing the meaning of text, independently of humor.¹⁹ Humor is the identification of opposing and overlapping scripts that lead to a humor response. Coulson and Yus prefer the concept of frames, which I will adopt below.²⁰ Attardo and Raskin claim this general definition of humor has yet to be falsified.²¹ This insight forms the core of the Semantic Scripts Theory of Humor (SSTH) and then the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH), discussed below, which have been shown to apply to narrative and other kinds of texts.²²

A brief primer may be helpful for those unfamiliar with the SSTH and GTVH. A script (or frame as I will call it below) is a dynamic, structured set of information about the world.²³ Raskin uses a joke as an example:

Is the doctor in? the patient asked in his bronchial whisper.

No, the doctor’s young and pretty wife whispered back, Come right in!²⁴

The initial script of man with health problem attempting to see a doctor is signaled to a hearer by the words doctor, patient, and amplified by the word choice of bronchial to describe his whisper. The hearer consciously and unconsciously draws on knowledge, memories, and observations of similar interactions to build what Raskin calls a Text World Representation, which may be compared to a scene unfolding in the hearer’s mind, perhaps complete with details of senses such as sight and sound filled in dynamically by the hearer. Some have misunderstood the nuances of the term script to imply something static or universal, which may motivate Coulson and Yus to use the term frame to better suggest the relationships of knowledge that are implied by the speaker and dynamically inferred by the hearer to interpret an utterance.²⁵

In the joke above, the hearer may begin to suspect a second script indicated by the description of the doctor’s wife as young and pretty who also whispers, which is confirmed by the invitation, Come right in!—the frame woman whose husband is not home and invites a man for an affair. The possibility of this second script existed at the beginning of the story but was not necessarily the primary choice or even consciously available to the hearer. The two scripts are opposing situations (seeking health care vs. seeking sex) but are overlapping until the first is rejected and replaced by the second. It is in the rejection and replacement of scripts that the humorous response may emerge in the hearer.

The SSTH Main Hypothesis is that the necessary condition for a humor response is that

1.The text is compatible, fully or in part, with two distinct scripts; and

2.The two distinct scripts are opposite in a special, predefined sense.²⁶

The explanatory power of this hypothesis was tested in an experience of reading aloud and hearing Eugene Peterson’s Message translation of Isa 55 with a modern audience, a congregation gathered for weekly worship:

"Hey there! All who are thirsty,

come to the water!

Are you penniless?

Come anyway—buy and eat!

Come, buy your drinks, buy wine and milk.

Buy without money—everything’s free!

Why do you spend your money on junk food,

your hard-earned cash on cotton candy?" (Isa

55

:

1

–

5

MSG)

Reading this, I did not intend it to be funny and I am not sure Eugene Peterson intended it to be funny, but there were smiles²⁷ and laughter²⁸ throughout the group. Why?²⁹

The audience had a certain frame³⁰ in mind: Reading of the Bible passage in worship setting, which implied the expectation of archaic-sounding language for ancient time. This frame is evoked by the communication situation even before the reading begins. The majority have had numerous experiences of a reader of the Bible, each time expecting references to experiences in ancient Israel or the Greco-Roman world using language somewhat detached from their modern lives.

The phrases junk food and cotton candy caused some audience members to reject the ancient frame for a modern one. They told me afterwards that the contemporary language immediately brought to mind their own junk food habits, and at the same time they found themselves asking, Did they have cotton candy back in Isaiah’s time? They experienced the text as directly speaking to their modern situation not simply to Isaiah’s ancient audiences (likely the translator’s intended effect). In addition, because they rejected the frame of archaic-sounding language for ancient time and replaced it with modern language for modern time, they experienced humor. This is an example of unintentional humor explained by frame-switching.

I have also intentionally attempted to evoke humor in an audience based on detecting humor in a text. To return to the example of Mark 3:20–30—as I was preparing to perform this passage, I was struck by the potential for the line How can Satan cast out Satan? (3:23) to be humorous. Recalling the earlier scene of an unclean spirit in a synagogue (1:21–28) about the man who convulsed and cried out (1:26) when Jesus cast out the demon, I imagined Satan convulsing and crying out and thought the image funny.

The details of Mark 3:20–30 suggest a humorous response. The phrase How can Satan cast out Satan? grammatically calls for a negative response and logically is ridiculous. The expected frame is that exorcist casts out demon, which is inconsistent with Jesus’ rhetorical question. An exorcist opposes Satan’s demons by definition. While some audiences may immediately experience a humorous response simply to the question, Jesus goes on to amplify the idea as a means to mock religious leaders who suggest he is motivated by demonic influence, increasing the likelihood that an audience will respond to the humor. He offers two examples that present a new frame of divisions leading to group failure. First, a kingdom divided cannot stand (3:24). Next, using parallel language, a house divided cannot stand (3:25). The final statement about division climaxes with addition of the absurd idea of Satan rising up against himself (3:26). By linking Satan to kingdoms and houses, Jesus implies a corporate idea of Satan (as ruler of an empire or house) but simultaneously returns to the individual image of a solitary Satan rising up to throw himself out, amplifying the ridiculousness of the original phrase. The combination of word choice, grammar, repetition, and the essential ingredient of frame-switching suggests that the author hopes the audience may smile or even laugh.

As the performer, I tried to amplify the probability. I shook my head and chuckled, using a smiling voice as I said the initial How can Satan cast out Satan? followed by a quick laugh (what humor scholars call an invitational laugh that signals to the audience the expectation of humor). I presented the two examples of a kingdom and house divided in a tone that suggested the audience already knows these things and thinks they are obvious. The cadence of the two examples is interrupted by the change in word choice and syntax if Satan rises up against himself . . . (3:26) that recalls the initial question, so I paused after himself to allow the audience to process the frame-switch from corporate to individual and raised a hand up to encircle my neck with a ridiculous smile on my face (which functions as a further signal to the audience to take the episode humorously).

Many in the audience responded with smiles and chuckles.³¹ Later, I asked several people what the humor meant to them and received two kinds of responses. First, many used the word silly to describe Satan, but they did not attribute silliness to the religious leaders that Jesus was mocking in the episode. The audience experienced effects because they detected a frame-switch between the expected seriousness to silliness of Satan. The gestures, facial expressions, and tone amplified the absurdity of the statement about Satan but without the audience recalling or attributing it to the ones who spoke the accusation. In effect, humor was experienced, but one could argue that the original targets of the humor (Jesus’ opponents) were lost.

Second, other audience members did not mention the absurdity of the statement about Satan, but only the way the laughter increased their confidence in Jesus. They said they could laugh when facing trouble if Jesus could laugh at Satan. In this case, what I thought was an invitational laugh by me, the performer, was experienced as a laugh by Jesus at Satan, and thus an expression of Jesus’ superiority over Satan. If there was a frame-switch here, it was from a person’s experience of the seriousness of trouble they faced and the surprise of their confidence imagining Jesus laughing at trouble. For some, the unexpected confidence produced a laugh.

Traditional Theories of Humor: Superiority

As an overarching theory of how humor works, frame-switching is also compatible with the big three theories of humor. Traditionally, superiority, release, and incongruity theories have been used to explain humorous purposes and effects. Superiority theories contend that humor may be used by a speaker to denigrate or mock a target in front of an audience. Ancient rhetoricians such as Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian describe this kind of humor as a rhetorical tactic to shame an opponent, demonstrate the speaker’s superiority, and persuade an audience to agree with the speaker. Differently, Freud describes this kind of humor as contentious or tendentious expression of hostility from the id that the superego usually suppresses or forbids but allows in humorous form. A harsh superego expresses these feelings in biting and sarcastic humor.³² From a frame-switching perspective, laughter that expresses superiority is rejecting the frame of the target’s apparent status and replacing it with the target’s low status and the speaker’s higher