“Humor is itself the chief antidote to pride and … the hammer of fools.” – G. K.
When I came aboard the Rover masthead in 2022 and was offered the position of Humor editor, I didn’t realize that it was a somewhat bespoke position. It then became a learning process as the section figured out what it was supposed to be. We had to start asking: What are we trying to do with our humor section? What does it look like for a newspaper to have a humor section, especially a Catholic one?
In short, it behooves a watchdog to bark, but every dog must be allowed to play.
At one level, Catholic humor means a plethora of styles and senses of humor, insofar as Catholic means “absolutely every.” We have no dedicated staff writers for the section, and instead have a perpetual open call for submissions. While it is a task of the Rover to defend objective Truth and Goodness, it seems fitting for the Humor section to imitate (in some simple way) the variety of subjective charisms and saints of the Church. Whether it was Augustine or Wesley who said it, “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.”
I’m proud to say that the humor section has a range and intentionally so. In order to have an even-handed treatment of the culture, at both a popular and a local level, it requires a celebration of things that are delightful as well as a scorn for things that are wrong. The section would fail if we did not have a Rudolph for every Thompson, a Grannis for every Bartleby.
But to approach it philosophically for a moment, the standard theory of humor nowadays is that it comes from the recognition of incongruity. Wordplay, for example, amuses us because of the way it disrupts the word we expected to hear. All kinds of humor, whether it be cerebral and philosophical, scathing and critical, or delightfully and simply foolish, only has its worth because we know how things ought to be. Now too much of a disruption descends into nonsense, and too little is simple misspeaking. In the same way, some things may be too grave to be funny, others are too sacred to be joked about, and others still are simply mistakes.
When one looks around the world, he is confronted with many incongruities. How else should we describe the Fall, if not as when incongruity began to dominate in the world? Things surely are not as they should be—and sometimes that departure from the ideal is actually laughable.
But this is where the Christian will differ from the atheist. If the atheist should laugh at the world’s incongruities, his laugh could only be the grim and hollow laugh of the hopeless. He would be like a convict who laughs with derision when his executioner trips over himself and drops his axe. Humor for him is nothing else than a brief and accidental distraction from his present anxiety.
For the Catholic, however, humor becomes much richer in light of hope. If the humor of a joke comes from knowing how things ought to be, then a Christian can laugh at the world’s inanities as a parent laughs at the child’s absurdity or as a movie-watcher at a blooper reel. The world falls short of heaven in a myriad of ways; and for those who have the eyes to see it, the world is filled with a myriad of jokes. He also laughs with confidence in heaven, for if life is only a rehearsal for death, then it is the rehearsal of a comedy.
It is a Catholic’s duty to laugh at things, to laugh at wordplay and irony and children and limericks and even potty-humor. I dare even to say that there are two kinds of laughter necessary for salvation. One must laugh at the world, since Christian scorn for this life means not taking it too seriously. St. Lawrence knew as much. He must also laugh at himself—if he does not see what’s so funny about himself, then it has been too long since his last Confession.
James Whitaker is a graduate student in the theology department. He is honored by the invitation to appear somewhere in the paper that isn’t the absolute back page. If you need him, that’s where he’ll be (or at jwhitak5@nd.edu).
Photo Credit: Cecilia Giménez Fitte
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