The History of Easter Laughter

2. (Easter) Laughter as a Historical Point of Contention

Already at this point it has transpired how important it is to approach the subject with a sense of historical awareness. This, however, points to a not insignificant challenge, as an obvious reaction to this alleged need would be to meet it with an overbearing smile – and a shrug of one’s shoulders. While it may be entirely valid out of pure historical interest to delve into the quarrels of the past over the legitimacy of laughter in connection with the Church and Christianity, it is tempting to think that the historical distance is so great that both the phenomenon of Easter Laughter and, in particular, the opposition to it can only be understood as an anachronism, as a historical oddity with no appreciable contemporary relevance.

At this introductory stage we must ask a counterweight question as to how great that distance actually is. Qualitatively, so to speak, we can maintain that even if and when most sermons today have no problem at all with including a joke or two, this does not necessarily mean that we have overcome the legacy theologically. Our attitude may simply have changed without any real arguments for such a change (including counterarguments against the condemnations of the past). Maybe we are just servile to an age that calls for entertainment, and where ‘it-must-be-fun’ is a parameter that is by no means restricted to the entertainment industry but has spread to almost all areas of society. There is a lot of canned laughter on TV, but how many Greek Choruses of ‘professional mourners’ are employed in the media? To avoid being misunderstood I hasten to add that, conversely, the point is not that sermons necessarily have to be boring, that it may not be ‘entertaining’ to go to church, nor that the church hasn’t earlier in history been faced with such demands (and that Easter Laughter may possibly be a testimony to that effect). Rather it is the presumed weight and imperialist spread of the parameter that is so striking. Why is it that it has suddenly become an argument – and a weighty one – that it must be fun to go to church – along with the expectations that it should be fun to go to school, to be at work, to go to bed with one’s partner? Should it also be fun to be in jail, undergo heart surgery, or lie in a hospice?¹³

Furthermore, it may also be worth considering ‘quantitatively’, so to speak, that even though in our current cultural climate there may be a wide gap in attitude between then and now, it is chronologically surprisingly narrower. To mention only one well-publicised case from the mid-1990s, it aroused equal parts curiosity and indignation, when the so-called Toronto revival made the congregation’s loud laughter a hallmark of the Holy Spirit’s presence during the service. The reactions of that time just a few decades ago may be a warning against exaggerating the distance between Oecolampadius and our time. Perhaps ecclesiastically and theologically we have not abandoned or overcome a mistrust of laughter entirely. The limitations to our acceptance of laughter in church may not have been lifted but simply shifted – more or less according to denomination, nationality, region … or perhaps rather according to individual mood and taste? An easy litmus test is to ask ourselves: is it permissible/desirable to smile during an (Easter) service? Is it permissible/desirable to laugh? To laugh loudly? To slap our thighs in a fit of laughter? If just one of the questions triggers a pause, it may be worth the trouble to read Oecolampadius and the subsequent discussion of his concern.

Just as faith in the resurrection is not restricted to Easter Sunday, neither can Easter Laughter be confined to such a narrow framework,¹⁴ so if it is illegitimate in that context, laughter is probably problematic in general. Conversely, if the condemnations of Easter Laughter in the past are overcome, does both it and any other form of laughter have the same legitimate place in church and theology as all other human emotions, reactions, and expressions?¹⁵ When many in our time have not only relaxed their resistance to laughter but are attempting to develop a theology of laughter, we must try not to lose sight of what the challenge is. It may indeed be a symbolically important step to allow laughter into the church, but this is not necessarily the same as having developed a theology to support it, certainly not if access to the church is mainly due to the fact that we have given up resisting the omnipresence of laughter in the surrounding society.

It is not likely that any theologians of laughter will use this as a justification; but it is with laughter as with so many other modern cultural phenomena that are invited inside the church: it will always turn out whether the motive was basically one of accomodation, since the result will soon be either involuntarily comic imitations or we sense an ulterior motive and do not really feel like laughing. By extension, it is also not enough to use laughter in the church for strategic reasons, as it is particularly customary in homiletics to argue. Humour is recommended, as it is demonstrably good at catching the congregation’s attention; but as soon as we get to the point of our sermon, we have to leave it behind! Arguably humour and laughter are used to serve the gospel, but apparently they have nothing to do with the gospel itself. Nor is it adequate to aim for laughing in the church at the church,¹⁶ although this can be interpreted as a display of an otherwise admirable self-critical consciousness, a kind of safety valve against an inflated sense of self-importance. That valve function certainly has an illustrious place in the theory of laughter, but quite frankly it is a kind of a negative defence, which could be reformulated thus: we legitimise laughter for the sake of our sinfulness; it is needed as protection against our penchant for pharisaism, pride and lust for power. All this is part of it; but does laughter also have anything to do with salvation?

Insisting on such questions is not only in respect for the Church and theology but certainly also out of awe of laughter. It is relevant and respectable to examine the many possible functions of laughter and decide which of them we will try to apply – and expose ourselves to. The crucial thing, however, must be to combine this with reflections on what the meaning can be behind the many types of laughter, and what significance this can have in a theological and ecclesiastical context. The addition of ‘exposing ourselves to laughter’ refers to the dialectic nature of laughter, that it is naïve to think that laughter can be used as a pure means. Precisely because laughter can seize control and make itself a goal, it is all the more necessary to clarify laughter theologically as a phenomenon and carrier of meaning, before making it a programme to bid it welcome within the church service.

This, of course, is ultimately related to the complication in the relationship between gospel and laughter that it does not directly and unambiguously work both ways. If joy is included as the link between the two, we can say that from a theological point of view joy belongs constitutively to the gospel, and anthropologically/psychologically we can observe that joy often finds expression in laughter. In that sense laughter cannot be completely foreign to the gospel. However, the order cannot be reversed; partly because laughter has many sources other than joy, partly because joy has other expressions than laughter – not to mention the fact that not even joy is able to circumscribe the gospel. Just as we may think it narrow-minded and prudish to want to exclude laughter from the gospel, it can be just as naive and dangerous to let laughter be evidence of the gospel being received, or to try to arouse laughter in order to let it be the entrance door to the service. Oecolampadius would probably have agreed with these reservations.

It can be a great stimulus to reflect on Richard G. Cote’s (1934–2005) call to ‘imagine what might happen if God’s laughter became a living religious symbol in the church, just as God’s remorse or God’s omnipotence or God’s providence once were’.¹⁷ Likewise, it should not be dismissed in advance that Merritt Conrad Hyers (1933–2013) may be onto something worth serious reflection when he suggests that the inclusion of humour and laughter in 20^th-century theological and ecclesiastical considerations may be an expression of ‘a special virtue of modern spirituality’.¹⁸ The present book presupposes that Cote’s and Hyers’ deliberations are legitimate and that it is not a major problem if the present were to stand alone in finding such thoughts relevant, even without being able to refer to substantial precedents in our tradition. We could argue that the world, humanity and/or the Church have changed so much that new conditions and possibilities appear. However, if we think that it is going too far to work with such ontological implications, we could settle for a more cautious, yet perhaps more polemical consideration: ‘modern spirituality’ is not necessarily an expression of a whole new relationship with God, but it may be a release of the aspects of that relationship which tradition has under-exposed, suppressed or condemned.

How do we strike the best balance between tradition and the present? How can tradition be considered an inexhaustible source of inspiration without giving it the power to veto change? How can we champion the latest answers to today’s issues without ignoring the ideas of the past simply because they are old? A benchmark could be the wisdom behind the canonical principle (at least in the Danish Lutheran Church) that we can introduce new rituals without thereby nullifying the validity of the old ones. As such this principle is the opposite of a cancel-culture that would want to tear down statues of people because they are an uncomfortable reminder of who we were one or more generations earlier. On the one hand, this benchmark is a sign of the churches’ attempt to preserve their identity in the face of change, and on the other hand, it testifies to a self-confident openness that we are able to accommodate a certain diversity. It is legitimate for a living faith to introduce something new, while at the same time it is an awareness of continuity that we do not thereby invalidate the tradition. Let this serve as a model that finds it fully justified to invent new ways of talking about God and Jesus, but which at the same time is a warning against treating the newfound openness of recent generations to speak of the laughter of God and Jesus almost as an expression of a crypto-philosophical belief in historical progress! For when we study the cornucopia of contemporary theologies of laughter, an unmistakable tendency becomes clear: in the attempt to rehabilitate themselves in relation to the traditional critique, these theologies often come recklessly close to turning the laughter-sceptical worship and forms of faith of the past into heresy.

It is not the concern of this book to promote the viewpoint that God meets us especially in the power of laughter to break down barriers, or that humour should be particularly consistent with a Christian view of life. Even if it has been scientifically proven endless times in the 20^th century that laughter is healthy and can have a healing effect, this does not eo ipso make it blissful or redemptive. For laughter can be just as much an expression of avoiding life as of embracing it, of hiding in a shell as of self-disclosure, of isolating oneself as of reaching out for a community. Conversely, it is indeed our concern – at least as a counterweight and supplement to the historical one-sidedness – to plead the case of laughter not being the opposite of seriousness, that God can also meet us in the laughter of joy as well as in the tears of repentance and sorrow, and finally that laughter as a natural bodily expression lies beyond, or before a good-bad dichotomy – and even more so a good-evil antinomy. The phenomenon of laughter is neither diabolical, as many of the Church Fathers et alii feared, nor – as it is now widely taken for granted – in itself heavenly.

As for the latter, it might be sobering with a Kantian-Protestant relation to laughter! We could try to distinguish the laughter of faith (and of humour) from a natural laughter. Not in order yet again to introduce false distinctions but to emphasise that to the extent that laughter is assigned a special ethical and religious role – whether we believe it leads to salvation or perdition – we must be wary of turning a natural inclination (the Kantian Neigung), such as a sunny disposition and being quick to laugh, into something particularly pleasing to God or stemming from the Devil. If not directly a Kantian ‘duty’ (Pflicht), the laughter of faith is not (only) rooted in a bubbling joy of life (joie de vivre) and a cheerful mood, but it contains pain and sorrow and springs from the fact that death did not have the last word about the Word … at the first Easter, and every day since.