I warn you, this isn’t going to be funny. I don’t write sitcoms. I don’t write books about humor. The funniest thing I’ve ever done I did over fifteen years ago, and I did it by accident. It used to be my family’s custom, during birthday celebrations, for each member to describe the birthday boy or girl with a single word. The more creative, the better. I racked my brain to come up with the one word that would encapsulate my fourteen-year-old brother’s prickly personality, a word that would have my family nodding and saying, “He did it. Christian described him perfectly.” I thought of my brother’s self-reliance, the way he avoided being helped. I thought of spiked lizards that survived alone in the desert. And I came up with the perfect word. “My brother is,” I announced, “horny.”
So, no funny stuff here. I am Balaam’s ass, speaking out of turn. But since I’m here and have been given words, let me untease two threads in James Cary’s initial article. It seems to me that James (if I may) is arguing two distinct, though related, things. In the first place, he argues that the Bible is funny. I agree. In fact, I would go even farther and say that the Bible is objectively funny, the funniest thing in the universe. (Anyone who thinks I’m making light of the Bible doesn’t know how weighty humor can be.) Second, James (again, if I may) argues that, because the Bible is full of crass people and crass situations, we can watch crass sitcoms, as long as we recognize that the characters need grace and forgiveness. To me, that’s a different discussion.
James (ok, I’m not going to ask permission anymore) is correct that the Bible is funny. The humor starts early on, at least as soon as the appearance of Abram, the childless old man whose name means “Big Daddy.” Perhaps it starts even earlier, when God comes down from his throne to squint at the tiny structure with which the men of Shinar plan to reach heaven. God’s laughter resounds throughout Scripture, in Psalms, prophets, history, and finally, when He Himself plays the continued joke that is the Incarnation. More impossible births. More miracles. More abundance. More life. The Jewish leaders become the butt of the biggest joke of all when they decide to get rid of the Man who can raise the dead. . . by murdering him. Smart.
History isn’t the only way God tells jokes. Jesus has a sharp wit and a sharp tongue. He likes to exaggerate to prove a point, like His image of one man with a two-by-four in his eye telling off another man blinking around a loose eyelash. A friend of mine once pointed out that Jesus tells a story (Luke 14) that quite possibly includes a joke about sex. A man invites his friends to his wedding. They all come up with excuses. The first friend says he just bought a field and he has to go check it out. The second friend says he just bought a yoke of oxen and he has to go test it. The third friend says he just married a wife and he has to go… Well, you know. The point is, the Bible is funny.
James also says that sitcoms are intensely moral. I agree. The incongruity that makes things funny needs a fixed mark to skew from. Silly needs straight. You have to know how things should be in order to get the joke, and in the world of sitcoms, the world has to go back to that happy normal. As Steve Wilkens pointed out in his response, you can’t just bump off a character in a sitcom (though having a seal bite off a character’s hand is a good idea). The characters are stuck with one another and must learn to live together.
The first point I want to make is drawn from this part of the discussion. In sitcoms, we recognize the stock characters that people our lives. We laugh at them. We learn to love them. We forgive and even begin to love their annoying idiosyncrasies. Less often do we recognize that we are the stock characters. We are the insufferable coworkers, the nosy neighbors, the sneering bullies. Steve (if I may) uses the example of Barney in How I Met Your Mother to argue that we should strive to see those who annoy us in real life as comedic characters with their own narrative arc of redemption. But we can go further. The guy who sits in the row behind you during church may not be the Barney in your life. You may just as easily be the Barney in his.
Christians must laugh because we serve a God with a sense of humor. More importantly, Christians must laugh at ourselves. There should be more self-aware Christian mockery to shock us out of our comfortable seriousness. There should be more Christian safety pins ready to deflate our modern-day Pharisees. A few sharp Christian wits are out there. The highest profile probably belongs to the Christian news website, the Babylon Bee. Do yourself a favor and read a few of their articles. We need more of that. May the Bee beget a thousand larvae, and may they all grow up to build satirical hives of their own.
The second argument James Cary makes in his essay seems to address a practical question: can Christians watch crass sitcoms? Yes, he argues, the Bible is full of fools and drunkards, so our entertainment can be, too. No whipping out Philippians 4:8 – you could apply the “whatever is lovely” standard to Genesis or Judges. Since “whatever is lovely” includes all of Scripture, it includes tales of rape, incest, dismemberment, human sacrifice, idolatry, and genocide. Samson was a violent man. Therefore, I can watch this bloody episode of Game of Thrones. Oh, you don’t watch TV shows with nudity? Then I guess you’ve never read the Song of Songs?
I have met pious Christians who fit James’s stereotype. The minute anything looks fun or thought-provoking, it gets a good Philippians 4:8 whack. These Christians want to hear stories that reinforce their pieties, not challenge or enrich them. That said, it’s far more common, in my experience, for Christians to publicly denounce the culture’s loose morals and then spend the weekend binge-watching HBO. I’m reminded of someone’s quip about TV: it allows us to be entertained in our homes by people we’d never allow under our roofs. It seems the question is not whether Christians can watch sitcoms, but whether they should feel bad about already doing so.
There’s much to be said on this topic – about the nature of different arts, about timing and appropriateness, about sin and the Spirit – more to say than I have space or intelligence to write. I don’t want to debate the merits of Game of Thrones or Modern Family or How I Met Your Mother. Know thyself and tread lightly. My only point here is that most of us have been so thoroughly cultured by TV that we scarcely know what “lovely” means. Is it ok to watch fools being fools and to laugh righteously at them? Yes, but only if we know what righteous laughter sounds like. It is all too easy to be retrained to see folly as wisdom and slavery as freedom.
James says that the Bible gives us insights into all kinds of follies, and I agree. The question is what is folly and who says? By the standards of the Bible, is Noah a drunkard? By the standards of the Bible, is Michael Scott a fool? For most of us, the balance between watching TV and filling our minds with Scripture is so heavily weighted in favor of TV that we actually think Jephthah is an example of a Game of Thrones-style warlord. We are so used to seeing drunken fools on TV that we can’t see Noah as anything else. If we were to read the Bible first, we would find that Noah was not a drunkard, but a new Adam, exulting in a new creation. We would find that Jephthah was not a tyrant of Westeros, but a Spirit-filled warrior. We would find that the heroes of the faith are not those who continued in their folly, but those who clung to God in repentance. The hard-hearted are cast away. Those who see their sin are saved.
A TV show filled with fools is a comedy. When the fools are on both sides of the screen, it gets tragic. Practice seeing yourself as a fool lest you become one. James bemoans the fate of the sitcom in a post-Christian culture. I wonder about the fate of the believer who blindly consumes sitcoms, never wondering about their influence. Comedy may require soul, but no sitcom will show you the Way, the Truth, and the Life, unless it is heavily diluted with the pure milk of the Word. The wise man, soaked in Scripture, can see wisdom in the rankest, most folly-filled sitcom, as he can with any art form, while the fool is just hastening his destruction, giggling in freefall.
James’s main point stands: sitcoms give us a glimpse of foolishness that deserves our rich, godly laughter. But unless our mockery is saturated with the Word and the Spirit, to the point where we can laugh at our own foolishness, we will soon find ourselves the butt of a holy joke.
Christian Leithart writes and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama.
I warn you, this isn’t going to be funny. I don’t write sitcoms. I don’t write books about humor. The funniest thing I’ve ever done I did over fifteen years ago, and I did it by accident. It used to be my family’s custom, during birthday celebrations, for each member to describe the birthday boy or girl with a single word. The more creative, the better. I racked my brain to come up with the one word that would encapsulate my fourteen-year-old brother’s prickly personality, a word that would have my family nodding and saying, “He did it. Christian described him perfectly.” I thought of my brother’s self-reliance, the way he avoided being helped. I thought of spiked lizards that survived alone in the desert. And I came up with the perfect word. “My brother is,” I announced, “horny.”
So, no funny stuff here. I am Balaam’s ass, speaking out of turn. But since I’m here and have been given words, let me untease two threads in James Cary’s initial article. It seems to me that James (if I may) is arguing two distinct, though related, things. In the first place, he argues that the Bible is funny. I agree. In fact, I would go even farther and say that the Bible is objectively funny, the funniest thing in the universe. (Anyone who thinks I’m making light of the Bible doesn’t know how weighty humor can be.) Second, James (again, if I may) argues that, because the Bible is full of crass people and crass situations, we can watch crass sitcoms, as long as we recognize that the characters need grace and forgiveness. To me, that’s a different discussion.
James (ok, I’m not going to ask permission anymore) is correct that the Bible is funny. The humor starts early on, at least as soon as the appearance of Abram, the childless old man whose name means “Big Daddy.” Perhaps it starts even earlier, when God comes down from his throne to squint at the tiny structure with which the men of Shinar plan to reach heaven. God’s laughter resounds throughout Scripture, in Psalms, prophets, history, and finally, when He Himself plays the continued joke that is the Incarnation. More impossible births. More miracles. More abundance. More life. The Jewish leaders become the butt of the biggest joke of all when they decide to get rid of the Man who can raise the dead. . . by murdering him. Smart.
History isn’t the only way God tells jokes. Jesus has a sharp wit and a sharp tongue. He likes to exaggerate to prove a point, like His image of one man with a two-by-four in his eye telling off another man blinking around a loose eyelash. A friend of mine once pointed out that Jesus tells a story (Luke 14) that quite possibly includes a joke about sex. A man invites his friends to his wedding. They all come up with excuses. The first friend says he just bought a field and he has to go check it out. The second friend says he just bought a yoke of oxen and he has to go test it. The third friend says he just married a wife and he has to go… Well, you know. The point is, the Bible is funny.
James also says that sitcoms are intensely moral. I agree. The incongruity that makes things funny needs a fixed mark to skew from. Silly needs straight. You have to know how things should be in order to get the joke, and in the world of sitcoms, the world has to go back to that happy normal. As Steve Wilkens pointed out in his response, you can’t just bump off a character in a sitcom (though having a seal bite off a character’s hand is a good idea). The characters are stuck with one another and must learn to live together.
The first point I want to make is drawn from this part of the discussion. In sitcoms, we recognize the stock characters that people our lives. We laugh at them. We learn to love them. We forgive and even begin to love their annoying idiosyncrasies. Less often do we recognize that we are the stock characters. We are the insufferable coworkers, the nosy neighbors, the sneering bullies. Steve (if I may) uses the example of Barney in How I Met Your Mother to argue that we should strive to see those who annoy us in real life as comedic characters with their own narrative arc of redemption. But we can go further. The guy who sits in the row behind you during church may not be the Barney in your life. You may just as easily be the Barney in his.
Christians must laugh because we serve a God with a sense of humor. More importantly, Christians must laugh at ourselves. There should be more self-aware Christian mockery to shock us out of our comfortable seriousness. There should be more Christian safety pins ready to deflate our modern-day Pharisees. A few sharp Christian wits are out there. The highest profile probably belongs to the Christian news website, the Babylon Bee. Do yourself a favor and read a few of their articles. We need more of that. May the Bee beget a thousand larvae, and may they all grow up to build satirical hives of their own.
The second argument James Cary makes in his essay seems to address a practical question: can Christians watch crass sitcoms? Yes, he argues, the Bible is full of fools and drunkards, so our entertainment can be, too. No whipping out Philippians 4:8 – you could apply the “whatever is lovely” standard to Genesis or Judges. Since “whatever is lovely” includes all of Scripture, it includes tales of rape, incest, dismemberment, human sacrifice, idolatry, and genocide. Samson was a violent man. Therefore, I can watch this bloody episode of Game of Thrones. Oh, you don’t watch TV shows with nudity? Then I guess you’ve never read the Song of Songs?
I have met pious Christians who fit James’s stereotype. The minute anything looks fun or thought-provoking, it gets a good Philippians 4:8 whack. These Christians want to hear stories that reinforce their pieties, not challenge or enrich them. That said, it’s far more common, in my experience, for Christians to publicly denounce the culture’s loose morals and then spend the weekend binge-watching HBO. I’m reminded of someone’s quip about TV: it allows us to be entertained in our homes by people we’d never allow under our roofs. It seems the question is not whether Christians can watch sitcoms, but whether they should feel bad about already doing so.
There’s much to be said on this topic – about the nature of different arts, about timing and appropriateness, about sin and the Spirit – more to say than I have space or intelligence to write. I don’t want to debate the merits of Game of Thrones or Modern Family or How I Met Your Mother. Know thyself and tread lightly. My only point here is that most of us have been so thoroughly cultured by TV that we scarcely know what “lovely” means. Is it ok to watch fools being fools and to laugh righteously at them? Yes, but only if we know what righteous laughter sounds like. It is all too easy to be retrained to see folly as wisdom and slavery as freedom.
James says that the Bible gives us insights into all kinds of follies, and I agree. The question is what is folly and who says? By the standards of the Bible, is Noah a drunkard? By the standards of the Bible, is Michael Scott a fool? For most of us, the balance between watching TV and filling our minds with Scripture is so heavily weighted in favor of TV that we actually think Jephthah is an example of a Game of Thrones-style warlord. We are so used to seeing drunken fools on TV that we can’t see Noah as anything else. If we were to read the Bible first, we would find that Noah was not a drunkard, but a new Adam, exulting in a new creation. We would find that Jephthah was not a tyrant of Westeros, but a Spirit-filled warrior. We would find that the heroes of the faith are not those who continued in their folly, but those who clung to God in repentance. The hard-hearted are cast away. Those who see their sin are saved.
A TV show filled with fools is a comedy. When the fools are on both sides of the screen, it gets tragic. Practice seeing yourself as a fool lest you become one. James bemoans the fate of the sitcom in a post-Christian culture. I wonder about the fate of the believer who blindly consumes sitcoms, never wondering about their influence. Comedy may require soul, but no sitcom will show you the Way, the Truth, and the Life, unless it is heavily diluted with the pure milk of the Word. The wise man, soaked in Scripture, can see wisdom in the rankest, most folly-filled sitcom, as he can with any art form, while the fool is just hastening his destruction, giggling in freefall.
James’s main point stands: sitcoms give us a glimpse of foolishness that deserves our rich, godly laughter. But unless our mockery is saturated with the Word and the Spirit, to the point where we can laugh at our own foolishness, we will soon find ourselves the butt of a holy joke.
Christian Leithart writes and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama.
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