Last week, The Bulwark published an essay of mine whose entire argument is contained in its title: “All Classics Are Funny.” Leo Tolstoy! Herman Melville! Toni Morrison! Uh, Norm Macdonald! All funny! I think the piece gets at something true while also being light, which is to say not dogmatic.
One book, or rather one volume of sixty-six books, I didn’t get a chance to consider for this project was the Protestant Bible. And that’s not all. I didn’t review the works of Plato, Homer, Sappho, Virgil, Ovid, or Epictetus. I hardly tackled nonfiction of any kind, and I side-stepped plays and movies and other narrative forms outright. My aim was narrow: to grab some of the best known “boring, book-nerd” novels and shake the dust of their undisturbed covers into the eyes of my enemies. I’m talking about the YA lit community, to be clear. (I’m coming for you [quick Google search], Sarah Dessen!)
But the Bible nagged me. Part of the problem was that I was reading it regularly for the first time in years. This is always a dangerous pursuit. People chatter about the goriness and gruesomeness and general “wow, okay” factor of the Bible, for example, but the Bible’s violence is far more disorienting and profound than our pat debates.
The below scene in 1 Samuel, for example:
Then Samuel said, “Bring here to me Agag the king of the Amalekites.” And Agag came to him cheerfully. Agag said, “Surely the bitterness of death is past.” And Samuel said, “As your sword has made women childless, so shall your mother be childless among women.” And Samuel hacked Agag to pieces before the Lord in Gilgal.1
Thankfully, the novelist Christopher Beha has been making the rounds lately with a talk on why the novel is necessarily a secular art form. I haven’t seen the talk. I’ve barely read the Q&A linked in the previous sentence. But that won’t stop me from summarizing his opinion! As B.D. McClay (
) puts it in a recent newsletter, he discusses “the novel as a ‘secular’ form in the sense that novels are a way we pass the time.” They aren’t inherently antithetical to the religious or moral life, but neither are they meant to redeem or purify us. It’s an illuminating and helpful distinction. Novels aren’t sacred, and to make them sacred is to undermine, as Beha says, their “power and possibility.”All the same, I don’t want my thesis, “All [Classic Works of Fiction] Are Funny,” to be saved by genre hair-splitting. I know the Bible isn’t the same as Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit,2 and while most “Bible as Literature” curricula strike me as an overreach of theory and an underestimating of transcendence, the Bible is The Classic—poetry, prophecy, myth, reportage, narrative—the actual canon from which all canon wars of English literature derive. It has to be funny!
Now, obviously, there are parts of scripture which we find funny that I don’t think the text intends as a punchline. I’m out of my depth here, but when the prophet Elisha curses some youths who call him “baldy” and a couple of she-bears maul forty-two young men (possibly children), I don’t think we’re supposed to laugh. We might re-enact the scene as a humorous skit for a summer bible camp during middle school that absolutely kills and is sort of a core experience of Being Funny On Stage—for some people—but the violence is grim and the situation mystifying. The number of youths alone suggests Elisha was either being mobbed or decimated a local playground. Not funny.
Likewise, I still have friends who pass around Ezekiel 23:20 as a kind of evangelical Rickroll: “[She] lusted after her paramours there, whose members were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of stallions.” Some of us are children forever. Still, the sophomoric humor isn’t exactly of the text. The laughter stems from the fact that Ezekiel invented “hung like a horse.”
Funny? On purpose?
A quick internet search for “Is the Bible funny?” will result in lots of affirmatives, but few convincing examples. The best of the supporting evidence includes a bit from 2 Chronicles 21:20 where an aside about a king dying reassures the reader that he passed “to no one’s regret.” There’s also a precedent-setting monograph, apparently, about the humor of Jesus. I haven’t read it, but I do think the words of Christ have the best case (besides Proverbs) for landing setups on purpose. I can’t imagine a preacher saying, “If your child asks for an egg, will you give him a scorpion,” without a glint in the eye.
My favorite funny verse, though, is about Abraham: “Therefore from one person, and this one as good as dead, descendants were born, ‘as many as the stars of heaven and as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore.’”3 As good as dead! That’s a joke. It’s a joke. It’s an innuendo about Abraham’s virility and even if it weren’t, there’s no way to read it that isn’t amusing. God’s penchant for transforming the unlikely into the glorious is compressed into “Abraham, a guy as good as dead.” I could use this with my children in a year and get a chuckle. “And then at the age of forty, your father’s grandfather, a man as good as dead, begat your grandfather.”
The broader conclusion is that only familiarity, and often study, will demystify the great books, to say nothing of the Holy Book. The jokes are there, in other words, but they’re often in-jokes.4
A Short List of Other Great Works of Art that Are Humorous
Religio Medici by Thomas Browne (1642)5
The Gate of Angels by Penelope Fitzgerald (1990)
The Seventh Seal dir. by Ingmar Bergman (1957)
Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci (1503-17)
The Iliad by Homer (8th C. BC)
Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-72)
Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov (1925)
The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford (1915)
The Fugitive by Ford, Harrison (1993)
Some Exceptions at which I May Have Smiled But Did Not Laugh
Confessions by Saint Augustine (400)
A Hidden Life dir. by Terrence Malick (2019)
Nursery Frieze I by John Piper (1936)
F•R•I•E•N•D•S
I love you all.
From the updated NRSV translation. I don’t have ready access to my Robert Alter translation, but I’ve been working through part of that, as well.
Another author I ignored: P.G. Wodehouse. His entire output is probably the best example of (good) comedy as a virtuosic use of language.
I also think, for the record, that the Bible is full of play and joy that goes far beyond verbal rimshots. I imagine a familiarity with Hebrew or Greek, etc., would only deepen that sense.
If you didn’t already click the link, Bill Coberly and I recorded a podcast on Thomas Browne. It’s one of our better outings, I think.