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    The Mother of All Laughter: Sarah and the Genesis of Comedy
    The Mother of All Laughter: Sarah and the Genesis of Comedy
    The Mother of All Laughter: Sarah and the Genesis of Comedy
    Ebook147 pages2 hours

    The Mother of All Laughter: Sarah and the Genesis of Comedy

    By Terry Lindvall

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    When the superannuated biblical Sarah learned that she would give birth to a son, she burst out laughing, and that son's name-Isaac-was forever a testimony to this moment of holy mirth. In The Mother of All Laughter: Sarah & the Genesis of Comedy, Terry Lindvall argues that there is a biblical place for laughter. At times, he lets truth be obscured by a good story (as when he cites the famous Neil Armstrong/"Mr. Gorsky" urban legend as fact), but he raises important points about humor for Christians.
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBH Publishing Group
    Release dateSep 1, 2003
    ISBN9781433677731
    The Mother of All Laughter: Sarah and the Genesis of Comedy

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      Book preview

      The Mother of All Laughter - Terry Lindvall

      Gloria.

      Introduction

      This is the day the LORD has made;

      let us rejoice and be glad in it.

      —PSALM 118:24

      If you keep on talking, you’ll eventually say something funny.

      —GROUCHO MARX

      Sport that wrinkled Care derides,

      And Laughter holding both his sides.

      Come, and trip it as ye go

      On the light fantastic toe.

      —JOHN MILTON

      F rom frowning saints, prayed St. Theresa of Avila, Good Lord deliver us." The following little book seeks to echo that prayer.

      A few years ago I wrote a book on C. S. Lewis’s views on laughter, insights picked and gleaned from his many writings. I tried to open windows into the heavens of humor and wit, inviting winds of laughter to swirl down and disturb my own dust. The book, however, was an academic text and scared away some of my favorite people, including family members. So I thought I would again try to see what I could find from holy sources about laughter and attempt to communicate my discoveries with the same delight into which I have been baptized.

      In 1964, one theologian (and a Quaker, at that) set out to set the record straight. In his classic The Humor of Christ, Elton Trueblood (a serious Christian-sounding name, if ever I’ve heard one) challenged the prevailing stereotype of a grave and gloomy Son of God.¹ He focused his study on the Savior’s love of word play and witty banter. Trueblood pointed out that the Lord loved not only parables but also paradoxes and puns. Alongside the suffering Messiah he re-presented the joyful Jesus. Trueblood said that if a four-year-old could get Jesus’ jokes (as he had discovered while reading Matthew 7 to his son), shouldn’t the rest of us?

      Of course we should. But how might we correct an image we’ve given the world that Christians are, and should be, stiff-necked, solemn, and unsmiling? Against a prevailing image of grim theologians and prissy church ladies, is there a biblical model for those who would serve the Lord with gladness?

      Perhaps we must be born again in another sense. Jesus said, Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven (Matt. 18:3), and that may go for the kingdom of humor as well. Maybe it takes being young at heart, even as a grown-up, to understand the mirth of God’s mercies. Sometimes the little children can lead us.

      As Trueblood recognized, children see the joy and laughter in life and in loving the Lord. I have seen this in my own family. Our son, Christopher, first erupted into real laughter by the time he was two, when he saw and heard two glass bottles clink into each other, a sort of breakable Laurel and Hardy. Our daughter, Caroline, would dance with laughter at a mere invitation. Both kids knew by abundant experience that a pillow fight with someone you love overcomes you with laughter and also allows you to stay up later. Yet it seems that somewhere between childhood and adulthood, we lose laughter, as if our humorous was surgically removed, leaving not one funny bone in our bodies. We become comedically challenged. Somehow we grow up to suspect that by laughing at the creation, we are insulting our Creator. This is especially true when the subject matter is religious or is related to our bodies. Then we tend to feel more solemn, with more guilt.

      Even I, well known as a merry prankster—who once threw snowballs at the dean’s window and broke it (not as a student but as a faculty member)—have chuckled in my pew over something funny my pastor inadvertently said, then wondered if I was out of line spiritually. Sometimes I want to chortle when my wife, Karen, prays something that strikes me as inviting a witty rejoinder from the Lord. And heaven forbid that I even think about the rather amusing nature of sex during the very act of marital duty (well, not in this chapter).

      All these things are funny, at least to me. Am I just so great a sinner or so small a saint as to be unable to squelch a smile?

      While I am a great sinner who has blessedly tasted grace, I don’t think solemn sainthood is the answer—or at least not entirely. C. S. Lewis once observed that there was too much solemnity among religious people, too much speaking in holy tones.² In my reading of the Scriptures and in my fellowship with a wonderfully odd troupe of Christians, I sense that I (we, actually) have been cast into a rollicking musical comedy. Yet even when the flutes play, some refuse to dance. Yo, sang the Lord of the Dance, do not look dismal, but rejoice!

      And we Christians are not the only ones to sense this irony-loving, upside-down side of God’s nature. We are certainly not the first group to recognize God’s comedic genius. The Jews, God’s original chosen and peculiar people, have been expressing such insight for centuries, yea millennia. Throughout their history it seems the children of Israel have recognized that sometimes God’s ways are very quirky and occasionally downright funny. The Almighty often does things that don’t make sense to us mere mortals, at least not at first, and we question them.

      But when finally the method in the madness becomes clear, we can put aside our queries and smile. We can laugh. And we should if God is the one pulling the joke on us. It seems that the Lord especially likes irony, making possible what is impossible—order from chaos, elation from mourning, life from death, saints from sinners.

      Let There Be Laughter

      Make no mistake, then, that laughter dates back to the Hebrew Bible—Genesis, chapter 17, to be exact. The first mention of laughter in the Bible occurs in a setting ripe with comic predicaments and dialogue—the story of Abraham and Sarah and the seemingly unlikely birth of their son, Isaac.

      In a nutshell the story is that God promised an incredible heritage to a trusting couple if they would listen to him, follow him, and obey him. The Lord told this seventy-five-year-old man and his sixty-five-year-old wife to leave their homeland (in his ancient language get out of Ur and get out of here sounded the same) and family and to go to a land He would show them. I will make you into a great nation, God promised him. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you (Gen. 12:2–3).

      So Abram and Sarai did just that. They packed up and left, headed out of Haran and down toward the Chevy Chase section of Canaan they went, like a National Lampoon family vacation. Along their journey south, God promised Abram that his seed would inherit all the land they passed through. So the couple trusted God and continued their journey, anxiously awaiting the fulfillment of the dream.

      But God, to whom one day is as a thousand years, took his dear, sweet time. Year after year he made them wait. Abram and Sarai grew old. I mean, really old. We’re talking older than tenured university faculty here.

      Year after year they wondered as they wandered. And year after year, as they waxed older, their hopes waned. At one point they even concluded that the Almighty might need their help, so they worked out a sort of surrogate parenting plan with their slave, who bore a son.

      But finally, fifteen years after he made the promise to the couple, God reminded them of his covenant. He changed their names. He added even more blessings. And when their ages almost added up to two hundred, the promise turned to pregnancy. God delivered—and so did Sarah. With Abraham as father, she bore a son, who, indeed, would bear two of his own sons and have descendants as numerous as the stars of the heavens and the sand of the sea.

      Despite the many emotions they’d experienced—doubt, fear, hope, jealousy, joy—in the end they laughed. And Sarah, especially, laughed. The Bible says so. God gave her the gift of laughter; and in doing so, he got the last laugh. She didn’t seem to mind a bit.

      The Answers in the Questions

      What can we Christians learn about life and laughter from Sarah? I wanted to know, so I got my wife’s permission to spend an inordinate amount of time with a good-looking older woman. Then I sat down and studied the story of Sarah and her husband, Abraham, to see how laughter came and fit into their lives so I could see how it should fit into ours as their spiritual offspring of faith.

      As I studied, I found that their story is punctuated with question marks. Sarah, the matriarch of all Jewish mothers, asked questions. Abraham, the potent patriarch, asked questions. Even God himself, though he already knew the answers, asked questions.

      So perhaps it is no accident that throughout the millennia, Sarah and Abraham’s offspring, the Jews, have raised questioning to an art form. As I looked into that fact, it wasn’t primarily the pointed interrogations of defense attorneys or the rhetorical queries of Catskills comedians that I found most interesting. It was in the kind of questions that rabbis of old would ask. As these religious leaders clarified and made commentary on the Hebrew texts, they explored why certain things happened in the biblical narratives and why other things didn’t. Sometimes the rabbis filled in the holes in the stories with imaginative possibilities of what might have been or what could have happened.

      I liked their methodology of Midrash, so I appropriated it into my study. And I liked some of the things I discovered. I won’t pretend that my questions and invented answers are absolutely true—although the biblical texts certainly are—but I believe that such explorations of Why? and Why not? helped me see the truth in God’s Word in fresh and enlightening ways.

      I must admit, I felt like a bit of a spiritual tourist goy in a wonderful temple of treasures. But in my trip I found some of my own Hebrew spiritual roots into which I, as a Christian, gratefully have been grafted.

      I also rediscovered the depth of Jewish humor. Through the most trying times and the hardest of histories, the Jews have always had jollity and jesters. Can it be any accident that the offspring of Sarah, the mother of all laughter, seem to be able to appreciate better than most of us the glory of a good guffaw? I believe their ability to laugh is an inherited trait, one that I hope we Christians, as Sarah’s other spiritual offspring, can rediscover ourselves, and thus recover some of the joy of our salvation. To saints beleaguered by our own sins and tribulation, the words of Jesus bring fresh hope: Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world (John 16:33 NKJV).

      Finally, when the time was ripe, God mixed the baby batter and brought forth a miracle child, a son, who, himself, would have descendants as numerous as the stars of the heavens and the sand of the sea. It was the christening of God’s family on earth.

      My interest, however, devotes its attention to five key moments in the story, each of which deals with Sarah and her unique experiences with laughter. Sarah is the Mother of All Laughter. She is the one around whom biblical studies of comedy must begin. Imbedded in this story are five incidents that explore what it means to be human, to be made in God’s image, to mar that image, and to experience this other worldly explosion called laughter. So, dwelling in these Scriptures from the Book of Genesis, I

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