Laughter: A Practice of Resistance

The following is an excerpt from a chapter I recently wrote for a collection of essays. It considers laughter as a practice of resistance.

The human being in addition to being a homo faber (a working man) a homo ludens (a playing man), to name but two of the many descriptors of “man,” is also a homo ridens (a laughing man).[1] Laughter and humor seem to be universal human characteristics, so much so that joy, humor, irony, and laughter are all celebrated in the Bible. Can we think of Miriam, Hannah, Mary, Elizabeth, the Father of the Prodigal Son, the healed paralytic, the disciples after Christ’s resurrection—and not think of laughter? And is God not having his moment of humor when he promises a son to the ninety-nine-year-old Abram and ninety-seven-year-old Sarai? And then “as a reward for their faith in Him, adding syllables to the elderly couple’s names, becoming AbrAHam and SarAH—an onomatopoeic ‘Ha-Ha’”?[2]

Of course, laughter can be derisive, blasphemous, or an expression of unbelief (Sarai again). It can ridicule and harm, diminish and discourage. It can be deceptive and hypocritical, manipulative and violent. It can be an instrument of death as much as of life, an instrument of oppression as of celebration. Have not most of us at times indulged a snicker of Schadenfreude—a joy in the misfortune of others—especially if they, as we see it, had it coming? This brings us to an important point. The way we cannot talk about experiences of beauty apart from moral considerations—beauty can be profoundly exploitative and aesthetic experiences can be self-destructive—so laughter too belongs to the sphere of ethics.

That laughter can also serve as a way of resistance in the most inhumane of circumstances is a theme that we regularly find in novelists such as Elie Wiesel (e.g., Gates of the Forest), Toni Morrison (e.g., Beloved), and Shūsaku Endō (e.g., Silence).[3] Wiesel, for instance, writing from the perspective of a Holocaust survivor, notes that the name “Isaac” etymologically derives from the verb “to laugh.” Indeed, 

as the first survivor, [Isaac can teach us] that it is possible to suffer and despair an entire lifetime, and still not give up on the art of laughter. [Of course, Isaac] never freed himself from the traumatizing scenes that violated his youth; the holocaust that marked him and continued to haunt him forever. Yet he remained capable of laughter. And in spite of everything he did laugh.[4]

The validity of Wiesel’s observation comes through in a recent study of fifty-five Holocaust survivors. The study notes that while laughter did not remove the horrendous circumstances of those survivors, their “macabre humor” help them subsist in the context of unspeakable tragedy.[5] True, theirs was not quite the slapstick comedy of Life is Beautiful, a controversial Holocaust-themed movie by the Italian comedian Robert Benigni. Nevertheless, the survivors’ humor did indeed function as a means of survival and resistance, thereby showing us that the human spirit is capable of life-affirming gestures even in the midst of horrendous evil. Tragedy and the tears are still there; there is no diminishing of that. Nevertheless, micro-practices of hope have genuine meaning. All that speaks to Harvey Cox’s contention that laughter, at times at least, “is hope’s last weapon. Crowded on all sides with idiocy and ugliness, pushed to concede that the final apocalypse seems to be upon us, we seem nonetheless to nourish laughter as our only remaining defense.”[6]

For Christians, of course, much more is at play than a mere Sisyphean decision not to give in to the absurd. The belief in the resurrected Christ introduces a whole different level of spiritual jocularity. To that end, Eugene O’Neill’s play Lazarus Laughed dramatizes how holy mirth is a proper provenance of hope. It is the story of Lazarus after Jesus brought him back from the dead. His life is controversial now for he laughs at everything, even at death. Everything is trivial. And so, everyone considers him a little off-kilter, a little dangerous. His home in Bethany is now called the “house of laughter.” At one point in the play, Lazarus says: “Laugh! Laugh with me at death. Death is dead! Fear is no more! There is only life! There is only laughter.”[7] Here, Christian praxis takes the shape of a stand-up comedy; a liturgical hilarity enacted by those who know how the story will ultimately end.

________________________
[1] See Simon Critchley, On Humour (New York: Routledge, 2002), 41.
[2] Critchley, On Humour, 42.
[3] For a helpful exploration of laughter in the listed authors, see Jacqueline Aileen Bussie, The Laughter of the Oppressed: Ethical and Theological Resistance in Wiesel, Morrison, and Endo (New York: T&T Clark, 2007).
[4] Elie Wiesel, Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends, trans. Marion Wiesel (New York: Random House, 1976), 97. For the wording and reference to Wiesel in this paragraph I am indebted to L. Juliana Claassens, “Tragic Laughter: Laughter as Resistance in the Book of Job,” Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 69, no. 2 (2015): 143-144.
[5] Chaya Ostrower, “Humor as a Defense Mechanism During the Holocaust,” Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 69, no. 2 (2015), 195.
[6] Harvey Cox, The Feast of Fools: A Theological Essay on Festivity and Fantasy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 157.
[7] Eugene O’Neill, “Lazarus Laughed,” http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks04/0400131h.html, last accessed October 2, 2019.