Cutting use of humor

by Dan Phillips

I recently finished my second go-through of the audiobook of Spurgeon's autobiography (see here and here). Among the many things that struck me were the great man's observations on humor, taken in turn from Lectures to My Students:

Sometimes, anecdotes have force in them on account of their appealing to the sense of the ludicrous. Of course, I must be very careful here, for it is a sort of tradition of the fathers that it is wrong to laugh on Sundays. The eleventh commandment is, that we are to love one another, and then, according to some people, the twelfth is, “Thou shalt pull a long face on Sunday.” I must confess that I would rather hear people laugh than I would see them asleep in the house of God; and I would rather get the truth into them through the medium of ridicule than I would have the truth neglected, or leave the people to perish through lack of reception of the truth. I do believe in my heart that there may be as much holiness in a laugh as in a cry; and that, sometimes, to laugh is the better thing of the two, for I may weep, and be murmuring, and repining, and thinking all sorts of bitter thoughts against God; while, at another time, I may laugh the laugh of sarcasm against sin, and so evince a holy earnestness in the defence of the truth. I do not know why ridicule is to be given up to Satan as a weapon to be used against us, and not to be employed by us as a weapon against him. I will venture to affirm that the Reformation owed almost as much to the sense of the ridiculous in human nature as to anything else, and that those humorous squibs and caricatures, that were issued by the friends of Luther, did more to open the eyes of Germany to the abominations of the priesthood than the more solid and ponderous arguments against Romanism. I know no reason why we should not, on suitable occasions, try the same style of reasoning. “It is a dangerous weapon,” it will be said, “and many men will cut their fingers with it.” Well, that is their own look-out; but I do not know why we should be so particular about their cutting their fingers if they can, at the same time, cut the throat of sin, and do serious damage to the great adversary of souls. [Spurgeon, C. H. (2009). Lectures to my Students, Vol. 3: The Art of Illustration; Addresses Delivered to the students of the Pastors' College, Metropolitan Tabernacle (43–44). Bellingham, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc.]

This is a topic worth greater focus, some time. We would see that the most frequent form of humor in the Bible is parody, satire, sarcasm. You'll not be surprised that the examples leaping to my mind come from Proverbs, which features both brief and extended send-ups of the lazy (6:6-11), the blinkingly-naive immoral lad (7:1-27), the harridan (27:15-16), the drunk (23:29-35), and of course the various kinds of fool (17:12; 26:11; 27:22). In fact,

The fact is that God moves His servants to communicate His truth, and to warn people away from deception, by all sorts of means. He moves them to employ instruction, explanation, reasoning, pleading, warning, and yes, even acerbic, sarcastic satire. Indeed, the most common forms of humor in the Bible are satire, sarcasm, and irony. [From this, p. 62]

"Dangerous tool," yes. But a tool nonetheless, and an effective one.

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