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The entire Bible, viewed as a 'divine comedy,' is contained within a U-shaped story…, one in which man … loses the tree and water of life at the beginning of Genesis and gets them back at the end of Revelation.

- Northrop Frye, The Great Code¹

"Holy Books," said Baudelaire, "never laugh, to whatever nation they may belong."² As a Christian with a guilty conscience, he undoubtedly had the New Testament in mind, where Jesus never laughs, and there seems at first to be little or no humor. But Baudelaire was wrong. It may be true that the only characters shown laughing in the New Testament are, ironically, the mourners in the house of Jairus (Mt. 9.24; Mk. 5.40; Lk. 8.53), who laugh at Jesus for saying that an evidently dead child is alive.³ But any reader of the Christian scriptures can readily think of episodes that are comic in some sense or another: Zacchaeus in the sycamore tree, say (Lk.19.1-10), or Jesus' remarks on the marital career of the Samaritan woman at the well (Jn. 4.16-20), the 120-180 extra gallons of wine provided for the wedding feast at Cana (Jn. 2.6-10), or the fate of the well-named Eutychus (Acts 20.7-12), who was killed by a boring sermon but fortunately revived by the preacher, and so forth. And the Hebrew Bible, as everyone knows, laughs a great deal. It would be sadly deficient as a human document if it did not.

Both Judaism and Christianity are, in fact, comic religions, as Dante understood comedy. They deal with (and for the believing community, they effect) a transition from unhappiness to happiness. One could say of the Bible what Dante said of his Commedia: "Its goal . . . is to bring those living in this life from out of their wretched state and to lead them to a state of happiness."⁴ The Bible is comic because it makes you happy, or is supposed to. Northtrop Frye describes its recurrent pattern as "U-shaped." Speaking of the Book of Judges, he notes the fall-off from peace to apostasy to "disaster and bondage" through repentance to deliverance.⁵ Frye calls this the classic shape of comedy; and he's right, although he might have added that outside of Judges the U is not symmetrical because the right hand stroke rises higher than the left. In any event, the story of Job forms a U, and so does the story of Jesus. But beyond comedy in this broad philosophical vein - to which I shall return - the Hebrew Bible also contains a good deal of more down-to-earth humor. Most of it, like most comedy in the ancient world, is "cruel" (i.e., ridicule of one kind or another). There are innumerable examples of such laughter, which can be heard even in heaven when the LORD (Ps. 2.4) derides the rebellious goyim. Biblical scorn doesn't have to be "funny," but often enough it is. We need only recall the powerful taboos surrounding menstruation in the Bible to appreciate the sarcastic merriment of Rachel's lie to Laban (in Gen. 31.24): "Let my lord not be angry that I cannot rise before you, for the way of women is upon me," which mocks the household gods she is supposedly sitting on and defiling. The Bible often satirizes idolatry, as in the witty put-down of Isaiah (44.9-20), which seems to crack up in disbelief as its author watches an idol-worshipper go through his idiotic routine: "Half of it (a tree trunk) he burns in the fire; over the half he eats flesh, he roasts meat and is satisfied; also he warms himself and says, 'Aha, I am warm, I have seen the fire!' And the rest of it he makes into a god, his idol; and falls down to it and worships it and says, 'Deliver me, for thou art my god!'" (Is. 44.16-17).

There is still more sadistic glee in Elijah's challenge to the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel: "Cry aloud, for he is a god; either is musing, or he has gone aside" (i.e., to relieve himself - again smearing false gods with human waste) "or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened" (1 Kg. 18.27). Anyone who behaves stupidly or has had a comeuppance deserves to be laughed at. Thus Haman's downfall is gaily celebrated in the Book of Esther; and in the Book of Jonah, a comedy from start to finish, the recalcitrant prophet (or anti-prophet, the man who shows how it's not done) is continually lampooned.

The loser, in short, is fair game. Wisdom (Pr. 1.26) laughs at the calamity of fools and mocks their panic. The enemies of Jerusalem delight in the catastrophe that has overtaken her (Lam 1.7). And in perhaps the most notorious example, Abraham (Gen. 17.17) and Sarah (Gen. 18.12) laugh at the LORD's ignorance of the facts of life, although of course the joke is ultimately on them. Hobbes and Bergson, among others, have told us about this sort of laughter. It is born of superiority and feeds on folly. ("A Satanic idea, if ever there was one!" commented Baudelaire.⁶) Bergson was thus being true to his Jewish roots (as well as to the implicit optimism of French rationalism) when he wrote that, "Laughter is above all a corrective. Being intended to humiliate, it must make a painful impression on the person against whom it is directed. By laughter society avenges itself for the liberties taken with it."⁷ Such laughter is, in the final analysis, malicious pleasure; and its aim, when it has anything so lofty as an aim, is to correct foolishness with scorn.

There are subtler strains of humor in the Bible as well. There is a more or less "victimless" laughter in the ruse of the Gibeonites (Jos. 9.3-27), who save their lives with some realistic-looking rags. The Israelites, needless to say, are not amused, but they salve their wounded self-respect by enslaving the perpetrators of the hoax; so things, in a way, come out even. We can find a certain shoulder-shrugging, oy-vey Jewish humor in Obadiah's complaint to Elijah (1 Kg. 18.11-12): "'And now you say, "Go tell your lord, 'Behold, Elijah is here'." And as soon as I have gone from you, the Spirit of the LORD will carry you whither I know not; and so, when I come and tell Ahab and he cannot find you, he will kill me, although I your servant have revered the LORD from my youth'." The Book of Ruth is a gentle idyll with some light sexual comedy, although it may also obliquely satirize the reforms of Ezra and Nehemiah.

More robust, or perhaps simply cruder, is the folk humor found, say, in the scheme for supplying wives to the Benjaminites (Jg. 21) or the whole career of Samson, with its rollicking machismo. Following Bergson's law that all "character" is comic (because it makes otherwise flexible human beings mechanically predictable⁸ ), we may note that even prophets, with their verbal violence and utter seriousness, can give rise to laughter, as Elisha does when he curses the army of small boys calling him "baldhead" (2 Kg. 2.23-24). And, to step outside the canon for a moment, there is a good deal of this sort of humor in the Apocrypha, most notably in the hilarious, if bloodthirsty stories, of Bel and the Dragon. The scene in which the angel of the Lord seizes Habakkuk by the hair and jets him to Babylon with Daniel's hot dinner in a bowl reads like a reductio ad absurdum of infinitely nobler but structurally similar scenes in Jeremiah and Ezekiel.

Still, the most interesting and original sort of biblical comedy is the comedy of sacred history, specifically of the Exodus. The entire episode may be classified as what Bergson would call "topsyturvydom,"⁹ a kind of inversion where the underdog triumphs, slaves beat their masters, etc.; but there is far more to it than that. We should note, to begin with, that all the laughter, or practically all of it, comes after the fact. This is one of those "et haec olim meminisse iuvabit" situations (Aeneid I, 201), which Dryden renders, "An hour will come, with pleasure to relate/ Your sorrows past, as benefits of fate" situations, where past tension and even anguish dissolve in comic relief. It is a once-threatening moment to be savored again and again. If this inevitably leads to gross exaggeration - like the Israelite army's numbering 603,550 (Num. 1.46) - so be it; in fact so much the better. Psalm 114.5 ("What ails you, O sea, that you flee?/ O Jordan, that you turn back?") nicely captures the euphoria prevailing in the reworked and aggrandized Exodus narrative. The tale of the ten plagues illustrates both Freudian and Bergsonian theories of comedy: The Egyptians, as the archetypal enemies of Israel, are punished more thoroughly and effectively in the "tendentious joke"¹⁰ of the Exodus than reality ever did or could permit. (A similar wish-fulfillment revenge occurs at the end of Esther. Here one is reminded of the old Jewish saying, "So many Hamans and only one Purim!" But Esther is pure fantasy, and so a much less powerful joke than the historically based Exodus.)

From Bergson's standpoint the story of the plagues confirms two major principles of comedy: The laugher must be emotionally detached from those he laughs at (the famous "anesthesia of the heart"1 1), and the objects of laughter must temporarily forfeit their human status by behaving like automata.12 Pharaoh and the Egyptians are (a) so implacably hostile to the Hebrews that any sympathy for them is cut off at the source, and (b) so hopelessly dense that their otherwise tremendous sufferings turn into something like a clown's pratfalls. Tragedy believes that wisdom comes through suffering, but plague follows plague, and Pharaoh learns nothing. Our heart is anesthetized because Pharaoh's has been hardened.

The plagues also serve, of course, to heighten the dramatic tension before it is finally unleashed in the liberating climax. Just prior to that we get the farcical interlude (Ex. 11.2-3) where the Hebrews despoil the Egyptians of their jewelry and fine clothes. But the escape from Egypt itself is the supreme comic moment in the Hebrew Bible. It combines what may be the most powerful elements in all comedy, the dream of control and moment(s) of gratuitous bliss.

By the "dream of control" I mean the vision of the world and history cut to human measure, the fantasy - or the experience - of life is not as it usually is, indifferent or hostile to our needs and desires, but pliable if not perfect, a realm of exemplary justice. This is a form of comedy that rationalists like Bergson tend to ignore (and pessimists like Freud tend to dismiss), but we find it everywhere in western literature, from Aristophanes' The Birds to Rabelais' Abbey of ThTlFme to the Marxist paradise of Marcuse's Eros and Civilization. Comedy, in other words, is not content with throwing satirical stones and exterminating social pests; it also needs to imagine heaven. But in secular literature utopia, such as Aristophanes' tongue-in-cheek Cloudcuckooland, is a satiric genre. Not so the blessed-out utopias in the Bible, from the messianic promises in Genesis to the description of the New Jerusalem in Revelation.

The comedy of Exodus, however, is more complex, nuanced, and profound than this. It has room for, among other things, the harshest kind of realism, as in the almost savage humor of Israel's "murmurings": "Up, make us gods, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him" (Ex. 32.1) and the eloquent kvetch, "O that we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we ate in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; but now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing but all this manna to look at" (Num. 11.4-6). Not the least satisfying feature of the Exodus story is the way everything begins to fall apart even before Moses gets down from the mountain. Esthetically and otherwise, happiness calls for the spice of negativity, the lack of which makes most utopias more or less insipid.

The escape of the runaway Hebrew slaves, then, has the same comic appeal of all stories about beating the odds, come-from-behind victories, and spectacular strokes of poetic justice. But the Exodus is not so much an achievement as a gift; and here we strike what I consider the purest vein of philosophical humor: the response to gratuitous goodness or unearned pleasure. The Exodus, like all great comic actions, shatters the narrow framework of logic and instrumental reason; it pushes back the limits of the possible; it redefines reality by giving us something for nothing. This speaks to our ingrained sense of helplessness, to our knowledge that we can't make it on our own, that, left to its own devices, history is a dead end.

This theme is familiar to us from many secular comedies that employ the same pattern of redemption "for free." One of the most notable instances of this is Shakespeare's The Tempest, where Gonzalo summarizes the play as a sort of Heilsgeschichte: "In one voyage / Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis, / And Ferdinand her brother found a wife / Where he himself was lost; / Prospero his dukedom / In a poor isle; and all of us ourselves / When no man was his own" (V.i. 208-213). But even in aggressively anti-clerical or anti-religious works like the Decameron or Huckleberry Finn we see the same basic structure of deliverance from oppression or doom through human energies lifted beyond themselves by some higher agency, call it Fortune, an authorial deus ex machina, or grace. Freud himself takes a line perhaps parallel to this when he argues that in jokes, the comic, and humor "the pleasure is derived from an economy ... For the euphoria which we endeavor to reach by these means is nothing other than the mood of a period of life in which we were accustomed to deal with our physical work in general with a small expenditure of energy - the mood of our childhood."13 Comedy, one might say, takes all sorts of exhilarating and normally impossible short-cuts. It lets us fly instead of trudging rationally down the road. It offers us - as adults are forever offering children - something that theoretically can't be had: a free lunch.

One more comic dimension of the Exodus appears in the fact that it is not a one-time-only affair. Even before the events have taken place, Moses passes on the command for their ritual perpetuation (Ex. 12.1-28); and no sooner have the Hebrews crossed the Sea of Reeds than Moses intones a song of praise to commemorate their victory. All this is no doubt anachronistic, but it is also emotionally satisfying and comically appropriate: the story must be retold again and again, and the laughter must go on. The Exodus is also echoed in later emancipations, most notably the return from exile in Babylon. "When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion," says Psalms (126.1-2), "we were like those who dream. Then our mouth was filled with laughter."

And the New Testament, needless to say, has its own version of the Exodus - Jesus' death and resurrection, in which the Christian community and the individual participate, sacramentally and otherwise. Since Christianity adopted the Hebrew Bible's comic view of history, it is no accident that the single positive mention of laughter in the New Testament refers to that view. "Blessed are you that weep now, for you shall laugh" (Lk. 6.21) is a Christian piece of "topsyturvydom," part of the grand comic reversal announced by the "Beatitudes" and Jesus' message as a whole. And Christians celebrate their paradoxical rescue in an endless series of eucharistic banquets every day all around the world.

Most traditional exegetes seem to have read the Bible without challenging Qoheleth's baleful judgment that, "Laughter is mad" (Eccl. 2. - where, however, laughter is paired with pleasure). This may be because they fear the critical and anarchic possibilities of laughter: It obeys no master, and it can get out of hand. If the righteous can laugh at the wicked, as in Psalms 52, then the wicked can return the favor. But, like the pious interpreter's attempt to dodge the eroticism of the Song of Solomon, ignoring comedy in the Bible does an injustice to the healthy humanity of the text. And while Ecclesiastes rejects laughter, the book itself is the joker in the deck of the Bible, a piece of wisdom literature that puts down the genre to which it belongs, as in its devastating paradox that "in much wisdom is much vexation, / and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow" (Eccl. 1.8). So, for the timid souls who think we need it, we have permission from the Bible itself to laugh while reading Scripture.

Notes

1. Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), p. 169.

2. Charles Baudelaire, "On the Essence of Laughter," tr. Jonathan Mayne, in Robert Corrigan, ed., Comedy: Meaning and Form, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), p. 316.

3. For these and a number of other references I am indebted to the fine entry on "Laughter" in John L. McKenzie, S.J., Dictionary of the Bible (New York: Macmillan, 1965), pp. 494-495.

4. From the letter on Can Grande della Scala, cited in Ernest Hatch Wilkins, A History of Italian Literature, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 60.

5. The Great Code, p. 169

6. "On the Essence of Laughter," p. 314.

7. Henri Bergson, "Laughter", tr. Fred Rothwell, in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher, p. 187.

8. "Laughter," p. 67.

9. "Laughter," p .121.

10. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, tr. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1963), p. 100.

11. "Laughter," p. 64.

12. "Laughter," p. 79.

13. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, p. 236.