蜜芽传媒

Good morning. Ken Dodd who died earlier in the week and Stephen Hawking, might seem to have occupied very different intellectual worlds but of course they shared the predicament and challenge of all human beings and one thing in particular they shared was a strong sense of humour.

鈥淚 do all the exercises every morning in front of the Television鈥� said Ken Dodd 鈥淯p, down, up own, up down. Then the other eyelid.鈥� Many of us would say, and I am certainly among them, that a sense of humour is essential to keeping going and it is well known that the greatest jokes tend to come from communities that have suffered a great deal, such as the Jews. It was also part of the survival kit of Stephen Hawking who was known for his witty, mischievous humour. I enjoyed his remark that 鈥淓instein was wrong when he said 鈥楪od does not play dice.鈥� Consideration of black holes suggests not only that God does play dice but that he sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can鈥檛 be seen.鈥�

In the days of the cold war, when I used to visit the old Soviet Union the wonderful jokes circulating at that time were again part of the survival mechanism of a people who had suffered so much but also something more. Towards the end it was said that if you renewed your membership of the communist party you got a reward of 50 roubles, and if you persuaded a friend to join, you not only got your reward you were allowed to leave, and if you persuaded two people to join you got your reward, you were allowed to leave and you received a certificate saying you never had been a member of the party. What jokes like that did was expose the cruel pretentions of the Soviet Communist party in all its empty folly. And that鈥檚 the other crucial fact about good humour. It shows up the contradictions, the incongruities and absurdities of life. And that鈥檚 why good humour has deep theological roots. This is because from a Christian point of view there is a fundamental incongruity between our true greatness as human beings, made in the image of God and called to an Eternal destiny, and the absurd ways we try to aggrandise ourselves, often demeaning ourselves in so doing. The contrast could not be greater between who we really are, and our foolish self-importance. One of the greatest of all Christian satirists, Jonathan Swift, has carved on his tomb in St Patrick鈥檚 Cathedral Dublin, where he was Dean, the words saeva indignatio, savage indignation. His humour was driven by this fierce anger against the cruelty of the powerful, not least in their attitudes to Ireland. And so long as we live in a world beset with pretension and self-deception, illusion and hypocrisy, humour, gentle or savage, will be necessary.