The Russian philosopher and critic Mikhail Bakhtin wrote that “laughter in the Middle Ages remained outside all official spheres of ideology and outside all official strict forms of social relations. Laughter was eliminated from religious cult, from feudal and state ceremonials, etiquette, and from all the genres of high speculation.” The oldest monastic rule we know of forbade joking, while the Rule of St. Benedict warns against the provocation of laughter, an impertinence for which St. Columbanus imposed the penalty of fasting. The medieval church’s dread of comedy leads to murder and mayhem in Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose. Aquinas is typically more relaxed about the matter in his Summa Theologiae, recommending humor as a form of therapeutic play of words or deeds in which nothing is sought beyond the soul’s pleasure. It is necessary, he believes, for the solace of the spirit. Indeed, a reluctance to engage in humor counts in his eyes as a vice. For Christian theology, the pointless delight of a joke reflects the divine act of Creation, which as the original acte gratuit was performed simply for its own sake, driven by no necessity and with no functional end in mind. The world was fashioned just for the hell of it. It is more like a work of art than an industrial product. [...]
Comedy poses a threat to sovereign power not only because of its anarchic bent, but because it makes light of such momentous matters as suffering and death, hence diminishing the force of some of the judicial sanctions that governing classes tend to keep up their sleeve. It can foster a devil-may-care insouciance that loosens the grip of authority. Even Erasmus, author of the celebrated In Praise of Folly, also penned a treatise on the education of schoolchildren that warns of the perils of laughter. The work admonishes pupils to press their buttocks together when farting to avoid excessive noise, or to mask the unseemly sound with a well-timed cough. [...]
Many a commentator has observed that, though Jesus weeps, he does not laugh, a reticence that might seem in line with the Book of Ecclesiastes’s grim insistence that “sorrow is better than laughter, for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made glad. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth”(7:3–4). It is true that the Jesus portrayed by the New Testament is hardly remarkable for his side-splitting sense of fun, having as he did a fair amount to feel glum about. It will be a sign that his kingdom is imminent, however, when we see the poor being filled with good things and the rich sent empty away, a classic carnivalesque inversion. Unlike the reversals and upendings of carnival, this will prove more than a temporary affair. In The Fool: His Social and Literary History (1966), Enid Welsford records that at vespers on the medieval Feast of Fools, the gospel words “He has put down the mighty from their seat and exalted the lowly” were sung over and over again, as the prelude to a mischievous parody of the Mass. Jesus and his plebeian comrades do no work, are accused of drunkenness and gluttony, roam footloose and propertyless on the margins of the conventional social order, and like the free spirits of carnival take no thought for tomorrow. As a sick joke of a Savior (the notion of a crucified Messiah would have struck the ancient Jews as a moral obscenity), Jesus enters Jerusalem, the stronghold of Roman imperial power, on the back of a donkey, and having been deserted by his comrades will be left to face an ignominious death, one reserved by the Romans for political rebels alone. Yet the folly of the cross proves wiser than the wisdom of the philosophers. The intimidatory power of the Law is overthrown, the meek inherit the earth, the sublime becomes human flesh and blood, the most sacred truths are cast in a plain idiom intended for fishermen and small farmers, and weakness proves the only durable form of strength.
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