Great Leaders Are … Funny
Deeply evil people are generally incapable of real humor because, as C.S. Lewis points out, humor requires a sense of proportion which evil people lack. When your entire field of vision is filled with Your All Important Self, you have trouble noticing that disproportion.
Meanwhile, when we think back to our own heritage as a Judeo-Christian culture we find something rather different: Lincoln, for instance, was remembered, not merely as a great President in the darkest hour of the country's history, but as a very funny man. Even in a life filled with tragedy, he was funny. For decades after his death, his jokes were remembered and retold.
Churchill too was, among other things, a funny guy. He had a ready wit, as when the stunningly clueless Lady Astor told him “Mr. Churchill, if I were your wife I would put poison in your hot chocolate!” and he replied “Madam, if I were your husband I would drink it.” Even in wartime, Churchill retained not only a stern resolve but a determination to laugh. So did the Brits (and we Americans) in general, wryly remarking (as one RAF planner did), “As a military strategist, Hitler has been of the highest possible assistance to the Allied effort.”
The Greatest Generation Snickered
Indeed, when we look back at the years of World War II what is striking is how much smaller the figure of Hitler was to people then than it is today. Hitler has, in our generation, grown into a semi-mythical shadow of evil, like Sauron. There is a queer solemnity in speaking of him, like a kind of photo negative of reverence. To call him, as J.R.R. Tolkien did, an “ignorant little cad” is somehow not often done these days, as though belittling him somehow belittles the memory of his millions of victims. But for the generation that fought him, this was precisely the way in which he was viewed and the culture that defeated him did so, in part, by refusing to take him seriously. He was the subject of bawdy songs, endless lampooning in films and cartoons (even Donald Duck pricked the pretensions of the Master Race) and the constant butt of jokes. The Greatest Generation snickered, rather than cowered, at his incredibly pompous histrionics.
I think the ability to do this is an important gift of the Holy Spirit and a peculiar side benefit of the Faith's permeation of Western culture. For one of the holdovers of the Christian worldview in our culture (a holdover that won't last forever if we continue to reject the Faith) is the ability to laugh at the devil. St. Thomas More said long ago that “the devil, the proud spirit, cannot endure to be mocked.” Christian culture has, for centuries, cultivated a conviction that, in the end, the Story in which we live is a merry one, whatever tragedies intervene. It has inculcated the belief that however big the cross and tomb may think themselves, the Resurrection is bigger. “Where O Death is thy victory? Where O Death is thy sting?”
Because of this, Christian culture has approached tragedy with the cocky defiance of Jack the Giant Killer, secure in the knowledge that even if we should get killed it will not, in the end, be the end. Eternal life goes on and, when the dust has settled, not a hair of your head shall be harmed–even if you die. Because of this gigantic metaphysical optimism, Christianity, said Chesterton, was sad about small things, but joyful about huge ones. Paganism (whether of the ancient god-worshiping variety or of the modern power-worshiping variety) is, in contrast, joyful about small things and profoundly sad about huge ones.
Christianity could produce people like More, who could offer punchlines before putting his head on the chopping block. It could create martyrs like St. Lawrence, who could say to the torturers roasting him alive, “Turn me over. I'm done on this side.” It could nerve St. Perpetua to reach out and steady the tip of her nervous executioner's sword so that he might thrust it home more cleanly–and unnerve an entire arena of jeering spectators in the process. It could make a surrounded American general reply to Nazi demands of surrender with a single word: “Nuts.” And it could create the peculiar gaiety of a culture in wartime that did not bolster itself so much with stentorian speeches about Our Invincible Might or Destiny or the Will to Power, but with tunes like Spike Jones' “Der Fuehrer's Face.”
Take the Devil Lightly
I am reminded of this again as I look at the way in which the most healthy and Christian aspects of our culture respond to the enemies we face. Osama and his little friends are a lot of things, but funny they ain't. I don't merely mean that what they do is nothing to laugh at. I mean they are, like all evil people, profoundly humor-impaired. Just listen to their agitprop (like the goofy tape Osama made from his cave). All the humor was unconscious, just as all Hitler's laughable qualities were things he himself never noticed. The rhetoric is the typical grandiose language of power worship (cloaked in Islamic garb just as Hitler's language of power worship was cloaked in Western Christian garb): “Horror grips America! I am terrible! Behold me!” etc. It all reminds me of a line from Superman II years ago where Lex Luthor reproves the Kryptonian bad guys for their lousy dramatics: “Bow! Yield! Kneel! Sheesh! That kinda stuff closes out of town!”
Meanwhile, you have stand up comics telling jokes about the Taliban. You have New York firemen not only telling Osama he can kiss their Royal Irishes, but (mark this) specifically announcing to the little terrorist creeps out there just where they live and virtually daring them to come and get them. You have Osama trying to be vewwy vewwy scawwy by threatening us with suicide bombers and declaring “We have thousands of people who want to die!” while the American reply is the typically funny rejoinder “That works out well! Because we have thousands of people who want to kill you!”
This humorous courage of our wounded people is in marked contrast to the humorless certainty of Osama and his little buddies that Allah Has Chosen Him To Destroy the Infidel. And it is beautifully topped by the fact that, just as the Righteous Servants of Osama are ginning themselves up to have a demonstration on behalf of the Vewwy Vewwy Scawwy and Wighteous Tewwowist, they pull one of the great public relations boners of the decade: running a picture of Meester Beeg himself with… Bert from Sesame Street.
The proper, manly, theologically accurate response to this is the words of that great hero of the Christian tradition, Bugs Bunny: “What a bunch of maroons!”
I want to see more of this sort of thing. I want to encourage those of us who are believers in Christ Jesus to do our solemn religious and civic duty in this time of fear and laugh it up. Not the hollow empty laugh of despairing postmodernism which has nothing to say in the face of implacable evil, nor the cynical and bitter laugh of those with no hope but in missiles and dollars, nor the gloating and evil laugh of those who imagine that their grip on earthly power put them beyond the pale of justice, but the laugh of genuine Christian cheer and courage that springs from hope in a God who is beyond this world and who will outlast it. If we are to survive, we must choose to recover the kind of Christian courage and gaiety of a God who pulled the ultimate practical joke on the devil by turning the cross into the tree of life. It doesn't mean we are to treat life as a joke or take everything lightly. But it does mean that we are not to be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good: in this case, the good of a laugh that takes God and our neighbor seriously and the devil (and ourselves) lightly.
“He who sits in the heavens laughs.” (Psalm 2:4).
(Copyright 2001 Catholic Exchange)
Mark Shea is a writer/editor for Catholic Exchange and Catholic Scripture Study. You may visit his new website at www.mark-shea.com.
