Earlier this summer, Pope Francis, hosted more than a hundred comedians from around the world at the Vatican.
The entourage of comedians included some famous names, such as Whoopi Goldberg, Stephen Colbert and Conan O’Brien, famed television comedic personalities in the States.
Our own Tommy Tiernan and Ardal O’Hanlon were also present. The gathering was organised by the Vatican Dicastery for Culture and Education.
Pope Francis told the comics that they have the ability to unite people because laughter is contagious; it is easier to laugh together than alone. Laughter breaks down social barriers and creates connections among people.
Humour, the pontiff suggested, “helps to spread peace and overcome difficulties and daily stress, while helping people to endure problems both big and small”.
He added that they make God smile when they manage to draw knowing smiles from the lips of even one spectator. (He was quoting a passage from the Book of Proverbs here).
I must say I was intrigued by that gathering of comedians. As I reflected on it, it helped me to appreciate the importance of laughter and comedy in our lives.
Freedom and creativity are great gifts of leadership that Pope Francis exemplifies.
St. Paul in his epistles encourages us to speak with grace seasoned with wit. St. Augustine, in his famous work, The City of God, assures us that comic spirit must reside in that City.
There are medieval collections of holy jokes, jests and stories used by saints to show themselves to be cheerful.
A medieval monk named Odo who lived in the famous monastery of Cluny was said to have made his companions laugh until they cried or were unable to speak to one another.
Dante in his famous poem, The Divine Comedy, sticks the melancholy in hell because they had remained “so stubbornly sullen in the sweet air of God’s sun”.
As he left the realms of purgatory and followed Beatrice into paradise Dante heard a sound he never heard before, celestial laughter, the laughter of the Heavens.
Some of the great Christian philosophers, such as Soren Kierkegaard, have written extensively on the comic dimension of Christian faith.
Kierkegaard claimed that “Comedy is an escape from despair, a narrow escape into faith.” So what is the connection between comedy and faith?
Ministry to the elderly is one of the great privileges in our work, visits to the housebound and celebrating Mass in nursing homes on a regular basis.
The ability of the elderly to laugh, their appreciation of the comic dimension is such a tonic.
I think of the hope and faith of a blind widower, who, perceiving unhappiness in another of his frail elderly companions at a daycare centre, reaches back in memory to tell silly jokes, which brings a smile back to the face of the man sitting in the next chair.
I remember a widow, who, having just had her cancerous colon removed, refuses to yield to the absolutes of the diagnosis and had all her doctors and nurses laughing with her over their own reports.
Laughter was a reaction to the immediate incongruities in the lives of these elderly people. Humour expressed a certain heroic defiance in the face of life’s most crushing defeats, approaching death and a cancer diagnosis.
In both instances, they demonstrate an unquenchable nobility of spirit that refuses to permit a given fate to define them.
The Christian would sense in the humorous exchanges of these patients an intuition, a signal of true redemption, that is of a world made whole and in which the miseries of the human condition have been abolished.
We would experience faith as the only possible response to the ultimate incongruities of existence, which threaten the very meaning of our lives.
The comic vision then is one of the byproducts of faith that can accept even life’s incongruities, the comic vision fulfilled in what Dante called The Divine Comedy.
This implies that the Christian relies on faith in the God whose greatest stunt of all was the resurrection where life won over death, possibility over tragic necessity… Which gives us the freedom not to take anything human ultimately seriously.
Comedian Woody Allen is good at expressing fear around this whole question of life and death. He said he doesn’t mind dying, he just does not want to be around when it happens!
He also said he does not believe in an afterlife, although he is bringing a change of underwear. The comic vision of the Christian convinces that death does not have the last laugh.
“The human heart desires joy. We all desire joy, every family, every people aspire to happiness. But what is the joy that the Christian is called to live out and bear witness to?
“It is the joy that comes from the closeness of God, from his presence in our lives. From the moment Jesus entered history, with his birth in Bethlehem, humanity received the seed of the Kingdom of God, like the soil receives the seed, the promise of a future harvest.
“There is no need to look further! Jesus has come to bring joy to all people for all time. It is not just a hopeful joy, or a joy postponed until paradise: as if here on earth we are sad but in paradise we will be filled with joy.
“No! It is not that, but a joy already real and tangible now, because Jesus himself is our joy …”
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