Volume 37, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Humor and Religion; Guest Editors: Nicole Graham and Paul S Martin

This paper considers the alleged incompatibility of humour and religion, identifies the need for a multifaceted approach to the study of humour and religion, and spotlights important scholarship on humour and religion. It also outlines how this special issue emerged from an online symposium organized by the editors (Nicole Graham and Paul S Martin) in 2020 titled: The Sacred and The Profanity: Humour, Religion and Ritual, hosted by the University of Bristol and the University of Kent and introduces the various papers which are spread across both the globe and historical periods and which engage various media.

This article establishes and demonstrates the importance of the topic of humor and religion. It traces the evolution of the existing scholarship on humor and religion, from its emergence in the 1960s, to its revival in the 1990s, and its latest resurgence in recent years. To overlook the presence of the comic, humor, and laughter in religious traditions is to overlook something significant. This article will demonstrate how interrogating and overcoming biases and preconceptions about the relationship between humor and religion reveals opportunities in both religious studies and humor studies. As such, this article offers a rejection of the existing privilege that is granted to ‘serious’ matters and argues for the inclusion of the non-serious – with a particular emphasis on humor – within (the study of) religion. In arguing for the necessity of taking the study of the (allegedly) non-serious seriously, the artificial nature of the binary of serious/non-serious becomes apparent. As such, this article begins to challenge and re-evaluate the conceptualization of ‘the serious’ and the limitations this inevitably places on our thinking and engagement regarding matters such as humor and religion.

The goal of this article is to analyze laughter and humor in the Egyptian monastic and ascetic movement in the 4th and 5th centuries with a special focus on solitary and non-humorous laughter. The article argues that laughter and humor were part of a strict emotional regime. It shows that several of the monastic stories include a laughter which is not humorous and where no one else laughed apart from the main character. This laughter was a means to show spiritual excellence and superiority. The other side of the emotional regime was that monastics were scolded for laughing and joking. There is a division between illegitimate laughter caused by humor and frequently connected to eroticism and a legitimate laughter of spiritual insight and authority. The article argues that non-humorous laughter should get more attention in contemporary research.

The sermon joyeux is a polemical and frivolous genre of late medieval French literature that parodies religious sermons. These humorous writings in verse transcended the canons of propriety and soon gained popularity across Europe, surviving even after the Middle Ages. This article, concentrating on the sermons joyeux that represent the lives of false saints, analyses three main sources of parody for this subgroup of the genre: the comic tradition of ecclesiastical parody in general, liturgical parody, and hagiographical parody. The study outlines a general landscape of the comic tradition in which sermons joyeux were created, highlighting some probable precursors to the genre with the goal of describing the characteristic features of these parodies. The analysis of the examples from the sermons joyeux themselves illuminates the reasons for the mock sermons’ popularity among and beyond clerical audiences and demonstrates how these texts may be perceived as significant of the importance, recognition and interest towards religious life rather than criticism or utilitarian didacticism.

Contemporary contacts and interactions with religion are often mediated by mass and social media. These sources vary in their reliability and some are known for their use of humor as a communicative strategy. In this article we analyze how humorous religion-related news triggers reactions to and discussions about the intertwined issues of humor, religion, history and ethnic identity. First, we look at how people perceive religion as an institution, contextualizing the results against the backdrop of the historical and present-day role of religion in the (ethnically, politically, and culturally) divided Estonian society. Second and more broadly, we analyze the (mis)use of strong religious symbols. We aim to understand why serious reactions to initially humorous fake news come about, and why humorous stimuli are sometimes met with discontent or even disgust. This contributes to understanding the intersection of humor and religion in divided societies. The results point out that the religious controversies triggered by humor are related to societal and political issues rather than ideas about religion and belief. We suggest that fast and broad dissemination via online media might be one of the reasons why the humorous and serious are closely interwoven in discussions on religious issues.

Satires that tackle religion have always courted controversy. When Jerry Springer: The Opera was originally aired on the BBC in 2005, the show received 63,000 complaints and Christian Voice attempted to prosecute Mark Thompson (the Director General of the BBC) for blasphemy for airing the show. In this article I draw on the work of Stanley Fish and Gerben van Kleef to argue that interpretive communities of emotional readers provide a valuable framework for interpreting humor scandals. This framework contributes to our appreciation of the interpersonal in the emotional experience of humor and demonstrates that interpretations of humor are often goal-oriented and ideologically motivated. Using the examples of Christian Voice and Mediawatch-UK, I demonstrate how these emotional communities are constructed as well as the rhetorical strategies these organizations adopted. To accuse Jerry Springer: The Opera of blasphemy, for example, Christian Voice presented themselves as defenders of traditional British values. Finally, my analysis of these examples demonstrates that the potential for community outrage increases especially when the community faces a crisis of identity.