merry krismas to all
OUR HERO
Oh, how completely I adore this.
I had an interview today with Rev. Welton Gaddy for the Air America program STATE OF BELIEF. Among the questions was the classic “How do nonreligious families celebrate Christmas?” My staple answer usually includes phrases like “Many different ways, there’s no need to all conform to a single expression,” “The winter solstice celebration is as old as humanity,” “Food, folks and fun,” and “Oh, there’s a religious version, too?”
Three hours too late, I learned from a comment on the PBB Discussion Forum that I don’t celebrate Christmas at all, and never have. I celebrate Krismas. As Jacob Walker, one of the namers of the holiday, put it:
Krismas is a secular holiday that celebrates the myth of Kris Kringle, commonly known as Santa Claus. It happens on December 25th of each year, and is also closely associated with Krismas Eve, which occurs December 24th… Krismas is about giving gifts, especially those “from the heart”; it is about the magic of childhood; it is about peace on earth; and it is about goodwill towards humankind, and anything else you wish it to mean that does not involve the Jesus as a savior bit.
Apparently this idea is three years old. Leave it to me to miss it. This is not merely cute; the more I think about it, the more genuine brilliance I see. Here’s more from Jacob:
I loved Christmas growing up. I treasure those memories buy amoxicillin. I treasure the mythology of Santa Claus, Rudolph, Elves, etc. I treasure the idea of giving gifts, the beauty of Christmas lights and the smell of Christmas trees. This is what Christmas was about to me. These are the secular mythologies and symbols that we have made Christmas about.
I really didn’t think much about the birth of Jesus while growing up; it was just another mythology surrounding the time, and I never believed in Jesus as a savior. As I have grown, I have come to believe that the notion of Jesus being a savior, and many of the ideas of fundamentalist Christian churches, and the Catholic church to be detrimental to peace, acceptance and love in our world. So I didn’t want to support them any longer. It also would not be true of me to celebrate Christmas when I really don’t follow what many people consider the MAJOR tenet of that holiday. So I decided to create a new holiday that would support the tenets that I believe are good and righteous.
In recent years there has been a movement by many fundamentalist Christian groups to “pull” Christmas back to being a religious holiday only. I think that is fine. We can have Krismas, they can have Christmas.
(Many thanks to BornAgainHeathen for the tip!)
laughing matters 2: the powa of yuma
Tragedy is when I get a paper cut. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.
Mel Brooks
I got in trouble in fourth grade. Mrs. Schloss had just given us an oral spelling test and was grading it at her desk. “Dale McGowan!” she said, curtly. “Come here at once.”
Ooooo, purred my classmates.
My breath quickened as I walked to the front of the room. She was a tiny woman with half glasses on a chain and an odd accent I never could place. Her head barely cleared the top of her enormous wooden desk.
“What is this?” she said, pointing to one of the words on my test.
I looked. “Yuma,” I said, helplessly.
“Are you making fun of me?”
“Wha…no! I…I didn’t know what that word was. I never heard it before you said it. So I just…I wrote it like it sounds.”
“I am supposed to believe you’ve never heard the word ‘yuma’ before.”
“Never.”
She straightened up. “Well allow me to expand your vocabulary, mister. YUMA, noun. ‘I hev a good sense of yuma.’ Now set doon and write it 100 tames.”
It’s not nice to make fun. But in this case, for once in my school career, I was innocent of the charge of attempted comedy.
redressing the balance of power
Laughing at someone is considered less kosher than blistering argumentation for several reasons. For one thing, satire is almost impossible to respond to. George Carlin calls comedy
a socially acceptable form of aggression. It’s an unfair response to an unfair imbalance of power – a seizing of the joystick. You get to name the targets, you get to fire the bullets – and what you’re essentially doing is putting those people in an impossible situation where they’re forced to like it. There’s a great deal of hostility involved – and the wonderful part is, after you’re finished, you say, ‘What’s the matter, can’t you take a joke? This is humor, sir!’ You can shame them into agreeing that the attack is acceptable. Nobody wants to be accused of not taking a joke. It’s a double-bind.
This “response to an unfair imbalance of power” is an important point. Jokes directed downward in the power continuum are considered in bad taste – ethnic jokes by powerful whites, jokes about the disabled by those who are not, and so on – while jokes directed upward at the more powerful can be a means of redressing the imbalance.
But there’s more to the strong reaction against satirical comedy than just the victim’s difficulty in responding. Much of it has to do with what satire actually is.
“I fear that the item you have posted engages in mere ridicule,” said the theologian in his note protesting the office-door satire I mentioned last time. “Ridicule does nothing to enlighten.”
Tell that to Erasmus, buddy. Tell it to Voltaire. Time for some definitions:
Ridicule
The contemptuous declaration that something is ridiculous and worthy of scorn.
Satire
The use of wit to attack the vices and follies of humankind.
Ridicule can be an element of satire and often is. The difference is that ridicule outside of satire often exists as a simple attack for its own sake. Satire by definition has a point to make, a critique to offer, and the Onion satire, to my mind, made a damning point about the inconsistency of the Vatican’s simultaneous work toward ecumenism (cooperation and understanding among religions) and the continued position that only Catholics are saved.
so…what is yuma?
Satire seeks change using humor as a medium. So what is humor? There’ve been many theories of comedy, but three elements consistently pop up: contrast, truth, and what I’ll call the revealed obvious.
Humor works best when it deals in sudden, shocking juxtapositions. The contrast between appearance and reality, between expectation and actual outcome, between someone’s self-image and the way others see him, between what should be and what is – contrast is indispensable to comedy.
The truth element is most important to its critical value. A joke is often funny in direct proportion to its revelation of something that is true but hidden by a fig leaf. The laugh comes as the fig leaf is yanked away, and the strength of the laugh is like a Geiger counter for the truthfulness of the joke’s premise. I’ll try to demonstrate this later in this series.
But the third piece is the really damning one, the one that makes satire such anathema to its targets. In delivering a satirical attack – and it is a form of attack, just like most types of critical challenge, let’s not mince words – in writing satire, I am essentially saying not just that someone’s actions or beliefs are ridiculous, but that I am counting on the ridiculousness to be so immediately obvious that the audience will roar with laughter when I strip that fig leaf.
What I’m saying to my target, really, is this: not only are you wrong, but the wrongness is so obvious that when I point it out, there will be a spontaneous and delighted recognition of truth from my audience.
Pretty insulting, right? Better not insult the target. Oh, unless it matters – unless we’re talking about institutions and attitudes that really need changing if we are to strike a blow for justice and compassion and reason. When that’s the case, why not bring out the big guns?
But the opening quote by Mel Brooks also reveals the pitfall of comedy: that it can, when uninformed, simply reflect the inability to see things from another person’s point of view. Fortunately the truth meter comes to the rescue again. A joke based on ignorance is generally less funny. It’s the revealed obvious that really kills.
Whether or not it rings true (and therefore rings funny) often depends on your point of view. Next week I’ll post some short satires I wrote for the faculty e-newsletter at the aforementioned Catholic college. The difference between those who found them hilarious, and those who found them pointless, had everything to do with diet — specifically, whether a faculty member’s diet included a regular infusion of wafers.
laughing matters 1: humor and critical thinking
Your [human] race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon—laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution—these can lift at a colossal humbug push it a little weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand. You are always fussing and fighting with your other weapons. Do you ever use that one? No; you leave it lying rusting. As a race, do you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage.
Satan, in The Mysterious Stranger by MARK TWAIN
___________________________________
I keep thinking I know what my next post will be, then something else pops up on radar. In this case, it’s a satire currently meming its way around the Internet — an extremely subtle, mildly delicious satire about atheist parents responding indignantly to a movie trailer for the next Narnia movie. Too subtle by half, apparently; the satire is now being reported in blogs as if it were actual news — reported, in other words, by people who failed to get the joke.
So I want to lapse into the pathetic mode of the former professor and post some thoughts on humor as it relates to critical thinking. We’ll pretend I’m on-topic because both humor and critical thinking are precious values in our family, because my favorite humor targets sacred cows, and because it was inspired by a satire about atheist parents. It’ll probably end up five or six posts long, or seven, once a week, in-between the Bible study posts and random others. And here we go.
I am in the fourth decade of a hot, sweaty, nasty intellexual affair with satire.
When our family lived in England in 2004, she was the one I looked for in the bookshops of London and Oxford and Hay-on-Wye. She tickles me through the earbuds of my iPod on our long walks together. If I promise not to mention her age (about 2500 years next July), she leaves me alone about my BMI and MPB. She waits by my bedside, and for thirty minutes every night, we get it on.
(Don’t worry. My wife is generally gettin’ just as busy with Khaled Hosseini or Gabriel Garcia Marquez.)
Satire is not just entertainment. It’s also a weapon for social change, and a damned effective and rightly feared weapon at that. Yet we tend too often to leave it lying in the drawer, unfired.
In The Rise of Rationalism in Western Europe, historian W.E.H. Lecky described the role of humor in a change in attitudes in England of the 1600s. For centuries, the English had engaged in witchburning to enforce this or that religious orthodoxy or express this or that superstitious fear.
In the 1650s, witchcraft trials and executions in Britain reached a fever pitch under the Puritan Commonwealth. But by the 1660s they’d stopped completely.
Why the sudden abandonment of something that was nearly universal and unquestioned just ten years earlier? According to Lecky, the agent of change was laughter.
Though the Puritans didn’t invent the practice, they were the most enthusiastic witchburners in English history and so became closely associated with it. When Cromwell died, all of the dour Puritan ideologies quickly fell out of favor. The monarchy was restored, theatres that were burned down were rebuilt, and dancing went from forbidden to being something you do in the street while drunk.
Overnight, the sanctimonious Puritans became the objects of ridicule. Every pub seemed to have a resident funnyman who could get the other patrons rolling on the floor with his imitation of the nasal Puritan manner of speech and the stiff-backed, rump-in-the-air Puritan gait.
And, by its close association with Puritanism, witch burning immediately went from obvious social necessity to ridiculous folly. Once it became laughable, it was over.
For centuries, words were thought to have magical powers. Pre-Islamic Arabs put satirists at the vanguard of military attacks, hurling epithets and ridicule at the enemy. Apparently this was also done in the medieval period:
In 1509 Erasmus wrote The Praise of Folly, in which the goddess Folly gives a speech in praise of all that the human race does to serve and promote her cause. After getting the reader chuckling at judges and tradesmen and fishwives for a hundred pages, he gradually turns to the church, taking the largest and longest swipes at the clergy. He was an Augustinian monk at the time, which deflected charges of impiety. Many historians believe only his personal friendship with Pope Julius II and his ability to hide in the skirts of satire stood between him and execution. A work of sober rational argument would have been his death warrant.
But Europe got the message. The Praise of Folly hit the continent like a firestorm. Many see it as one of the final nudges for the Reformation, which began eight years later. If true, that puts satire at the center of one of the most earthshaking challenges to the status quo in Western history.
Two centuries later it was Voltaire, railing against intolerance, tyranny and superstition. It’s hard to argue for anyone exerting a greater influence on the rise of rationalism and the promotion of critical thinking over superstition. And lo and behold, he chose satire as one of his primary vehicles. His best-known bust is the only one I know carved with a smirk.
Horace Walpole, an otherwise forgettable English aristocrat, said, “This world is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel.” And sure enough, throughout history, there’s evidence of thinkers laughing and laughers thinking, each side of that coin calling on the other to facilitate our slow crawl out of the swamp of ignorance and injustice that is our apparent human birthright.
Humor is a form of nonviolent protest, a socially acceptable way to challenge power. Over and over it has been a catalyst to social change. Yet we spend half our time dismissing it as mere entertainment and the other half deriding it as unseemly and disrespectful, especially when the humor is perceived as ridicule. Then it becomes the one thing you dare not do in critical discourse.
Six years ago, I began posting sober critical arguments against religious belief on my office door at the Catholic college where I was then employed. Each Monday for eighteen months I posted new critiques and invited replies. Nothing.
Then one day I posted a satire from The Onion targeting self-contradictory Vatican statements. The headline captured the essential predicament of Catholic salvation doctrine:
Pope Calls for Greater Understanding Between Catholics, Hellbound
VATICAN CITY — In an address before over 250,000 followers assembled outside St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope John Paul II reaffirmed his commitment to global religious unity, calling upon the world’s Roman Catholics to “build a bridge of earthly friendship” between themselves and the eternally damned.
“We have been aloof too long,” the Pope told the throng of well-wishers who crowded into Vatican Square. “For too many years, otherwise pious, observant Catholics have not made enough of an effort to reach out to nonbelievers, reasoning that, since they would have no contact with them in the next life, there was little point in getting to know them in this one.”
And so on. It remains one of the most brilliantly constructed satires I have ever seen. And less than 24 hours after I posted it, I had an outraged note from a campus theologian.
Why did he yawn at serious arguments but protest at humor? Because Catholicism has a long history of success at batting away rational argument with polysyllabic nonsense posing as rational argument. But, as Erasmus and Voltaire both demonstrated, they’re powerless when someone points and chuckles.
No God and no religion can survive ridicule.
MARK TWAIN
