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.
Six things the religious (generally) do (much) better than secularists
One of the central messages of Parenting Beyond Belief is that there are secular ways to achieve all the benefits of religion. It’s true. I’ve even been so bold as to suggest we do some things better. Also true. It’s time to let that other shoe drop. Here are six things religious believers in the U.S. on the whole do much better than the nonreligious:
1. Give generously
Though the nonreligious outpace the religious in volunteerism once “church maintenance” volunteering is eliminated (Yonish and Campbell, “Religion and Volunteering in America“), when it comes to actual giving of actual money, there’s no contest: churchgoers have us licked. Even outside of church-based giving, the average churchgoer in the U.S. gives 2-3 times as much as the average non-churchgoing American. Obviously there will be notable exceptions, as there are on the other side, but the overall picture of giving by secular individuals needs improvement. [Note: Outdated stats removed 6/1/11]
Part of the solution is the systematizing of giving. That offering plate passing beneath one’s nose has a certain loosening effect on the wallet.
2. Connect their good works to their beliefs
As noted above, the nonreligious are very good about rolling up their sleeves and volunteering. But we are abysmal at making it clear that those good works are a reflection of our humanistic values, so the presence of nonbelievers doing good works is often overlooked. That’s why Dinesh D’Souza was able to write the ignorant screed “Where Were the Atheists?” after the Virginia Tech tragedy. Nonbelievers were present and active as counselors, rescuers and EMTs at the scene, but because they were not organized into named and tax-exempt units, their worldview was invisible. We must do a better job of making it clear that we do good works not despite our beliefs, but because of them.
3. Build community
I’m at work on an extensive post about this, so for now I’ll just point out what should be obvious—secularists are miserable at forming genuine community. We fret and fuss over the urgent need for more rationality in the world, completely ignoring more basic human needs like unconditional acceptance. Most people do not go to church for theology—they go for acceptance. They go to be surrounded by people who smile at them and are nice to them, who ask how their kids are and whether that back injury is still hurting.
Most freethought groups are not good at making people feel welcome and unconditionally accepted. Whenever I walk in the door of a new group, either to attend or as a speaker, I mill around and look at the walls for ten minutes before someone says something. It’s a painful ten minutes for anyone, and makes them less likely to return. Get a greeter at the door to welcome new faces in and introduce them around.
Becca made an observation that I’d never thought of before: This lack of social awareness may be tied in part to the fact that freethought groups are predominantly male, and churchgoers are predominantly female.
Until we recognize why people gather together—and that it isn’t “to be a force for rationality”—freethought groups will continue to lag light years behind churches in offering community.
4. Use transcendent language
There are many transcendent religious words without good secular equivalents. There is no secular equivalent for “blessed.” I want one. And no, “fortunate” doesn’t cut it. I also want a secular word for “sacred.” I want to be able to say something is “holy” without the implication that a God is involved. I want to speak of my “soul,” but do so naturalistically, and not be misunderstood. This list goes on and on.
5. Support each other in time of need
Individuals do a lovely job of supporting each other in times of need, regardless of belief system. But when it comes to the loving embrace of a community, religious communities once again tend to do it much, much better than any nonreligious community I’ve seen.
I once learned that a member of a freethought group I belonged to, a sweet man in his late seventies, had been in the hospital for nine days, and not a single member of the group had been to see him. We all signed a card, someone offered, knowing full well how lame that sounded.
If the man in the hospital had been a member of a church, you can bet he’d have had a stream of visitors to sit with him, talk to him, see him through it. Volunteers would have brought dinner to his wife. I’ve seen this as well. It is heartwarming, and the worst church I’ve seen does it better than the best secular organization I’ve seen. Much.
Yes, they have the numbers, and yes, they have the structure — but I’ll also give them credit for recognizing the need and having the desire to fulfill it.
6. Own their worldview
Yes, it’s easier for Christians in the U.S. to be “out” about their Christianness, because Christians are everywhere. Guess what—we’re everywhere too. Current estimates put the nonreligious at 15-18 percent of the U.S. population. There are more nonreligious Americans than African Americans. Think of that. Coming out of the closet and owning your worldview makes it easier for the next person to do so. So do it.
Need more incentive? Think of the children. I want my kids to choose the worldview that suits them best, and yes, I’d like secular humanism to be one they consider. The more visible and normalized it is as a worldview, the better chance that it will appeal to them. But in the meantime, it would also help if we gave more generously, connected our good works to our beliefs, built communities, learned to use transcendent language, and developed a better collective ability to support each other in time of need.
This is a partial list—I didn’t even touch on inspirational art and music—and I welcome your additions. We are not generally good at these things, and Christians, after millennia of practice, generally are. We could learn a thing or two. Or six.
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A similar post at Friendly Atheist.
GOSPEL OF MARK (bookin’ through the bible 5)
[back to FIRST CORINTHIANS]
[ahead to MATTHEW AND LUKE]
The multiple versions of nearly every major episode in both the Old and New Testaments—the creation of woman, the flood, the wife-sister subterfuge, the Ten Commandments, the names of the twelve tribes of Israel, the names of the twelve disciples, the Sermon on the Mount, the Shema, the Lord’s Prayer, the words inscribed on the cross, and the last words of Jesus before giving up the ghost, among scores of examples, attest to the folkloricity of the Bible.
From Holy Writ as Oral Lit by folklorist Alan Dundes (1935-2005)
quick preface, to cheat my word count limit
I’ve been insanely lucky at times. One of my luckiest accidents was my choice of university, UC Berkeley, which could hardly have been a more perfect fit for me. In addition to a dozen other lifechanging things, I met the other half of my ridiculously lucky marriage there. Most of the best things in my life can be traced to that place in one way or another.
I also studied with a number of professors who left indelible stamps on my life and mind, especially in anthropology: Tim White, F. Clark Howell, Desmond Clark, James Deetz. But one stands alone as the luckiest path-crossing of my academic career: folklorist Alan Dundes.
I’d gladly spend my thousand words talking about this unique, funny, brilliant and beloved guy, but you’ll just have to follow the link. He changed forever the way I look at the human project. Among other things, he made me find wonder and fascination in things that had formerly irritated me about the human animal. Long story.
Anyway, when I tucked into the Book of Mark, it was Alan Dundes who immediately sprang to mind. Mark is a bag of memes, after all, and it was Professor Dundes who first made me love memes.
One of Dundes’ great joys was studying the mutation of folklore during oral transmission – the changes, tiny and great, that inevitably find their way into a story, joke, playground game, nursery rhyme, or legend as it is passed orally from one person or generation to the next. Nothing pleased him more than having four or five different versions of a story in hand, then recreating the original, and he always seemed to value the variants more than the original. The original was mere creation, after all. The variants had picked up the fingerprints of folklore and so were more complexly, richly human.
The Gospel of Mark
THE BUDDY CHRIST from the movie DOGMA
The Bible provides folklorists like Dundes with one of their greatest playthings for reasons made clear in the immensely readable and fascinating book Holy Writ as Oral Lit (1999). I mentioned in the first installment that Genesis begins with two different versions of the same creation story, but as Dundes noted in the quote above, it hardly ends there. The technique in play is another form of midrash, the Jewish syncretic teaching technique I mentioned in an earlier post.
By “folkloristic,” Dundes means the stories of the Bible show clear evidence of passage through many, many layers of oral tradition prior to being recorded at all. This shouldn’t be too surprising: Mark was written no earlier than the year 70, since the destruction of the Temple is referred to (Mt 24), and more likely around the year 85 (see Doherty, The Jesus Puzzle for a brilliant discursion on dating the gospels).
One of the most wonderful aspects of Dundes’ thesis is that he doesn’t remotely denigrate the gospels on these terms. Their inconsistencies are precisely what intrigues and delights him. Loving variety as he does, he is quite impatient with those who insist, despite continuous evidence to the contrary, that the Bible is inerrant and/or consistent. He contrasts what he calls the literalists’ “governing syllogism”
-
God Cannot Err.
The Bible is the Word of God.
Therefore the Bible Cannot Err.
(Geisler and Howe, When Critics Ask, 1992)
with his own syllogism:
-
Folklore is characterized by multiple existence and variation.
The Bible is permeated by multiple existence and variation.
The Bible is folklore!
(Dundes 111)
Only by remembering that folklore was the love of his life can we see this as the compliment it was meant to be. The Bible is warts-and-all human, not divine, he says. Isn’t that wonderful?
There are two main kinds of memetic repetition in the gospels: (1) Luke and Matthew (written a decade later than Mark) repeat the stories of Mark, and (2) each of the four gospels, including Mark, also repeats different variants of the same story within its own text – often on the same page. The feeding of the multitudes is one example of a single event told in two variants (6:35 and 8:1), followed by a rather awkward attempt to make them appear as two different events – by putting words in the Big Guy’s mouth, no less (8:18-20). Textual analysis this simple and clear doesn’t lie: it’s one story that has drifted into two versions.
5th c. tilework from the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes, Tabgha, Galilee, Israel
I could go on with this, but there’s much more to say about Mark.
There were dozens of existing first century gospels. Of the four eventual winners of the memetic lottery, Mark was written first, and Luke and Matthew were so closely based on Mark that the three are called synoptic (“same view”) gospels. So among other things, Mark gets credit for beginning to establish the New Testament’s relationship with the old.
So, with the coming of Jesus, have we decisively thrown that festering stew of the Old Testament Law nastiness onto the dung-heap of bad memes, as so many modern Christians claim? No such luck. Matthew (5:18) makes this clearest (“I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished”), but Mark already hints at the continuing enthusiasm for wretched immoral doctrine. Here’s Jesus himself (Mk 7:9-10) berating the Pharisees for not killing their disobedient children:
You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions! For Moses said, ‘Honour your father and your mother,’ and, ‘Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.’
Oh well done, thou Font of Goodness! Let us hasten to build all human morality on His example.
So why didn’t the early Christians take this golden opportunity to bid the OT farewell? Because the gospels were carefully crafted in fulfillment of OT prophecies, making it necessary to keep the OT around as evidence. But to specifically underline the more reprehensible messages, like child-killing? Perhaps my understanding of Christ’s message of love is insufficiently subtle to grasp His divine strategy.
So long as literalism is alive and dominant, this was, in a very real way, the Last Chance in history to renounce those ideas from the Old Testament that are most reprehensible — to say, “Here is a new covenant AND the old law is renounced.” Instead, God gave those ideas his explicit and enduring Seal of Approval. Once Jesus Christ weighed in both jot and tittle, there was no further way for subsequent Christianity to decisively disclaim any given notion in the Mosaic law. And there, I suggest, is the central problem with religions of the book: they lack a meaningful mechanism for self-correction.
More on this in later posts.
By far the most interesting aspect of the Gospel of Mark is what is missing. The miracles are mild and few, and the story lacks both the beginning and the end we all know. There’s no Zeus-like insemination of the mortal woman, no manger, no wise men or shepherds — none of the things that made Luke and Matthew bestsellers. In Mark, we start with a Jesus who is old enough for his tenth high school reunion. The dying girl he revives (Mark 5) has not yet been exaggerated into a dead girl (Matthew 9:18). Even the moral messages are blander and less compelling than Matthew and Luke.
And there’s another point, perhaps most fascinating of all: Mark 16:9-20 is not present in any of the earliest manuscripts. The original Mark ended with the empty tomb but included no appearances of the risen Christ, no snake-handling or poison-drinking, no appearance to the Apostles, no Great Commission, and no ascension into heaven.
We are left with two choices: If the oldest canonical gospel lacks both the beginning and end that appear in later gospels, either Mark found Jesus’ miraculous birth and explicit conquering of death too uninteresting to include (and the cursing of figs and pigs too interesting to exclude), or those elements — the most theologically important — were later folkloric additions.
Which of those (he asked rhetorically) is 1000 times more likely?
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For December 24: THE GOSPELS OF MATTHEW AND LUKE
Read Matthew and Luke online
Believers on Matthew
Skeptics on Matthew
Believers on Luke
Skeptics on Luke
Followed by:
Dec 29 — John
Jan 8 — Exodus (special guest blogger)
Jan 15 — Leviticus
Jan 22 — Deuteronomy
Jan 29 — Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs (special guest blogger)
Feb 5 — Acts
Feb 12 — Revelation
branch-on-ground
Acacia tree at sunset, Laikipia Plateau, Kenya
DELANEY (6, after ten silent seconds staring at our bathroom scale): I wonder how people in places like Africa and India weigh themselves if they don’t have scales.
DAD: Hm. I never even thought about that. Any ideas?
(Five seconds pass.)
DELANEY: I know! They could sit on a long tree branch and see how far down it bends.
DAD (recombing his hair): Holy cow, Lane. That would totally work.
ERIN (9): And they could say, “‘I weigh branch-halfway-down. How about you?’ And the other guy says, ‘I ate too much. I weigh branch-on-ground.'”
(Laughter.)
DELANEY: Or they could put carvings on the tree trunk to see how far down it goes.
This kid slays me on a daily basis. She recognized a problem, proposed a workable solution, and refined it, all within sixty seconds. I’m pretty sure that my own scientific investigations at the age of six were limited to which nostril produced the best-tasting boogers.1
___________________________
1Left side, by a mile — though further research is necessary.
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