Against the absurdity of this, and possibly all times, we need the saving grace of the gaspingly funny, by way of Chesteron, Fred and Ezekiel
It might be reasonably maintained that the true object of all human life is play.
G.K. Chesterton, ‘Oxford and Without’, from All Things Considered
G.K.Chesterton understood the occult affinity between gravity and levity better than most. For him, all deep and lasting things ring with timeless laughter. He relished the counterintuitive dimensions of the Church’s teachings better than most, and complemented that relish with a journalist’s eye for the conflation of glory and vanity in most human aspirations. It is easy to imagine him, from the balcony of heaven’s Divine Comedy Club, surveying the rest of the twentieth century as both lamentable tragedy and illuminating farce. In its crowded succession of horrors, he would have observed serious people, pursuing serious purposes, inflicting serious woe and misery on serious numbers of their fellow human beings. He would have seen the most serious perpetrators rising to their task by mistaking atrocity for solemn duty. Josef Goebbels never booked any stand-up comics for his Nuremberg rallies. Yet hilarity’s sovereign remedy often eludes us as we solemnly object that hilarity cannot avert a bullet or feed a starving child. True enough, but such easy truths often beg a poke in the eye.
Hilarity eludes easy definition. Best to begin with a few casual negatives: it is, of course, signalled by laughter, but laughter is only its expression, not its essence. Malice and mockery exclude real hilarity, though innocent raillery need not. Hilarity also precludes nervous laughter prompted by averted calamity or social embarrassment. It is less a response to external stimuli than an upwelling from within. Consider how a hilarious joke doesn’t just tickle us: it involves the sudden revelation of an unsuspected dimension, an ‘aha!’ moment like our response to any work of art that moves us as we perceive an inevitability that wasn’t there a second ago, shouting ‘of course!’ to an unforeseen alignment that delights because it seems, at one and the same time, utterly inevitable and utterly surprising. It had to go like that, yet we’d never have thought of it on our own. Young lovers who feel, after fifteen minutes’ acquaintance, that they’ve known each other all their lives taste a more exalted form of hilarity. The returns and recognitions of absent dukes or lost sons, daughters and lovers in Shakespeare’s later plays coast the same shores, at once poignant and uproarious. Those involved go giddy with joy. Everyone concerned is entitled to feel both a complete fool and blessed beyond all hope and expression.
‘Where have you been all my life?,’ note, is always a rhetorical question, because its answer, if not ‘the green room’ or ‘stuck on the lift between the second and third floors’, must always be ‘right here’: I effectively had no life until this moment’s revelation. The fullest hilarity draws laughter and tears in equal quantity, with no one all that fussed about distinguishing them. Shakespeare is its modern herald, Dickens its uncanny master, Chesterton its licensed fool and Tolkien, in his essay ‘On Fairy Stories’, one of its more penetrating theorists. (Tolkien coined the term ‘eucatastrophe’ to denote the sudden happy turn that reverses an appalling succession of griefs and misfortunes, what Tolkien saw as the essence of the fairy tale.)
Humbler instances of hilarity include the odd mix of pleasure and satisfaction that attends our solving an engrossing puzzle or winning a game—though not a wager: we commonly associate good luck with material advantage, but genuine hilarity is disinterested, and most of the time we sense that Dame Fortuna’s gifts are not to be trusted. Hilarity rightly laughs all doubt and uncertainty to scorn. It is both expansive and reckless. It cannot ‘reck’ or ‘reckon’—cannot narrow its eyes and frown as it calculates cost and benefit. To our sense of life’s variously serious concerns, hilarity is about as welcome as a fit of giggles at a funeral. It respects no decorum and benignly wrong-foots our everyday sense of how things ought to work.
‘Quit fooling yourself: it’s never going to happen.’ Once in a while, this is even true, and the giving up, a worthy nod to reality. Yet once in another while, if we have persisted, often without any expectation of success or reward or satisfaction, something just clicks, and we find ourselves standing where we had lost all hope of arriving. For the musician, to speak from my own experience, fingers that had achieved only useless tangles now seem to know their business without being told. ‘What was all the fuss about?’ is another rhetorical question that occurs once we find ourselves standing where we had lost all hope of arriving. Usually grinning broadly.
Hilarity makes a gentle and happy mockery of all the toils we have undertaken. I almost wrote ‘undertaken to achieve it’, but by now it ought to be clear that it can’t be achieved in any practical sense. It will not be won or directly earned—remember, we have to spend all those hours practising without a guarantee of success. It simply happens. It is literally incommensurable: we can never say that X amount of labour will result in Y amount of joyful triumph. Hilarity’s height and depth cannot be sounded, and it defies all genealogy. Like ‘getting’ a joke, it comes in a flash of unheralded cognition that can realign the entire cosmos, yet it’s as simple as merely turning around: Sirius was eight light-years in front of me; now, faster than light itself, it’s travelled sixteen light-years to twinkle eight light-years behind me. Magic. Easy as.
Back in the real world, hilarity offers a poke in the eye and a cream pie in the face of just about every just-so economic theory that’s ever presumed, like Polonius lecturing Laertes or Hamlet, to tell us why we do what we do and how we can—and even more fatuously, how we ought to—pursue our rational interests quicker, better and more efficiently.
In the hyper-managerial culture that has overtaken just about every field of endeavour in these bad latter days of the ‘developed’ world, advantage is calculated to a nicety and pursued with humourless single-mindedness. From MBA programs to online wealth gurus, most business practices share the same one-dimensional obsession with mere gain.
It is a curious fact that when ancient myth-makers, less ancient folk-fabulists and later authors anthropomorphise animals, nature’s top predators seem rarely to be endowed with much sense of humour. Nearly all are strangers to hilarity—the lion, say, or the tiger, shark or eagle. The pursuit of evolutionary advantage, or simply your next warm-blooded meal, is clearly a serious business. From my youngest memories of the dinosaur hall in Manhattan’s Museum of Natural History, I retain a keen impression of the grim purpose expressed in the Tyrannosaurus’ toothy rictus. Like the most feral derivatives-broker, there stood (and, I hope, still stands) a rampant master of all he surveyed, unaware that the comically aimless furballs around his ankles would have the last laugh—at least until they got serious, evolved into the most goal-oriented top predators and hedge-fund managers the world has ever known, and came to face their own climate-change catastrophe, this time self-inflicted.
A splendid incarnation of the spirit of hilarity can be found, of all places, in that comedy-fest known to Christians as the Old Testament, itself an often-wry reboot of the Tanakh, as Judaism names its scriptures. In either tradition, the God of Abraham combines a growling thunder deity’s chronic dyspepsia with a penchant for farce. After his ‘gotcha’ with Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac (‘Just kidding—love the faith, dude!’) and Isaac’s wife Rebeccah’s later invention of blind-man’s-bluff and three-card monty in one go when she tricks the elderly Isaac into blessing the wrong son (who’s really the right son—go figure), the one she (and God) favours, there’s the further story of how Jacob is destined, after his own spectacular career as an archetypal trickster figure, to carry God’s blessing forward through time, and become the ancestor of the tribes of ancient Israel. Though not before his own sons trick him into believing for a time that his beloved younger son Joseph was devoured by wild animals. I said it gets silly, though poor Isaac seems destined to play the straight man from youth to old age. God’s ways are indeed mysterious. I sometimes wonder whether the Old Testament/Tanakh was not orchestrated, by whatever powers really govern such things, as a kind of Trojan Horse in which hilarity could be smuggled, like an exploding cigar or whoopee cushion, into the solemn heart of Western religious tradition. You can only hope.
But nowhere is this deity’s wicked sense of humour more on display than in the story of Jonah, which stands among the finest Jewish jokes in the long history of that venerable genre. If I were to argue from a Jewish vantage against Christianity’s appropriation and adaptation of its scripture, one of my primary objections would be the overwhelmingly straight, sober and earnest tone of the New Testament. Communing, in whatever form, with a deity you conceive as absolute, transcendent and omni-everything puts you in an impossible position; the authors of the New Testament and their later patristic commentators have appreciated this after a fashion, but they have left hilarity out of the picture almost entirely. Some of Jesus’s parables and other sayings manage to achieve a folksy blend of Jewish humour and Zen koan, but they stand forth rather starkly from the earnestness of the overall narrative in which they’re embedded. Later, Tertullian did manage to say, ‘It’s absurd. I believe it because it’s absurd’. Never heard of him? I rest my case.
Old Testament prophecy took definite shape after the return of the Babylonian exiles in the sixth century BCE as a post-mortem inquest into the Jewish people’s experience of exile. Collectively, the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, alongside other briefer texts in like traditions, give a confronting account of why God permitted his chosen people to be so roughly handled by their pagan neighbours. They develop a governing narrative of disobedience, exile and chastised restoration, a grim moral geometry that plots God’s outraged righteousness against the sufferings it ordains for his wayward but still chosen people. The prophets promulgated a stern doctrine of God’s harsh but loving discipline. ‘There will be consequences’, as many a modern parent—and many tyrants—have intoned prophetically down the ages. They often raised dissident voices, denouncing faithless kings and corrupt societies that sought in turn to silence them, with commonly fatal consequences. An altogether serious business, but the Tanakh contains one odd story that features a very different kind of prophet, a comic folk-tale about a cowardly bumbler named Jonah. The Jewish canon silently recognises the story’s irregular manner and does not group it among the genuinely prophetic texts that record the voices of Isaiah, Elijah, Jeremiah or Ezekiel. The authorities who assembled the Christian Old Testament, on the other hand, completely missed the joke and promoted Jonah to the status of ‘minor’ prophet.
Commanded by God himself to preach repentance to the reprobate citizens of Nineveh lest his wrath destroy them—Prophecy 101 for an Elijah or Isaiah—Jonah pauses to reflect on the sticky ends to which most prophets were brought and does a runner, thank you very much. Prophets of the genuine tradition—Isaiah and Jeremiah spring to mind—protest both their incapacity and their unworthiness to perform such direct action for God. Their reluctance reflects their genuine humility, rather than cowardice; Jonah is simply afraid, but the poor guy just can’t win. Putting to sea, he’s pursued by a storm. Admitting to the sailors how he’s angered God, he musters enough fortitude to bid them pitch him overboard lest they be caught up in his punishment—a noble and weirdly inverted reflection of the original prophetic mission he is still trying to evade—only to be comically saved by a giant fish that has no problem carrying out God’s commands.
From here, things just get sillier by the verse. Put ashore by that God-fearing worthy of the finny tribe with suspicious accuracy hard by the walls of Nineveh, Jonah relents, conquers his fear and delivers God’s message, no doubt in the thundering tones of the prophets of old. Now, at this juncture in the archetypal prophetic narrative, what comes next should be the rejection of God’s chosen messenger, who will not be heeded but rather persecuted and, more often than not, martyred for his pains, as Jonah well knows. And—would you believe it?—contrary to the recorded experience of nearly every prophet who, before Jonah, had proclaimed, declaimed and denounced his way to a hard fate at the hands of an uncomprehending and resentful audience, Jonah’s mission actually succeeds. The king of Nineveh himself proclaims a season of repentance for all his people. Even donkeys and oxen are commanded to fast and don hair shirts. I find it one of Christianity’s more curious miracles that, across its long history of sometimes obsessive scriptural commentary, so many pious readers appear not to have perceived the hand (and tongue) of a wicked stand-up comic in the narration of these absurd proceedings. Never was such a deadly earnest prophetic tradition so affectionately and devastatingly caricatured. And to top it all, this is in a text that was later included, by the zealous guardians of two very demanding canonical traditions—both Jewish and Christian—in the very canon it sends up. One of Lady Hilarity’s better moments.
And she has still one more trick up her sleeve. When Jonah sees that his message has actually saved the Ninevites from destruction, he throws a major tantrum and storms off to have a good sulk by the sea. Having proven himself the most successful prophet of all time—even Moses erred enough to be denied entry into the Promised Land!—Jonah is put out by his own success. He would far rather have failed and then sat back to enjoy the satisfying ‘I told you so’ of watching his enemies get the hammering they so richly deserved. The story ends with God, more or less, telling Jonah to lighten up through a parable about mercy that suggests how much better it is for the universe to be governed by a God with a sense of humour than by a hypocritical wowser like Jonah. Amen to that, we may all conclude.
Having strayed this far with hilarity, I can’t close with some solemn peroration on how badly our vexed times could do with a bit more of it, though they certainly could! Hilarity is as noble and salubrious a friend as humankind has ever known, and a bit of a hoyden into the bargain. To solemnly enjoin hilarity would be self-defeating, but let me at least observe that the present plight of the developed world is a kind of cul-de-sac or Gordian knot, into which it’s got snarled by its compulsion to manage itself solely in pursuit of efficiency and profit. If we endlessly race after the greatest material advantage in the shortest time, we will, as individuals and as societies, inevitably spiral downwards into a vortex of autistic (and occasionally homicidal or genocidal) paralysis. The living pageant of ‘the world’, with its tableaux of everything that doesn’t answer to our desires—that mocks them for our own good from time to time, and that in each life tosses up a succession of others whose wishes and ways do not always chime with our own—allows us endless opportunities to grow out of the confines of our own parochial perspectives. These opportunities almost always digress and distract from whatever it was we thought we were doing. Such inefficiencies are anathema to the managerial compulsion to get to the end of whatever job it’s taken up in the shortest way.
Consider in this regard all the English idioms involving the word ‘straight’ and their connotations—the straight and narrow, the straight man, a straight face, straightforward—all of them pointing in their different ways to the way we cope with complex realities: by ruthlessly suppressing their rich complexity, which is the very playground of hilarity and, when enjoyed as such, the best imaginable school for the heart and spirit in any well-disposed individual. Should we allow ourselves to be governed wholly by results-oriented efficiency, which has been tightening its grip on the human imagination at least since the onset of the Industrial Revolution? Our subsequent reliance on machines and mechanism has generated analogies and metaphors, now part of everyday language, for the mechanisation of human relations, aspirations and endeavours. Should we allow these to shape our thinking unchallenged, the outlook is grim. Consider, if nothing else, that dark demon of American modernity, Henry Ford, who helped metastasise the treatment of workers as units of production, whose experts geometrised the repetitive movements of his assembly-line workers to achieve—what else?—their maximum efficiency. And whose anti-Semitism (he donated $500,000 to fund the printing and distribution of an English translation of that murderous fraud, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion), and whose authoritarian tendencies led him to admire the ruthless efficiencies of Nazi Germany and who famously declared, ‘History is bunk’. A straight man indeed! Following Ford’s example, we would commit ourselves to our own lunatic asylum, in which each of us will sit confined, its sole resident as far as we are aware, pounding the stone of our terminally privatised consciousness against the dead sand to which the whole of the external world and all its play of possibility will have contracted. No sparks will fly, and Lady Hilarity, defeated at last, will retreat to a heaven of which, quite literally, we can entertain no idea whatsoever.
My own experience of trying to teach in higher education establishments regulated by humourless apparatchiks is, I suspect, typical. No one points to the emperor’s empty wardrobe, which he assumes is full of splendid robes and regalia. No one can prise the grip of grimly focused financial interests from the levers of public policy. More critically, no one can break the spell of crude economic rationalism that dominates mainstream discourses about what is good for us. Imagine a politician standing before the cameras in an election year or a dean or vice-chancellor rising at graduation to announce that we desperately need less caution, more recklessness, less dire expertise and competent management of the nation’s or university’s policies and finances, fewer disabling anxieties about getting stuff wrong, and above all a heightened sense of play and hilarity in all we do, and let the future look to itself for bloody well once. It’s not really thinkable outside of broad farce, is it? Quod Erat Demonstrandum, or, in the vulgar tongue, ‘Duh, Fred!’ If we want to save ourselves, let’s forget the administrators, politicians and CEOs, stock up on cream pies and banana skins and prepare for an absolute Dickens of an exalted and merry laugh that will peal, like Herbert’s ‘Church bells beyond the stars heard’, from here to the heights of every imaginable heaven.