What the comical can do for your preaching (a guest post)
Jake Myers serves as the Wade P. Huie, Jr. Associate Professor of Homiletics at Columbia Theological Seminary. He’s ordained minister of Word and Sacrament in the PC(USA). Jake has written numerous books and essays, the latest of which is entitled “Stand-up Preaching: Homiletical Insights from Contemporary Comedians” (Cascade, 2022). He has a forthcoming book in press with Lexington Book’s Theology and Pop Culture series connecting theology and ethics with stand-up comedy, which he is co-authoring with Dr. Nicole Graham, a religious studies professor at King’s College London. He provides online homiletical resources and sermon coaching at www.preachingdr.com.
Website: www.preachingdr.com
Facebook: @JakeMyers
Instagram: @preachingdoctor
All preachers employ some form of rhetoric when they preach.
Even as the aims of Christian proclamation vary between denominations and historical epochs, the Church has arrived at a rare point of unanimity in the belief that preaching ought to do something.
A growing number of preachers have begun to employ new rhetorical strategies. Here I’m talking about the use of the humorous and the comical in the pulpit.
In my latest book, Stand-Up Preaching: Homiletical Insights from Contemporary Comedians, I draw an important distinction between the humorous and the comical.
In brief, the humorous signifies discourse that aims to make us laugh. Period. The humorous links etymologically and historically with the human body and its many foibles. Probably because it belies our animality amid our efforts to transcend it, humans find the body’s olfactory and excretory processes amusing.
By the comical, I refer to a use of humor that seeks something more than laughter; it aims at metanoia. The best and brightest contemporary stand-up comedians arrange their bits and jokes to make us laugh and think in new ways.
Comics like Jerry Seinfeld, Ellen Degeneres, and Jim Gaffigan almost exclusively employ humorous rhetoric in their stand-up. But other comics such as Hari Kondabolu, John Oliver, Wanda Sykes, Dave Chappelle, and Hannah Gadsby are just as intent on making us think as they are in making us laugh. They show us that it need not be either or.
But be warned, preacher: The humorous and the comical are double-edged swords. They can just as easily reinforce the status quo as subvert it.
There’s a reason that despite the hard-won victories against racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, etc., some still take pleasure in humor that reinforces negative stereotypes about classes of people. I’m going to go ahead and presume that my present readership would join me in denouncing such humor.
But how might the comical aid us in our gospel efforts at metanoia? There are three points I’d like to offer in this regard.
1. The comical fosters engagement on important matters we may prefer to ignore
Joking and seriousness need not be antithetical.
Some forms of joking can spur a tiny revolution that can serve our political and moral goals. For instance, comedy can help us challenge sociopolitical structures that marginalize certain people groups and oppress others. As Chatoo and Feldman argue:
When it comes to social justice issues, particularly issues that can seem removed from everyday life—such as climate change or global poverty—one of the foremost challenges to public engagement is getting people to pay attention in the first place. In today’s media environment, where myriad messages—and issues—compete for our increasingly fragmented attention, comedy can cut through the clutter, promoting attention to topics that otherwise may be eclipsed from public view. (Chatoo and Feldman, A Comedian and an Activist Walk into A Bar, 41–42.)
Broaching issues of great sociopolitical significance can be tough for many preachers.
Doing so in a comical mode can make listeners more receptive to hearing about matters that some might wish to ignore.
2. The comical exposes our radical contingency
The British philosopher Simon Critchley contends that the comical is produced by a disjunction between the way things are and the way they are represented in the joke, a disjunction “between expectation and actuality.”
Like Kierkegaard before him, Critchley sees the philosophical benefits of the comical, which he locates in its ability to work on us subversively as it produces a “consciousness of contingency.” Through this consciousness, argues Critchley, the world is exposed as not naturally given or necessary but capable of being reimagined otherwise. This malleability of the world attributes much power to the comical preacher to help her listeners see the contingency of things. (Critchley, On Humour, 1, 10).
When I speak with preachers about broaching divisive issues from the pulpit, one of the things I often hear is that congregants and parishioners transform from being kind and sensible to intransigent—and even hostile.
Part of this intransigence is our all too human efforts to uphold our respective worldviews.
A benefit of attempting the comical from the pulpit is that it exposes our worldviews as constructs that can be modified. While risky, exposing the radical contingency of our worldviews can open us to imagining the world otherwise.
3. The comical is a political tool
All preaching is political.
Even when the sermon says nothing about politics as such, a certain politics governs the preaching moment, determining what kind of person is allowed to preach in the first place.
When preachers bearing most—or all—of my identity markers deny the politics of preaching, our omission silently supports white supremacy and its concomitant isms. When I, as a mostly straight, white, cisgender, presently able-bodied man in America, fail to acknowledge the privilege baked into my very body, I reinforce the homiletical status quo.
But if all preaching is political, there are things we can say and do in the pulpit that render our politics potent or puny.
This distinction I am making between puny and potent politics tracks with the argument of the eminent Slovenian psychoanalytic philosopher Alenka Zupančič on the political consequences of comedy.
Zupančič argues that when the target of comic critique is a person who possesses all the defects and foibles as the rest of us, such humor cannot be considered political—even if the butt of the joke happens to be a politician.
Only when the central premise of humor is built upon engagement with questions of knowledge, power, and judgments about the status of real-world behaviors, can it be potently political.
Like me, Zupančič is interested in the kinds of humor that can actively intervene in political discourse in a way that goes beyond the ridicule of one’s opponents.
It’s not simply the case that one will only “get” the joke if one already shares the joke’s underlying political perspective, but also that in “getting” the joke—i.e., interpreting it correctly—the hearer might become aware, or even convinced, of the political issues at stake.
Such playing with politics can thus be considered “true comedy,” in Zupančič’s terms, because it explores rather than denigrates the abstract ideals of politics. Accordingly, Zupančič refers to ad hominem jokes as “false comedy” because they leave universal categories of the political “fundamentally untouched in their abstract purity” (Zupančič, Odd One In, 31).
As we consider the prospects of attempting a comical rhetorical style in our preaching, we would do well to consider the real target of our comedy.
Certain politicians make it easy to make them the butt of a joke; the harder and far more important task is to help church folx hold public figures accountable for failing to manifest universal categories (e.g., freedom, the sanctity of all life, justice) in their concrete policies.
Such exposure might earn us a chuckle or two, but how much more powerful would it be to earn us a moment of critical reflection and introspection?
Such, I believe, is what makes the comical worthy of the serious calling to which we have been called.
Jake Myers presents “Preaching Jokes to Power” to The Collective+
August 22, 2 pm Central
Preachers will gain tools for thinking critically and creatively about the use of the comical to challenge sociopolitical structures of injustice. We’ll examine some of the possibilities and pitfalls of employing the comical in one’s sermons and some practical suggestions for preaching prophetically through the use of humor and comedy.