The First Joke in the Gospel of John
And how getting technical about comedy really isn’t funny
When thinking about concepts like humour, comedy, irony and joking, it’s traditional to spend lots of time defining our terms. To which I argue: stuff that. Life’s too short.
What I’ve just written there is, in itself, a joke. I set myself up as someone who was going to spend hours waggling on the tee and going into semantics and dictionary definitions, and then I trashed it with a line of bathos. In so doing, we’re already learning something about set up and jokes. The person telling you the joke leads you by the nose one way, and then pulls you in another direction with the punchline.
That other direction isn’t random. It’s not a diversion. It’s connected in some way to the set-up, but it’s not the connection you were expecting. So comedy is all about management of expectations.
Expectation Management
Wow. Isn’t this getting boring really quickly? That’s why I said I wasn’t going to get into this. How is the theory of comedy so hysterically unfunny?
We can have all the theories of comedy we like, but let’s remember the words of the great comedian, Ken Dodd, that I quote in The Sacred Art of Joking.
Freud said that the essence of the comic was the conservation of psychic energy. But then again Freud never played second house Friday night at the Glasgow Empire.
Inspired Jokes
So let’s look at a joke. A truly inspired one. And I mean that literally, in the sense of a joke from God’s inspired word, the Bible. (You probably weren’t expecting that either, which means technically that’s another joke. That’s two jokes so far, not couting the one by Ken Dodd. It’s going well, isn’t it?)
Most people aren’t turning to the Bible for jokes, but there are plenty in there if you know where to look and you’re open to the possibility that some of it is funny.
So let’s look at the first proper joke in the Gospel of John, which I talk about in my Water into Wine show (which will available to stream from 12th May so what this space). The joke is in John 1:46, but let’s start at v43.
The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, “Follow me.” Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. Philip found Nathanael and said to him, “We have found him of whom Moses in the Law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.” Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”
Boom. There’s the joke at the end: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”
Nathaneal is being funny. Is he intentionally making a joke, or at least saying something unwittingly funny? Does it matter?
Let’s look at what’s he saying. What’s the set up? What’s our expectation?
The Set Up
Jesus has begun his earthly ministry. From the beginning of the gospel, John’s made a big deal about Jesus being there at the creation of the whole universe, as if to say ‘Whatever you read in Matthew, Mark and Luke, you’re not thinking big enough.’
Then Jesus has calls three followers, Andrew, Simon and then Philip. Philip, in turn, bounds up to Nathaneal and announces that the Messiah has arrived, and it’s Jesus, who is from Nazareth. What are we expecting?
Not Nathaneal’s response. He bursts Philip’s bubble of enthusiasm. He’s dubious that someone so cosmically important could be from some backwater place with no historical significance like Nazareth. The Old Testament is full of cities, mountains, wells, rivers and trees that are all loaded with historic, symbolic meaning. But not Nazareth. So there must be some mistake. Nathaneal’s either being smart or dumb, but either way, it’s a joke.
And there’s another possible joke in the fact that John is probably later than the other gospels, and John is assuming that we know Jesus was born in Bethlehem, the city of David, and then raised in Nazareth. Now that would change things and create an extra layer of joke.
So Many Levels
Later on in Chapter 7, the religious authorities are losing their minds about what Jesus is doing and saying. And then a man called Nicodemus says:
“Does our law judge a man without first giving him a hearing and learning what he does?” They replied, “Are you from Galilee too? Search and see that no prophet arises from Galilee.”
It’s as if they’re saying ‘this Jesus can’t be the Messiah because he’s from Galilee, not a place where Messiahs come from.’ But we can have a giggle at them because they don’t seem to realise that Jesus was actually born Bethlehem, and is from line of Judah and David.
In fact, earlier ten verses earlier, John writes:
But some said, “Is the Christ to come from Galilee? Has not the Scripture said that the Christ comes from the offspring of David, and comes from Bethlehem, the village where David was?”
As if to say, “now if this guy had actually been born in Bethlehem, then we’d be bowing down and worshipping him as the Christ.” So they’re saying something funny, because we know something they don’t.
So that’s another aspect of how comedy works, especially within character and story. We see something the character in the story doesn’t. I think technically that’s called dramatic irony, but I’ve been a professional comedy writer for nearly 25 years, so clearly the terminology can’t be all that important.
Anyway, last night, I performed Water into Wine, possibly for the last time. But you can see it from 12th May, thanks to the wonder of the internet. And money. Here’s a clip of me in the show, where I read from The Gospel According to a Sitcom Writer:
Smuggling Jesus Back into the Church?
Sounds like a good idea, right? In the latest episode of Cooper and Cary Have Words podcast, I had words with Andrew Fellows who talks about L’Abri, Francis Shaeffer and what’s gone wrong with the church, especially where artists are concerned.
Thunder, Thunder, Thunder, Ho-ooo
If you’re of a certain age, Thundercats will have a special place in your heart. In which case, you might be interested in the Reformed Mythologist’s take on the opening titles which is coursing with religious imagery. Well worth your time. Seriously: