You'll Laugh About This One Day

Why the Easter story is funnier than it first appears.

Apr 02, 2021

Is the Easter story funny? Yes. A bit. Given the ending (spoiler alert), the Easter story isn’t a tragedy, even though it gets pretty black and bleak on Good Friday. But there are comic elements throughout the story that are easy to miss. In this article, I explore some of those and how we can easily miss them.

“You’ll laugh about this one day.”

You rarely want to hear those words because someone is saying them to make you feel better. The engine of your car has fallen out, you’re miles away from help, and there’s no mobile signal. The cake you’ve spent three days baking and decorating has been demolished overnight by your cat. In those moments of intense frustration and despair, where everything has gone wrong, the words “Don’t worry. You’ll laugh about this one day,” are not welcome.

Worst of all, you know they’re right. You will laugh about it one day. It’s a reliable mathematical equation in my world that:

Tragedy + Time = Comedy

Look at Job. His life is incredibly tragic. But it’s also a very long time ago. Read the first chapter now, and it escalates rapidly in cartoonishly comic way. A servant delivers bad news and “While he was still speaking, yet another messenger came” and delivers even worse news. The news itself is also comically severe.

“The fire of God fell from the heavens and burned up the sheep and the servants, and I am the only one who has escaped to tell you!” (Job 1:16)

Yikes. Fire from heaven? What on earth is going on?

To cap it all, Job’s friends say things even worse than “You’ll laugh about this one day” or “Chin up. Worse things happen at sea.” (Tell that to Jonah.) Once Job’s wife has told her husband to curse God and die, Job’s friends say that he must have done something to deserve this fate. Wow. Thanks guys. Hope you get your money back on that counselling course.

Is it poor taste to laughing about the suffering of Job? In situation comedy, characters are normally the authors of their own fate. They are fools chasing idols that are both unobtainable and unsatisfying. In Dad’s Army, Captain Mainwairing ends up looking foolish (with his glasses comically askew) because he pompously insists on being in charge, as the local bank manager, when it is obvious to everyone that the natural leader is Wilson.

A while back, Ricky Gervais created a show called Derek. It was hard work to watch because the eponymous character clearly had learning difficulties. Therefore, it was hard for anything he did to be his fault. Many found the show uncomfortable to watch, although die hard Gervais fans hailed it as a work of genius. The show was troubling. (I wrote about it back in 2012 here)

Trouble At Easter

The Easter story is troubling. There are comic moments, and one isn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. What’s going on is the bleakest of bleak things. It’s so bleak it’s absurd. God becomes man which is, in itself the most incongruous concept imaginable. (This is one of the reasons why some Muslims find Christianity not just wrong but laughable.) God as Man is then killed. It’s like Shakespeare literally walking into one of his own plays – and then being physically crucified by characters he himself created and sustains. He is writing their lines as they kill him.

The reality is more comic still. Jesus isn’t just executed by created beings, but by religious ones. As John says in the prologue to his gospel:

The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. (John 1:9-11)

It is the holiest of the holy, the high priest and the teachers of the law who knew every jot and tittle of the Old Testament which foretold this event.

Killing God

How on earth did they expect to be able to kill God, the Supreme Being? Their reaction to the raising of Lazarus from the dead in John 11 is comic. The priests respond: “So from that day on they plotted to take his life.” (11:53).

JESUS JUST DISPLAYED POWER OVER LIFE AND DEATH! YOU WILL HAVE SERIOUS PROBLEMS KILLING THIS MAN WHO ALSO CONTROLS THE WEATHER AND HEALS THE SICK.

Later we see the results of their derangement. They manage to kill to Jesus. The disciples are stunned. On Palm Sunday Jesus is riding into town on a donkey being hailed by the crowds. On Thursday night, he’s talking about dying. Within 24 hours, he’s been arrested, tried, found guilty, flogged, nailed to a cross, killed and laid in a tomb. The disciples hadn’t expected this.

They should have. Jesus repeatedly said that he would be captured and killed. The disciples respond to these moments with total incomprehension, wondering how on earth this miraculous man they followed could be killed.

But as they ran for their lives from Gethsemane, or watched their friend die on a cross from a distance, telling them “Don’t worry. You’ll laugh about it afterwards” would sound like the sickest of jokes. It would take a cheeky grin from Eric Idle to stand a chance of getting away with that one.

Shock and Surprises

Here is one of the ways in which jokes misfire, or appear out of place. (I explain this in The Sacred Art of Joking) Jokes tend to rely on surprise, making a connection that you’d not noticed before. You have the set up, and the punchline/reveal. Sometimes the joke is disproportionately vicious or exaggerated. The contrast is too great or morally hard to process. This, in itself, can be funny. It’s the sort of joke you might see in an episode of South Park or Family Guy. For many people, ‘the joke’ is a nasty shock, rather than a nice surprise.

I’m not a huge fan of shock. I have a very low threshold for creepiness. Growing up, I never watched the Freddie Kruger films like my school friends did. I find blood repulsive, not funny, interesting or dramatic. I like my curries spicy but my horror firmly set to ‘Butter Chicken’. Back in the 1990s, The X-Files was about as scary as I wanted. Yes, The X-Files. More recently, I’ve just watched The Terror which, again, was right on the edge of what I could bear to watch.

The Passion narrative is a rollercoaster of shocks and surprises. The crowd shouts that the murderer Barabbas be released instead of Jesus. Pilate is surprised but gives in. We are shocked and appalled that this crowd, a week earlier, were holding out palm branches and shouting ‘Hosanna’ for the Son of David. We are appalled at Pilate’s pragmatism.

It’s a Bad Sign

Then you get this bizarre undignified incident in John 20:19-22 which says:

Pilate also wrote an inscription and put it on the cross. It read, “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.” Many of the Jews read this inscription, for the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city, and it was written in Aramaic, in Latin, and in Greek. So the chief priests of the Jews said to Pilate, “Do not write, ‘The King of the Jews’, but rather, ‘This man said, I am King of the Jews.’” Pilate answered, “What I have written I have written.”

The chief priests didn’t want people to get the wrong idea that the man being crucified really could be the King of the Jews. They try to get Pilate to change the sign, but he’s not having it. What’s going on? It’s an extraordinary moment of comic chaos between the collaborators.

Context is King

What we read in the narrative is not the whole story. Each passion narrative is the culmination of each of the four gospels. This is how stories work. In Acts 1 and 2, you are setting up characters, themes and objects which will have great significance later on. By the time Act 3 rolls around, you know the significance of a hand gesture, a costume, a form of words and a plate of sardines. (See Noises Off by Michael Frayn). We need to see these passion narratives in context.

Moreover, these gospels are themselves the third act of a longer narrative that begins in Genesis. When “Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark, and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb” (John 20:1), we’re thinking of Jesus raising Lazarus back in Chapters 11-12. The darkness might remind us of Nicodemus coming to Jesus in the dark in John 3 where he is told to be born again. He begins his journey of faith which culminates in his help with Jesus’ burial in John 19. Mary is going to meet Jesus like the woman in broad daylight at the well in John 4 who, in turn, reminds us of Jacob meeting his wife at a well where “Jacob came near and rolled the stone from the well's mouth” (Genesis 29:10). If this were an out-and-out comedy, these would all be categorised as ‘call-backs’.

Then John delivers more moments of comedy. John outrunning Peter to the tomb is really odd, and I’ve done a comic Bob Newhart-style monologue about it here. Meanwhile in Luke 24, in a moment of pure Shakespearean irony and disguise, we read:

While they were talking and discussing together, Jesus himself drew near and went with them. But their eyes were kept from recognizing him. And he said to them, “What is this conversation that you are holding with each other as you walk?” And they stood still, looking sad. Then one of them, named Cleopas, answered him, “Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?”
And he said to them, “What things?”
And they said to him, “Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, a man who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and rulers delivered him up to be condemned to death, and crucified him.” (Luke 24:15-20)

We are invited to imagine Jesus standing there nodding along saying, “Uh huh,” and “Really?” Now that’s funny. I wouldn’t open with it on a Friday night at the Comedy Store, but there comic elements are there and worth savouring.

The Easter story has everything. Shocks and surprises. Irony, disguises and call-backs. And on Easter Sunday, when Christ is risen, we really can laugh long and hard. Happy Easter.

James’s book, The Sacred Art of Joking, is available signed directly from him via his website. His new book, The Gospel According to a Sitcom Writer is released in June 2021. This will be available to pre-order soon.