HOW DO YOU TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN COMEDY AND THEOLOGY?

One common rendering of today’s typically religious person is someone with so many sacred cows that they’re constantly taking offence. A comedian, on the other hand, in the popular imagination, is someone for whom nothing is sacred – it’s someone who gives offence rather than taking it. And yet if there’s one thing that can be guaranteed to offend comedians, it’s sacred cows. Be they religious pieties, social snobberies or political correctnesses, sacred cows are like red flags to the comedian’s bull. In fact, they attack them with such missionary zeal, it’s almost as if some sacred cow of their own was driving their iconoclasm. So what, we might ask, is the comedian’s sacred cow?

Back in the shtetl, Moishe was in his bed, dying. They brought him fresh milk from the cow to help him feel less parched, but he was too weak to get out any words. Maybe, his daughter thought, some spirits could help revive him. She put a little whisky in with the milk and gave it to him. Moishe shot bolt upright in bed and said his immortal last words: ‘Don’t sell the cow!’

Okay, okay, so that’s not the comedian’s sacred cow ...

A rabbinical student is about to set off on his first job in a far-flung community away from everyone he knows. He asks his own rabbi, a famous scholar of the Talmud, for some final words of wisdom before he leaves.

‘Life is a fountain,’ his teacher tells him. The young rabbi is moved by the profundity of those words as he embarks on a hugely successful career.

Many years later, hearing his teacher is dying, he visits him one last time. ‘Rabbi,’ he says, ‘I have one question for you. For so many years now, whenever I’ve been sad or confused, I’ve told myself that “life is a fountain” – your words of precious wisdom – and that thought has always helped me get through even the worst of times, and yet truth be told I have never really understood what that adage means. Please can you tell me: why is life a fountain?’

‘All right,’ says his rabbi wearily, ‘so life isn’t a fountain.’

Sometimes, that is, a joke is just a joke. And not only that: the acceptance of chance, accident and contingency ought to even be considered a condition of possibility of the joke. For while theologians are tempted to see everything as part of a divine plan, comics find their freedom in the right to be unserious – and in the distinctly profane enjoyment to be had in the spectacle of a serious man, a man in a business suit, who is walking determinedly to work when, for no apparent reason, he slips and finds himself flat out on the ground.

In admitting that, however, can we ever be entirely sure when a slip is just a slip, a joke just a joke, a kiss just a kiss, or even a cigar just a cigar? It was Søren Kierkegaard, after all, one of the greatest modern theologians, who, when faced with the hapless man in a business suit, could not but detect the divine comedy at work: ‘[When] a tile from the roof falls down and strikes him dead, then I laugh heartily.’^* And whether or not you’re tempted to join him in that confounding laughter, you can hardly fail to notice the irony or self-contradiction of an essay strung together by jokes attempting to make a case for the joke as that which radically refuses the kind of meaning or determination that it might expect to receive in an essayistic interpretation.

Thus, while there’s some truth to the idea that a comedian is someone prepared to transgress laws, rules and reasons – or do anything for a laugh – there are nonetheless limits to the liberties any such comedian will likely take. Most comedians, for example, do have lines they won’t cross or things they feel they can’t say without doing damage to the funny. As Jerry Seinfeld tells the priest, he’s offended by his dentist’s conversion, not as a Jewish person but as a comedian. Because not everyone gets to tell the same jokes as well as each other. His dentist, Jerry thinks, is acquiring ‘joke-telling immunity’ by underhand means – he’s converting to Judaism not as a creed, but as a sense of humour. And you can’t convert to a sense of humour, can you? I mean, much as he’d love to, Jerry doesn’t get to tell all of Richard Pryor’s jokes.

You can’t convert to blackness, no more than you can to whiteness:

People are always introducing me as ‘Sarah Silverman, Jewish comedienne’. I hate that! I wish people would see me for who I really am – I’m white!

Or can you?

*  Either/Or, Part 1 (1843).