Valson Thampu

Charles Dickens generated a world of humour, immense popularity and an ample personal fortune by looking at the world of adults through the eyes of children. The essence of humour is the ability, or the inner freedom, to look at individuals and events from an alternative perspective.

A problem could seem serious; but may not have to be. The offence in a situation may well be either created or aggravated via the response of the offended.  Given that, a modicum of humour could be a greater and saner resource for dealing with situations of religious offence than religious zeal.  In point of fact, this underlies the ‘doctrine of the other cheek’. It is only in a comedy, not in a tragedy, that it seems natural to offer the other cheek. In contrast, an eye for an eye belongs to the genre of tragedy; especially to revenge drama.

Being inwardly free involves the ability to deviate from set patterns.  As the Stoics said, doesn’t your anger involve conformity to a set pattern? Someone offends you. You feel angry. That’s all right. But, what makes you believe that you need to express your anger in a particular way? Say, by thrashing the offender? Does it not result from instinctive conformity to a stereotype? Not hitting back amounts, you fear, to cowardice which, too, is a stereotype. You didn’t decide the correlation between the offence and the reaction. You only borrowed it from your social context. Jesus would say that your freedom lies in breaking your bondage to that pattern and responding to the situation differently. It takes a sense of humour, not knee-jerk religiosity, to do so. When the aggressor boils over in anger, the sensible thing to do is to sprinkle a drop or two of cool humour.

The Hindu religious worldview views the world as the leela, or play, of the Divine. God plays; but we have to wear a funeral look in his name. As compared to our sense of righteousness, there much humour in God’s sending his rain alike on the good and the evil.   When we are screaming on behalf of God, God could be smiling. Don’t you think it’s funny that we scream for the sake of God? In the playground of God’s leela, the offender and the defender belong together. Because our fiery religious earnestness makes us blind to God, this strikes us as blasphemous. Blasphemy has its place in the humour of irreverence that, it appears, God doesn’t mind. Jesus was, remember, tried for blasphemy. The proof that God has a sense of humour is that blasphemy is acceptable to him. This means that God is less religious than most of us. Jesus certainly was. By the way, every new religion, every new sect, emerged as blasphemy in the eyes of its predecessors. Prophets were mistaken for enemies of religion.

Humour involves a sort of inner explosion towards diffusing the accumulating nervous energy. The transition from explosion to diffusion is mediated by a sudden change in cognitive direction. We expect the given situation to develop in the particular way to which we are accustomed. It moves along predictable lines up to a critical point. Then, all of a sudden, the direction changes and the situation takes an unexpected leap; somewhat like a speeding car shifting, suddenly, to the reverse gear. The arrested kinetic energy could explode and toss the car in the air. The car would laugh, if it could. But, alas, like most of us, the car is incapable of humour. So, the situation is no more than an accident. A walking man steps on a banana peel and falls on his face. He would laugh at least in reminiscence.

A psychological benefit that humour affords is easing the burden of living aggrieved. Arthur Koestler cites an episode in illustration. An English baron went out to hunt. When he came back, he found his wife in the arms of the local bishop. What did he do? He went to the window that opened out on the street, and started blessing the passers-by.

‘How dare you do my work?’ The indignant bishop protested.

‘My Lord,’ the baron said calmly, ‘You are doing my work. Shouldn’t I do yours?’

The alternative to this is riddling the brain of the bishop with a bullet. That would have generated a dead body in place of laughter.

It is good manners and sound culture to refrain from ridiculing prophets and godly persons. Even so, it needs to be asked: is it really possible to ridicule Prophets and Saviours? Where does the insult lie? In the person of the Prophet, or in the perception of his defenders? When Jesus was being led to Calvary to be crucified, the women of Jerusalem went weeping after him. ‘Weep not for me;’ he told them, ‘weep for yourself and your children.’ Why? Because, as he said later, ‘They (his tormentors) know not what they do.’

Much of what we do in the sphere of religion belongs to this ‘know-not’ category. Why do we take offence and defend? How does it help?Do we know? Or, want to know?  If the offenders and defenders were to consult Prophet Mohammad (PBUH), what would he tell them? Perhaps what Jesus said, ‘Turn back and become like children’?

Children play! They are free to laugh and cry. They don’t burden themselves with head-loads of grievances.  They forget. Forgetfulness constitutes the beauty and freedom of childhood. They survive quarrels. Children live in the present. If you were to consult a child on your ponderous project of ‘righting historical wrongs’, the child would laugh and punch you on your stomach.

Being natural and spontaneous seems inappropriate to the zealously religious. Yet god(s) in every tradition, behaves in mysterious, or unpredictable, ways. The essence of that mystery is freedom from  stereotypes. God is indifferent to defending himself against his mockers in the way religious zealots feel obliged to. Instead, God may smile over them, or regard them them with pathos. Who knows?

There will be peace in the world, when those who are zealous for their gods and prophets learn to behave like those they think they need to protect. The less one is like the Prophet, the keener one tends to be in defending the Prophet. If that does not occasion cosmic laughter, what else can?

No human being is a prophet unless he transcends divisive categories like friend-foe, worshipper-mocker, believer-blasphemer, saint-sinner, and so on. It should split our sides with laughter when we see gods made partisan, or vulnerable, to human malice and bigotry. It is not gods and prophets, but we, who need to be defended. But, it is from ourselves that we need to be defended, liberated and saved.