I heard a joke about drone strikes yesterday, and it got me thinking about our fascination with provocative comedy. Normally, I’d be the last to undersell humor’s value: it can be a powerful comfort in times of trouble, a way to build solidarity with others who are suffering. Yet I can’t help but wonder at what point this incessant impulse to push the boundaries of comedy begins to destroy rather than console.
Traditionally, satirical humor is meant to antagonize those who are comfortable in their positions of authority, to tear away the carefully maintained veil of convention that lets powerful people get away with oppression and maltreatment. But when we tell jokes about impoverished immigrants or people on welfare, who’s actually laughing? Are we calling attention to inequalities and corruption, or kicking those who are already on the bottom?
Now may be a good time to remember these words of Jonathan Swift, perhaps the greatest humorist of them all: “Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.” Humor that touches on delicate subjects should always be informed by an awareness of our own failings, lest it risk clueless insensitivity. Take aim at yourself first.
Of course, it’s easy to dismiss objections to “edgy” humor as needlessly politically correct. A Washington Post article a few years ago about the pop culture fondness for poking fun at North Korea missed the point in a truly spectacular fashion: “We should probably feel guilty for all the light-heartedness, but schoolmarm-ing ourselves doesn’t tend to feed hungry mouths or aid defections.” Well, yes—policing our language does distract us from feeding the hungry. But so does laughing at them.
And maybe we shouldn’t let ourselves off the hook. North Korea is, after all, a country where prison guards tie pregnant women to trees, slice the fetuses from their stomachs, and leave them on the ground to bleed to death. A young woman who escaped from North Korea last year told the U.N. that she “didn’t know what freedom was.” We have the freedoms she doesn’t, and that includes the freedom to joke and to laugh with impunity. But that license exists for a reason, and we need to start thinking more about our responsibilities than our privileges. We need to be careful not to mistake cluelessness for courage. Humor that pokes fun at others’ suffering is rarely as brave or subversive as we believe it to be. It’s usually just cruel.
When I go to the Bible and read how the prophets spoke out about injustice and tragedy, I don’t see a lot of one-liners or sarcastic quips. What I do find is a lot of weeping and advocating and a whole lot of what you might call solidarity. But if you do find a passage where Jeremiah cracks a joke I’d certainly love to hear it. (I’m skeptical, though—I find it hard to believe Jeremiah even knew what a joke was.)
This is a bitter lesson, and it isn’t one that can be learned overnight. It’s one that has taken me a long time to accept because I dearly love to laugh and will use nearly any opportunity to make a good joke (or a bad one, to be honest). And because we live in a culture that incessantly screams that we deserve to be entertained, to be amused, to be diverted. We hear this so often that we forget the vast and unspeakable sacredness of suffering. We forget that some ground is still holy. We forget to take off our shoes.
“Blessed are those who weep,” Jesus told the disciples, “for you will laugh.” In the kingdom of heaven, there is a place—an important place—for laughter. But it must never supplant compassion.