Religion and Satire
[My personal favorite from the “On Writing” column. February 4, 2015]
In 14th-century England, some towns celebrated the summer feast of Corpus Christi with plays dramatizing stories from the Bible. One such play, the York Crucifixion, has Christ suffering pain and humiliation at the hands of a medieval Three Stooges, a group of bumbling Roman soldiers whose comical incompetence only increases Christ’s suffering.
The anonymous playwright — known only as the “York Realist” — was almost certainly a priest, but the play’s slapstick representation of the Crucifixion would no doubt strike modern audiences as sacrilegious.
Medieval audiences don’t seem to have had a problem with seeing sacred subjects treated comically. I suspect that for them faith provided an understanding of the cosmos that was comprehensive, all-embracing, and which explained all human behavior, our sometimes outrageous sense of humor, as well as our capacity for acting like morons, even in the face of the divine.
Modern faith is, sad to say, a lesser thing. We’ve sequestered it behind doors marked “Morality” and “Spirituality” and “Dogma.” Having lost touch with the beauty and mystery–and comedy–of everyday life, religion has become so limited and defensive that it can’t laugh at itself any more. It can’t reflect on its many shortcomings with openness and humor, as if it’s afraid that in doing so it will lose credibility.
(Indeed, it was Pope Francis’s original openness and humor–before he became embattled by recalcitrant bishops–that made him seem such a hopeful and transformational leader.)
The tragedy at Charlie Hebdo in January, when two Islamist gunmen entered the satire magazine’s offices and killed twelve people, including two policemen — this tragedy raises these issues because it’s not just Muslim extremists who consider Charlie Hebdo evil. I’ve heard otherwise rational people say so too. So I think it needs to be heartily asserted:
Charlie Hebdo is not evil.
However irreverent and offensive its satires, the staff-writers and cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo were not hurting people. They were making fun of people, and they were murdered for it. The notion that their satire is evil is what motivated religious extremists to kill them.
But it’s not just the defensiveness of modern religion that makes such satire offensive. In part, that’s the job of satire, to offend. When it rubs up against our own beliefs, however, we can easily forget how satire works. Satirical cartoons of Jesus or Mohammed aren’t meant to satirize those revered religious figures–what good would that be? Rather, such images lampoon those who misuse their respective religions to justify behaviors that are irreligious and hypocritical.
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And don’t we all know Muslims and Christians like that? And Jews and Buddhists, too? And atheists and environmentalists and conservatives and progressives? — you get the drift: anyone who puts ideology and doctrine above all else.
I know people like that. Sometimes I just want to haul off and slap them.
But I can’t slap them, because that’s against the law. And that’s why we have satire.
Satire uses ridicule to punish bad behavior that isn’t actually illegal. It’s not against the law to be a jerk. (If it were, we’d all be behind bars. As Hamlet says, “Use every man after his dessert, and who shall escape whipping?”)
But for behavior that’s not against the law, we have a punishment that’s not against the law: ridicule. Satire is the punishment commensurate with the crime. Whenever we take ourselves and our ideas too seriously, we probably could do with a good satirical slap in the face.
Are you being hypocritical and showing off your religious piety? Get thee to the satirist.
Are you a member of an exclusively same-sex clergy that decries the evils of same-sex marriage? Go see your local satirist.
Are you a glad-handing corporate yes-man instead of being a real shepherd for your flock? To the satirist, go!
And are you a little too fond of quoting Shakespeare and whipping out your knowledge of medieval literature? Go, quickly. Please.
A relationship between religion and satire is hinted at in the last novel of our greatest American satirist, Mark Twain. “The Mysterious Stranger” tells a story about a group of boys in late-15th-century Austria who are befriended by a stranger named Satan, who claims to be the devil’s nephew. It’s a bleak novel, uncharacteristic of the Twain we all know. But one detail reminds us of the satirist and humorist in Twain: Satan is afraid of laughter.
Whether this Satan is who he says or is really the devil himself, he has supernatural powers and exercises complete control over events in the story, but he has no power over laughter, which literally scares the hell out of him. The novel’s black ending suggests that Satan’s wiliest ploy is to sink us so deep inside our individual psyches that we’re unable to laugh together about ourselves, beyond the reach of the laughter that would save us from being damned.
Satire isn’t the enemy of religion; it’s one of its greatest allies. It’s the most religious of literary genres, because it’s the most hopeful. Unlike straight comedy, which assumes that human beings are irremediably laughable, satire aims at those foibles we can actually remedy. In making fun of our pieties and hypocrisies, our prejudices and pretensions and presumptions, satire assumes that we can change. We can stop being jerks. We can be better people. We can maybe even be better children of God, if only we can laugh at how stupid we sometimes look.
