prayer, subjectivity, and politicsjoke, between expectation and actuality,” we find an understanding
of humor that reminds us of prayer.^25 For humor can accomplish a
some what similar decentering of the human subject through its
insight in the shortcomings of the human condition. Humor is also a
way of making human existence less familiar by seeing it in a new
and different light, and thereby it is also potentially critical of all
ideologies by showing that there are alternatives to the prevailing
circumstances. To understand the world in a certain way is not a
necessity implied by the facts but a historically contingent organization.
Humor is, further, neither a stranger to the historical church (even if
there of course are exceptions without any sense of humor with
disastrous results, as shown for example by Umberto Eco in his novel
The Name of the Rose) nor to the religious world on the whole.^26 Critchley
does mention the temptation that a religiously inspired humor
becomes an escapist way of turning away from this world and so
miraculously — as it were — be delivered from all its shortcomings.^27
But his critique alerts us to the risk that humor itself — and probably
most human practices — in a similar way could become escapist in
jokes about ethnicity and in the malicious delight in other people’s
misfortunes. Without taking the similarities between prayer and
humor too far, I would like to claim that prayer reminds us of humor
insofar as both are phenomena that call into question a certain neurotic
desire for control which human beings are capable of displaying (the
anthropol ogical correlate to a God that suffers from a compulsory and
paranoid despotism, Dawkin’s bullying God) and so directs critical
attention to our very attitude towards existence and to our com-
portment within existence.^28
- Simon Critchley, On Humour, Thinking in Action, London/New York:
Routledge, 2002, 1. - See M. A. Screech, Laughter at the Foot of the Cross, London: Penguin, 1999;
Peter L. Berger, Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience,
Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1997; and Karl-Josef Kuschel, Laughter: A Theological
Reflection, trans. John Bowden. New York: Continuum, 1994. - Critchley, ibid., 16–18. Critchley, ibid., 16–18.
- What, then, is the diff erence between prayer and humor? Could it perhaps What, then, is the difference between prayer and humor? Could it perhaps
consist in the way humor too easily becomes concerned with itself, that humor in
the form of irony is doomed to circle around a nothingness, which evokes the