‘I divide the causes into human laugher into Joy, Fun, the Joke Proper, and Flippancy. You will see the first among friends and lover reunited on the eve of a holiday. Among adults some pretext in the way of jokes is usually provided, but hr facility with which the smallest witticisms produce laughter at such a time shows that they are not the real cause…the phenomenon is of itself disgusting and a direct insult to the realism, dignity, and austerity of Hell.”
So Joy is of little use. Fun too is difficult to utilize other than as diversion from more important things, Screwtape tells Wormwood. The third and fourth however are more promising. The Joke Proper is defined by Screwtape as a joke “which turns on sudden perception of incongruity.” The main area that Screwtape goes for with this type of comedy is the bawdy joke. Lewis argues that only if the joke incites the listener to lust and not only to humor is the joke helpful to Screwtape. This is an area which I think Lewis is skating too fine a line if he’s not plain wrong. Sexuality is of a nature that is so sacred and so private that I think it’s very difficult to imagine a situation in which jesting about sex does not in some way diminish the importance of the act itself. This diminishing can hurt our ability to respect and utilize it for the ends that God intended it (namely an expression of love). So while I’ll agree with Lewis that a joke about sex is far more serious if it incites lust, all sexual jokes run the risk of doing damage regardless of the feelings they incur.
Before discussing Flippancy, Lewis chooses to digress to talk about a dangerous aspect of humor. That is, its ability to justify the unjustifiable. Screwtape explains:
“(Humor) is an invaluable as a means of destroying shame. If a man simply lets others pay for him, he is ‘mean’; if he boasts of it in a jocular manner and twits his fellows with having been scored off, he is no longer ‘mean’ but a comical fellow…Cruelty is shameful-unless the cruel man can represent it as a practical joke. A thousand bawdy, or even blasphemous, jokes do not help towards a man’s damnation so much as his discovery that almost anything he wants to do can be done, not only without the disapproval but with the admiration of his fellows, if only it can get itself treated as a joke.”
It is important for us to recognize that harm done in jest is still harm and as such should be avoided. This part however has the extra danger of convincing ourselves that we are in fact doing no wrong. Being sinful and being unaware of its consequences is a two-edged sword with which we ought not to play.
Finally, Screwtape discusses Flippancy. The danger in Flippancy is quite simply an inability to take seriously what we need to take seriously. Flippancy promotes an idea that there is nothing grave and this is problematic when trying to deal with weighty matters of the soul. In these cases we need to be serious and to accept the horrifyingly real consequences of the decisions we make. If everything is a joke, if the demons are funny little men with pitchforks and the angels little women with shiny circles floating above our head, then how are we supposed to quiet ourselves to listen to good and to make firm difficult decisions, particularly about sacrificing ourselves. As Screwtape says, “If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armour-plating against the Enemy that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in other sources of laughter.”
So laugh. Laughter is good. But be careful about what you’re laughing about so that when the time to laugh passes you can cease laughing and start listening.
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