Laugh or Not?

It’s blasphemy.

Having a sense of humor is a universal human trait, but so is shame. Thus, what we find funny may be highly influenced by culture, but it will always be moderated through our individual personality. Most of us fail to notice that human personality is contextual in itself, so that humor of the moment tends to vary. However, the last thing you want to do is try to squelch someone else’s sense of humor. It can be godly to help someone who falls under your dominion, to help people be more conscious about internal processes, but there is precious little you can do in shaping the outcomes without violating morality itself.

Go ahead and laugh. While it’s obvious Maher attempts to counteract a very ugly, intolerant social trend, his own choice is intolerant in a different sense. Quite literally, wars get started over much lesser concerns than that. That Maher feels a need to engage the issue shows we have a major cultural flaw, but the flaw lurks in the dialog itself. We can’t even call it feminism or Victorian sensibilities, but those influences are present in the problem. This video clip is one nanny scolding another. You can laugh at his presentation within the context, but if you actually belong to any part of this, that’s very sad.

The whole thing is an artifact of a dying, demonic and damned culture that just happens to rule over most of humanity right now. This thing has been pushed upon humanity with a bloodthirsty arrogance that is hard to grasp. The level of absorption varies across the globe, but it’s presence is undeniable. You cannot stand within this tradition and pretend to judge the results of it. You cannot pretend your particular version is the proper human default. Yet the jokes Maher uses themselves reflect that kind of arrogance.

And it’s okay, in that sense. The sin is not in finding this funny, but in belonging to the context itself. To follow Christ means withdrawing from this very worldly frame of reference, not arguing with it. This is highly contextual and culturally based humor. What makes us laugh is fundamentally contextual, because humor itself is nearly impossible to define. It’s a human response to a context. Step into that world just far enough to laugh, but realize it’s not your home. Don’t be confined by it.

Rather, try to understand how this video clip represents a very thin slice, a highly contextual manifestation of something much bigger. Those of us comfortable with being human, who are somewhat aware of our foibles and willing to live with it, are the ones most likely to have the freedom to laugh about some things in life, at least. It’s people who don’t laugh that are sick, twisted and perverted.

Within this broader expectation, we do find that most people who have the internal freedom to laugh will tend to exhibit a signature, a fairly consistent character to what they find funny. The one real immorality here is when people are offended at the expressed humor of another. Apparently that internal freedom is highly conditional in most of humanity, because the impulse to take offense at things others find funny, and in particular offense that they find it funny, reflects the internal mechanism of idolatry. It’s an attempt to demand control of things God placed under no human authority.

In that sense, taking offense at the laughter of another is blasphemy.