Humor is one of many pleasurable aspects of human life that the Bible does not oppose, yet there are situations or topics that might provoke a sense of discomfort when treated as a source of humor. Even dark humor is not sinful (1 John 3:4 and the realization that the Bible never condemns dark humor are all that is necessary to establish this) despite the intentional use of controversial or painful subject matter for comedic purposes. If someone tries to draw lines and assert that something on one side of a line cannot be legitimately joked about, they will be making an arbitrary leap based on personal or collective preference.
Why would murder be suitable for jokes but not racism, torture, or involuntary slavery? Some beliefs and actions are far worse than others, but any attempt to distinguish subjects that can be joked about without moral error and subjects that should not be joked about is inherently arbitrary and therefore inherently fallacious. However, this does not mean that there is never such a thing as an immoral way to joke about a topic or deed. The motive and audience are the two factors that determine if a given joke is morally legitimate or not. Unlike separating some subjects from others, these two factors are not arbitrary at all.
If an act truly is wrong, it is by necessity also wrong to reference it for the sake of humor if one does so out of a lack of concern for the actual nature of the act and its consequences. For example, someone who jokes about sexism or prison rape in an effort to make others regard them as trivial or morally defensible is guilty of an erroneous worldview and of apathy towards the men and women harmed by such things. Likewise, someone who simply jokes about murder is not sinning (although murder is far from the most malicious or harmful of actions), but someone who thinks murder to be something that should be philosophically dismissed is sinning.
As for the audience of a joke, it is not the feelings of an audience member that ultimately make some humor morally illegitimate, but, again, the moral apathy of the one telling the joke. There is nothing inherently wrong with joking about mental health issues with friends, for instance. No one can make a sound Biblical or non-Biblical argument against this. Nevertheless, if someone treated mental health issues like depression as trivial things even when they have been told that their friends are in deep, personal struggles with depression, their lack of concern for the issue would be problematic.
No Christian has to feel guilt over merely wanting to make a clever or well-timed joke about a sinful or destructive behavior. Left to itself, this is not sinful, and anyone who insists otherwise is actually the one in violation of Biblical commands, one of which literally condemns the prohibition of acts not condemned by the Bible (Deuteronomy 4:2 is relevant here, as it is in so many other cases). It is reducing sinful acts to nothing but potentially humorous jokes that is immoral, as ignoring a thing's true nature is not the same as using humor to lift someone's spirits or entertain them.
No comments:
Post a Comment