Defining humour is very difficult or impossible. 1 So, a fortiori, defining “black humour” must be doubly impossible. Even delineating the boundaries of “black humour” is difficult. The coiner of the phrase, the surrealist André Breton,2 evidently saw it as anarchist and in a sense negative, pointing out the absurd and pretentious, but not offering any [...]
Browsing Posts in Humour
On Facebook yesterday I was prompted to reflect on the oddities that our herd mentality imposes on humans. We often signal words that name these “herds” linguistically (rightly or wrongly)1 by giving nouns that name human herds capital letters. Thus I am catholic but not Catholic in my tastes.2 Capitalisation to indicate herd membership is [...]
The Southern Baptist Convention is apparently considering a name change. Jim West is upset (about this, as he is about so many other things). He’s thinking himself that he’d “like to follow suit and consider a name-change for myself “. I have a great suggestion: How about changing your name to “Southern Baptist Convention” the [...]
OT scholars are way cooler than NT scholars. Maybe funnier, too. (David Ker in a comment on my podcast Humour in the Bible: 21B: Ecclesiastes (again)) All I should say is: you might possibly think that, I couldn’t possibly comment! But I will offer a challenge to those Old Testament scholars (and would-be scholars) applying [...]
Humour and hurtfulness often go hand in hand. Comedians can hardly be squeamish about offending. Indeed one of the liberating possibilities humour opens for us is to make fun of the powerful. But often in everyday life the people humorists make fun of are not powerful, still less powerful and oppressive. Rather they are often [...]
In my series on humour in the Bible I have not considered moving into the “foreign” territory of the New Testament. But I could not resist this one… Randall Rauser in his always provocative way has been considering how “Paul”1 makes use of a racial stereotype in Titus 1:12-13. In On slurring Cretans and Indians [...]
Well, till I had time for research, in between assignment marking, I thought David Ker had solved my problem with Ezra. (No, not my problem with Ezra the character’s treatment of foreign wives, my problem finding humour in the book.) David’s suggestion was this: This is an easy one. In fact our family was just [...]
No, this post has nothing whatever to do with that Camp director guy. But it seems unfair, that having (with the help of my friends, especially Tyler) successfully found humour in such unlikely spots as Leviticus and Chronicles the next book on the list is Ezra. If you thought Leviticus was dull, read Chronicles! And, [...]
Both I (as part of strengthening the academic grunt of my humour in each book of the Bible project) and a Postgraduate student, planning an essay on “The significance of humour and irony in Biblical narrative for (cross cultural mission) teaching and preaching” would really appreciate any suggestions you may have for reading on humour [...]
I have just put two simple “facts” together. If both are correct then 97.5% of the readers of this blog are in for a severe disappointment. The first “fact” is the claim by some interpreters (notably the Jehovah’s Witnesses) that there are, according to Rev 14:1ff., only 144,000 places in heaven. The second “fact” is [...]
