In C.S. Lewis’ classic The Screwtape Letters, there are many chapters filled with wit and wisdom. One of my favorite of those is the chapter on humor. Discussing a sense of humor is tricky to do – like explaining a joke, if you have to talk about what makes something funny, you’ve probably missed the point. But I find Lewis’ description in the following passage very insightful.
If you aren’t familiar with The Screwtape Letters, the conceit of the book is that it is advice from an old demon to a young demon on how best to tempt humans. It’s also one of my favorite books. Lewis hilariously re-imagines the epic rebellion of the fallen angels in Paradise Lost devolved into a sort of demonic religious bureaucracy, with under-secretaries, handbooks, and such. It’s important to remember then, when you read “The Enemy” it’s a reference to God, “our Father” is a reference to the devil, and “the patient” is the person being tempted.
“I divide the causes of human laughter into Joy, Fun, the Joke Proper, and Flippancy. You will see the first among friends and lovers reunited on the eve of a holiday. Among adults some pretext in the way of Jokes in usually provided, but the facility with which the smallest witticisms produce laughter at such a time shows that they are not the real cause. What that real cause is we do not know. Something like it is expressed in much of that detestable art which the humans call Music, and something like it occurs in Heaven – a meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience, quite opaque to us. Laughter of this kind does us no good and should always be discouraged. Besides, the phenomenon is of itself disgusting and a direct insult to the realism, dignity, and austerity of Hell.
Fun is closely related to Joy – a sort of emotional froth arising from the play instinct. It is very little use to us. It can sometimes be used, of course, to divert humans from something else which the Enemy would like them to be feeling or doing: but in itself it has wholly undesirable tendencies; it promotes charity, courage, contentment, and many other evils.
The Joke Proper, which turns on a sudden perception of incongruity, is a much more promising field. I am not thinking primarily of indecent or bawdy humor, which, though much relied upon by second-rate tempters, is often disappointing in its results. The truth is that humans are pretty clearly divided on this matter into two classes. There are some to whom “no passion is as serious as lust” and for whom an indecent story ceases to produce lasciviousness precisely in so far as it becomes funny: there are others in whom laughter and lust are excited at the same moment and by the same thing. The first sort joke about sex because it gives rise to many incongruities: the second cultivate incongruities because they afford a pretext for talking about sex. Find out which group the patient belongs to – and see that he does not find out.
The real use of Jokes or Humor is in quite a different direction, and it is especially promising among the English who take their “sense of humor” so seriously that a deficiency in this sense is almost the only deficiency at which they feel shame. [In my experience, you can substitute “The American teenage or college age male” in for “the English” and get the same truth] Humor is for them the all-consoling and (mark this) the all-excusing, grace of life. Hence it is invaluable as a means of destroying shame. If a man simply lets others pay for him, he is “cheap;” if he boasts of it in a jocular manner and needles his fellows about getting one over on them, he is no longer “cheap” but a comical fellow. Mere cowardice is shameful; cowardice boasted of with humorous exaggerations and grotesque gestures can be passed off as funny. 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.
But Flippancy is the best of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it. If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armor-plating against the Enemy that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter. It is a thousand miles away from Joy: it deadens, instead of sharpening the intellect; and it incites no affection between those who practice it.”
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