The joke’s on us: why comedy is not always a laughing matter

In this reflection for Lent and Ramadan, Toby Lees argues we need less cynicism and more contemplation.

It’s curious (or rather, providence) that this year the Christian season of Lent and the Muslim season of Ramadan coincide for a number of weeks, walking together for much of the month of March.

Without entering into heavy theology, and even less into the minefield of inter-religious theology, one basic thing we could say about both seasons is that they are about learning the value of self-denial. They teach us it is good for us to give something up (clearly food in the case of Ramadan, and food or something else in the case of Lent).

Giving up can open us to the value of what we renounce. It can also open us to others and their needs, and most importantly to a spiritual dimension. By controlling the body, our spirit can rise up to God.

But perhaps we need to add another dimension to our fasting. Not just giving up, all too often, alas, with a sense of gritted teeth (“I do this because I should, but I don’t like it”), but opening up, with a sense of wonder.

The beautiful thing about wonder is that it opens us up. Wonder in the face of what I have already received, in fact, makes me capable of receiving more.

As Jesus put it: “For to him who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away” (Mt 13:12).

Is this something we have lost in our consumerist, technological world, where nothing needs to be imagined or contemplated because everything can be purchased or viewed online (and even more so now, with the arrival of AI)? Where everything can be obtained, nothing is left to the imagination.

But curiously, we’re still not satisfied and this dissatisfaction, together with so many bad things happening in the world, leads us to the self-defence mechanism of cynicism. I won’t care so I won’t suffer.

Yet the travesty of cynicism is that nothing is recognised as gift and any further gift becomes impossible. There can only be what I was due and that gives rise to little joy.

In contrast, that sense of “I didn’t deserve this, any of it” gives rise to a sense of having being loved in a way that I could never have merited – and even the most reciprocal love has something of that thrill of being unmerited – and a deep joy that even vicious circumstances may not shake. Even in Gethsemane and the Passion there was love and delight of the Son for the Father.

David Foster Wallace, one of my favourite essayists and novelists and a philosopher by training, was a man who saw beneath the surface. He recognised that irony, cynicism, and satire had a place in entertainment and were especially necessary in times where high moral standards were being vaunted by hypocrites.

But he also saw that they were only ever tools of destruction, they could be used to critique and to tear down, but you could not build anything on the back of them.

He thought the rise of long-running ironic sitcoms was a symptom of a cultural malaise.

For him the 1989-1998 series Seinfeld was a prime example but more recent examples could easily be found.

Seinfeld was very funny, but none of the characters progress or grow in any way, they’re always the same. It’s only the circumstances that change – different disastrous date, different job – and even those not so much. There is no moral development, there is no marriage, no children.

Fundamentally they are depressing characters, even if funny, and Foster Wallace saw that the only way you could justify the waste of your time watching such characters (characters without real character in fact) was by feeling better than them. “Hey, I may be sitting at home night after night watching hours and hours of TV . . . but at least I’m not as tragic as Seinfeld!” 

Who was the joke really on? To gaze hour on hour at people you think you’re better than doesn’t make you a better person.

In more recent times we have the advent of Ali G and Philomena Cunk, highly intelligent people pretending to be stupid and seeking to make intelligent people make fools of themselves. It can be funny, but there’s no wonder, there’s no opening up of the self to the other. In fact, we all just become more guarded and wary of being a fool.

I don’t know about Islam but this is certainly the complete opposite of the Christian life. St Paul writes to the Corinthians, “We are fools for Christ’s sake, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honour, but we in disrepute” (I Cor 14:12).

The Christian life fully lived will always make you look foolish in the eyes of some, like charitable giving when you’re not exactly flush with money, and the world says you would be wise to save.

St Paul knows that living like Christ will open you up to mockery because that is exactly what they did to him.

But wouldn’t it be sadder if there is nothing in your life, nothing you loved enough, that you were prepared to be mocked for?

When it comes to fasting, Islam sees things in a very similar way to Christianity. The Quran teaches: “O ye who believe, fasting is prescribed for you as it was prescribed for those before you so ye may guard against evil”. The idea is that if we can control our more basic desires, we will be better equipped to guard against more evil ones.

Modern society mocks any sense of self-restraint for the sake of not sinning. Self-denial is only tolerated for dieting or vegan motives. So Christians and Muslims can stand together in their fasting to affirm the value of bodily loss for a spiritual gain. And surely the evil the Quran calls on us to guard against includes cynicism and losing one’s sense of wonder at the world.

On 27 January we marked Holocaust Remembrance Day, which made me think of the remarkable life and interior transformation of the Jewish young woman Etty Hillesum who experienced an ever more profound interior freedom even as the scourge of Nazism encroached upon her most basic freedoms under the law.

The developing sense of wonder that one sees over the course of Etty’s diaries are not that of woman putting her head in the sand in the face of what was happening. She knew all too well her likely end (which did in fact come about, in Auschwitz on 30 November 1943), but the wonder gave rise to an increasing sense of gift, which meant she could gift to us a diary entry like this:

“The sky is full of birds, the purple lupins stand up so regally and peacefully, two little old women have sat down on the box for a chat, the sun is shining on my face — and right before our eyes, mass murder. The whole thing is simply beyond comprehension.”

Radio has a capacity to generate wonder that no screen has. Reading even more so. 

Look at a child or adult absorbed on a phone or some other screen: they may be transfixed, but it’s a zombie-like state, it’s not human. 

Then watch them listening to Children’s Liturgy, to Florilegium, or a piece of music like Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrows. Watch them as they learn that the lyrics to the second movement were etched on to the wall of a Gestapo cell by a young Polish prisoner, who went on to be liberated by a group of guerrilla resistance fighters and would be married and raise five children in the city of St John Paul II’s birth.

These words. “No, Mother, do not weep,

Most chaste Queen of Heaven

Support me always.

“Zdrowas Mario” (the first line of the Hail Mary in Polish)

Do you want your loved ones to hear yet one more ironic gag from Jerry Seinfeld or to hear words like these? Which will give them more life, which will be the occasion of wonder?

This article is adapted from a reflection initially given on Radio Maria England, you can read the original talk here (scroll down to February 2025). It is republished in Adamah Media with the author’s permission.

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