Here it is:
And here are a couple more old threads on the topic:
That verse is misunderstood and not well translated-The Misunderstood Story of Bear Attacks, a Bald Prophet, and Forty-Two Mouthy “Kids”
Pretty much all of that is wrong. This occurred in the OT, many hundreds of years before Christ. Next, it wasn’t rain, it was fire. Finally, they slew the Prophets of Baal, not just some regular heathens.
That is the right one.
Not a joke. It’s to connect the messiah-hood of JC with royalty in the Hebrew Bible:
Zechariah 9:9
Behold, your king comes to you, triumphant and victorious. He is humble and riding on an ass
Kings 1:33
And the king said to them, “Take with you the servants of your lord and have Solomon my son ride on my own mule , and bring him down to Gihon.
2 Samuel 16:2
The king asked Ziba, “Why have you brought these?” Ziba answered, “The donkeys are for the king’s household to ride on, the bread and fruit are for the men to eat, and the wine is to refresh those who become exhausted in the wilderness.”
Genesis 22:3
And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass , and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him.
‘Bringing the rain’ is a common metaphorical statement. And the Prophets of Baal were heathens. Also, it’s been about 20 years since I taught that class. And I acknowledged that I was talking about the Baal story right above your post.
Jesus Christ Superstar – King Herod’s Song.
Already noted. 
How old were these children, and what denomination was the church?
I find Ezekiel 23:20 to be one of those verses that has me thinking, “What is THAT doing in there?” (NSFW)
That wasn’t done as a joke, it was done to squeeze in a prophetic reference.
Baptist Church. The kids were all under grade 6.
This is my personal favorite joke from the Bible, from Numbers 11:
“Tell the people: ‘Consecrate yourselves in preparation for tomorrow, when you will eat meat. The Lord heard you when you wailed, “If only we had meat to eat! We were better off in Egypt!” Now the Lord will give you meat, and you will eat it. You will not eat it for just one day, or two days, or five, ten or twenty days, but for a whole month— until it comes out of your nostrils and you loathe it—because you have rejected the Lord, who is among you, and have wailed before him, saying, “Why did we ever leave Egypt?”’”
Dorothy L. Sayers wrote an essay called “Divine Comedy”, published in (among other volumes) Unpopular Opinions. She gives quite a few practical examples in her radio-play cycle, The Man Born To Be King. I would ask you, do you really believe that, “Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel,” was not meant to be funny? Does it make any sense at all to believe that Jesus was a bore?
That’s funnier than most people realize.
Here’s me in a Bible humor thread quoting from a Martin Gardner Dr. Matrix column.
The Method and Message of Jesus’ Teachings by Robert H. Stein mentions this and additional points.
- There was a group of Pharisees who did strain their wine through cloth to filter out gnats (so the book claims).
- A gnat and a camel are both ritually impure (trayf) and prohibited.
Humor based on the Bible:
Peter Cook and Dudley Moore: Gospel Truth
Another thread: Has any religious figure ever told a Joke?
When Christ calls Peter ‘the rock on which I shall build my Church’, he makes a pun on petros [rock].
It works in Greek, which was the original language of the New Testament books. Might not work in Aramaic.
There is the prank Jacob’s sons Simeon and Levi played on some Canaanites…
That’s not a pun, because it’s a single meaning. He’s literally saying “I’m going to call you Rocky, because you’re a rock”. The dude’s original name was Simon; the name Peter didn’t exist until Jesus gave it to him as a nickname.
But yeah, there are a lot of puns in the Bible. A lot of the names, too: Whenever the Bible says something like “And she named her son _____, because _____”, the given name has its own (relevant) meaning, and the “because” is some other, also relevant, word that sounds very similar.
Humor is difficult to translate from one language to another. Trust me, I am no biblical scholar, but I seem to remember that it was originally written in Hebrew and Greek, then to English for us English speakers. So if there was any humor in it, which my gut says no to, it may have been lost in the translations.
I once had two different translations of Voltaire’s story Candide that were translated into English by two different people. The differences were quite large when you opened them up to the same pages and compared them side by side.
10 plagues was the first punk’d on the Egyptians.
Two Philistines walk into a bar…