Is there humor in the Bible?

[lance_strongarm]

@PSXer

why would a book written in Hebrew contain a pun in Sumerian

It kills in the Catskills!

But anyway, folks, don’t forget to tip your waiter.

[Nava]

@DrFidelius

If we are created in the image of a given deity, and we demonstrate a sense of humor, than the deity in question must also enjoy a good laugh every once in a while.

Thus pandas.

And platypuses. And koalas. And anteaters. And… But definitely platypuses.

[74westy]

@Surreal

Out of curiosity, do you also believe that the Quran contains jokes?

I don’t know enough about it to say but one friend of mine got a laugh out of Allah telling Mohammed that people should fast all the time and Mohammed dickering Him down to one month.

[John_Bredin]

@Surreal

The notion that something that was perceived as a sacred text would contain jokes is just absurd. It’s amazing what people can read into things.

I don’t think it’s “reading in things” to see humor in (paraphrasing) “maybe your ‘god’ isn’t answering because he’s napping or on a trip” or “you complained about lack of food, now you will eat so much it’ll come out your nose.”

[Senegoid]

The thing is, we can see jokes between the lines, but one wonder if the original writers, in their time, saw anything funny about it. The overall impressions one gets from the Bible (especially the Old Testament) is that they were deathly serious about everything, especially about appeasing the sensitivities of a jealous and wrathful Ceiling Cat who would smite you dead for as trivial a transgression as spilling your seed on the ground. Especially here on the SDMB, populated as we are by a cohort who mostly don’t take that stuff all too seriously, I wonder if we correctly understand how seriously seriously serious they took all that stuff in the Bad Old Days.

Is humor, after all, a relatively modern invention?

[dracoi]

@Senegoid

The thing is, we can see jokes between the lines, but one wonder if the original writers, in their time, saw anything funny about it. The overall impressions one gets from the Bible (especially the Old Testament) is that they were deathly serious about everything, especially about appeasing the sensitivities of a jealous and wrathful Ceiling Cat who would smite you dead for as trivial a transgression as spilling your seed on the ground. Especially here on the SDMB, populated as we are by a cohort who mostly don’t take that stuff all too seriously, I wonder if we correctly understand how seriously seriously serious they took all that stuff in the Bad Old Days.

Is humor, after all, a relatively modern invention?

We know that humor is not just modern and neither is the type of humor, by and large: the oldest joke known to man is a fart joke. “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial - a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.” If you did it in an Adam Sandler movie instead of a cuneiform tablet, it’d play just fine to a 21st-Century audience.

The problem with Biblical jokes is that we’ve largely lost the cultural context, we’re reading translations and furthermore, the translators are serious scholarly types who are probably inclined to play down any humor they do find.

[Thudlow_Boink]

@Senegoid

The overall impressions one gets from the Bible (especially the Old Testament) is that they were deathly serious about everything

That’s not the impression I get. Are you sure you’re not reading that into the text?

especially about appeasing the sensitivities of a jealous and wrathful Ceiling Cat who would smite you dead for as trivial a transgression as spilling your seed on the ground.

It sounds like you’re missing the point of that particular incident, which makes it easy for me to believe that you could be missing the context, the point, and the humor of a lot of what’s in the Bible.

Is humor, after all, a relatively modern invention?

It would be very odd if it were.

[Captain_Amazing]

I can’t speak to the bible itself, but humor isn’t a modern invention. We have examples of ancient Greek and Roman humor, ancient Egyptian humor, ancient Chinese humor, ancient Sumerian and Babylonian humor. Here’s a third century Chinese joke from The Book of Shu in The Records of the Three Kingdoms.

There was a drought in Yi and so a law was passed prohibiting brewing alcoholic drinks (to save water). Overzealous officials seized brewing equipment and punished the owners the same way they punished people caught brewing. One day Jian Yong and Liu Bei were inspecting the land, and they saw a man and woman walk past. Jian Yong said “That couple is planning on committing an indecent act. You should arrest them.” Liu Bei asked “How do you know?”, and Jian Yong answered, “They have the tools to do so, just like the owners of brewing equipment have the tools to brew drinks.”. Hearing that, Liu Bei laughed and pardoned the owners of brewing equipment.

[Chronos]

It’s hard to see the humor in the Bible because it was written in a different language, and humor often doesn’t translate well. Especially puns, which were one of the Bible writers’ favorite kinds of jokes.

[Skald_the_Rhymer]

@NDP

FTFM

What does that abbreviation mean?

[Dr.Strangelove]

@Thudlow_Boink

It sounds like you’re missing the point of that particular incident

The column says that the passage was being reinterpreted as early as 100 BC due to the decline of levirate marriage. If Senegoid’s interpretation is wrong, then so is around two millennia of religious tradition.

[robert_columbia]

@Chronos

It’s hard to see the humor in the Bible because it was written in a different language, and humor often doesn’t translate well. Especially puns, which were one of the Bible writers’ favorite kinds of jokes.

Puns are for children, not groan readers.

[Fubaya]

@Senegoid

The thing is, we can see jokes between the lines, but one wonder if the original writers, in their time, saw anything funny about it.

I’m wondering the same thing from a different perspective. I know ancient people were funny but I don’t find much humor in the examples posted now. Were they originally meant to be humorous or are we just seeing them as humorous because they’re more informal than we expect from the Bible?

[yellowjacketcoder]

@Skald_the_Rhymer

What does that abbreviation mean?

Not the person that wrote it, but given the context I believe it is “Fixed That For Myself”

[Senegoid]

@yellowjacketcoder

Not the person that wrote it, but given the context I believe it is “Fixed That For Myself”

FTFY means Fixed That For You, so for parallel grammar I took FTFM to mean “Fixed That For Me”.

[MacLir]

@Mk_VII

Arguably when Christ calls Peter ‘the rock on which I will build my church’ he makes a pun on petros [rock]

I have heard a theory that the naming of Simon as Cephas/Peter was chronologically inverted in the Scriptures; he got the nickname in the middle of the Sea of Galilee … :dubious:

[bowlweevils]

@Fubaya

I’m wondering the same thing from a different perspective. I know ancient people were funny but I don’t find much humor in the examples posted now. Were they originally meant to be humorous or are we just seeing them as humorous because they’re more informal than we expect from the Bible?

We might as well go with the entire signal detection theory spectrum.

There would be passages intended as jokes that we think are jokes (true positives)
Passages not intended as jokes that we think are jokes (false positives)
Passages not intended as jokes that we do not think are jokes (true negatives)
Passages not intended as jokes that we think are jokes (false negatives)

We can be certain that most of the content of the bible is going to be non-humorous, and we will probably agree that it is not funny. But what is humorous or not changes with time and circumstances, so we’re going to have some difficulties with the other categories, as well as determining the full set of true negatives. Especially when we consider the Sumerian puns that lay under 3-4 sets of translations.

But since we are dealing with humor, which does change with circumstances and time, we have to consider additional categories.

We would have your example, things that were intended to be funny at the time, but aren’t so funny now. Perhaps like having 42 bears kill some people for calling you a dickhead because you’re friends with god. As far as I’m concerned, that proves they were right.

We’d also have a wide assortment of things that were not considered to be jokes at the time but are now. These possibilities are magnified by the many translations of the bible, with many more manners of phrasing things in ways that the translator didn’t intend to be funny but that we find rather ridiculous.

But the best example of this would probably be our willingness to compare god to vengeful ceiling cat without fear of death by stoning. Not that kind of stoning.

[Ignotus]

Passages not intended as jokes that we think are jokes

Probably belonging to this category, but one I find hilarious, is the story of Jesus cursing the fig tree:
“Whaddaya mean, ‘wrong season’? Tell you what, tree: when I want fruit I don’t frickin’ care about your ‘seasons’! Take that, you gynodioecious, inflorescent eudicotyledon! (ZAP!) Yeah, that’s right! Nobody fucks with Jesus!”

[user_hostile]

@NDP

For the record, the “kids” in that episode were little children but a gang of snotty teenagers trying to goad him into losing his temper. In addition, it’s implied that the “bald-head” insult wasn’t just meant to make fun of his follically-challenged cranium but also suggest it looked like a circumcised part of the male anatomy (i.e., they were calling him a dickhead).

I’m cutting Elisha some slack here. Snotty teenagers are a dime-a-dozen and what male on this board wasn’t a smart-ass in his teen years?

But look at the context: If you were walking alone and had 42+ teen boys appear calling you a dickhead–who wouldn’t feel scared for their lives?

Frothing with testosterone, the boys in the hood were looking to pick on someone who was extremely vulnerable and couldn’t fight back. With those kind of numbers, you’re talking about a mob mentality that could easily turn into bloodlust.

The passage states the bears “mauled” the kids, which suggests to me they actually survived (otherwise, wouldn’t they use the phrase “mauled to death”? I don’t know. Others can correct me on the meaning of this phrase).

My interpretation is that it’s a dark, comedic Grimm’s kind of fairy tale of YHWH’s “tough love” policy with rebellious teens.

[Horatio_Hellpop]

Google the phrase “any that pisseth against the wall.” It turns up a few times in the KJV.