Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Charlotte County
"What's So Funny?"
Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore May 3, 1998



Opening Words

Unitarian Universalists believe we have religious spirit or divinity and religious answers already inside us and all we need is a loving religious community to help us find those answers. Grounded in the Christian and Jewish traditions, the world's scriptures and philosophies are our guidance and inspiration to help us realize our own religious potential, in this world, following our own spiritual path. We want this freedom not just for ourselves but for everybody in the whole world to be able to grow religiously as their hearts move them.

Why don't you come this Sunday and see how we do it! Here's my card and be sure to check out my web site!

Spoken and Silent Meditation

Let us turn inward now
To search the depths of our being,
To listen within to the subtle movements of our minds,
To feel the passions of our hearts,
To awaken the inner life which reaches beyond the self.

Let us call forth this morning the muse,
The inner imp who sees the humor in life
and fears not the mysteries which at times overshadow us.
The salacious sage ready to snicker
at the ridiculous ways we pretend and posture.
The comic clown who inspires
a joke, a funny face, a silly pose, a cheerful smile.
We all have our pocket full of troubles,
warn thin and full of holes for our constant worrying.
We all have misfortunes behind us and ahead of us
which will bring even more misery into our lives.
Each of us lives under the sentence of death which we cannot escape.
To the sober minded, life is a tragedy...
But to the muse, it is nothing but comedy.
The line between them can be ever so slender.
Let us make friends this moring with our muse and let the laughter come.
Humor is the greatest healer
for the muse touches a part of us that knows
a reality greater than death.
This morning, may the muse lift us up,
lift our burdens and cares
and renew our spirit.

A UU Comedy Routine "Sam the Man" Trumbore

Glad to be here this morning and I thought I'd warm up with some old standard jokes about UUism:

Why are UU congregations so disjoint at hymn singing? Because they are always reading a few lines ahead to see if they agree with the words.

What do you get when you cross a UU with a Jehovah's Witness? Someone who knocks on your door for no apparent reason. Or better, someone who knocks on your door and asks you what you believe.

What do you get when you cross a UU with a Muslim? Someone who kneels to pray five times a day to whom it may concern in the direction of Boston.

What do you get when you cross a UU with a Pentacostal? Someone who gets up during the service on Sunday morning, waves his hands in the air and shouts, "Thank you Darwin!"

We get accused of being "church light;" and we don't ask for much from our members. I didn't know how our critics got this idea until the other day when I heard about one UU Fellowship which reduced the worship service to 35 minutes and trimmed the sermon down to only 7 minutes. The ad I saw for the sermon said the speaker would be lecturing on the parable of the feeding of the 500 and the downsizing of the ten commandments to 6, making them multiple choice.

I know sometimes visitors are apprehensive coming to a church like ours where they don't know what to expect. I heard about a young boy who came for the first time with his family to one of our larger churches and was looking at everything including all the pictures on the walls. There were a group of pictures of men in military uniforms. The boy asked, "Who are those people?" A kindly minister responded, "Those are men of whom we are very proud. They died in the service." The boy's eyes opened wide, and he began to tremble as he asked, "Was it the 9:00 or the 11:00 one?"

While many know right away after their first visit they have always been Unitarian Universalists without knowing it, others sometimes need some help figuring this out. To help these people out, let me suggest some ways you might know you're a Unitarian Universalist:

  1. If you are unsure about the gender of God.
  2. If you own six pairs of Birkenstocks and your favorite pair needs to be thrown away.
  3. If the money you sent to the Sierra Club last year was more than you spent on your mother at Christmas.
  4. If you think the Holy Trinity is "reduce, reuse and recycle."
  5. If you study the "ten suggestions" instead of the "Ten Commandments."
  6. Or possibly this one: if the only time the word "Jesus" crosses your lips is when you trip and stub your toe;

One of the questions we get asked is just how many gods are there?

Polytheist: "Many"
Monotheist: "One"
Atheist: "Zero"
Agnostic: "Don't know"

Unitarian: "Any number except three. Well... maybe, but which three?"

Given we have so much individual freedom in our movement, its tough being a Unitarian Universalist minister. Non UU's have all these expectations of us for which we really don't have stock responses. One of the most dreaded questions we all have is being asked to explain what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist since we are also trying to figure out what that means too. Since we don't have any doctrine, you've got to look to the members to understand who we are. The problem of course is we don't agree on some of the fundamental problems of existence. Our members may or may not believe in the Bible. Our members may or may not believe in God. Our members may or may not believe in life after death. And while most of us hope for heaven if we are wrong about life after death, a few are more than happy to send those we dislike to hell.

This struggle of faith and belief often comes up around the traditional sacraments. It's been said that there are only four UU sacraments Child Dedication, Marriage, Memorial Service, and the last, Argument."

What does it mean to be baptized, married or confirmed in our faith? What do others expect of us? Confirmation for us is getting your driver's license or first university diploma. If someone comes to us for confession, we don't usually give them any Hail Marys or Our Fathers to do but are more likely than not to give them a book recommendation. Our communion isn't wine and wafer but rather coffee and cookies.

There was a Unitarian Universalist minister who was asked to baptize a child for a family. The minister explained that we don't do baptism but we do do child dedications to dedicate the parents and the child to each other and to nurture of the child and its religious development. The grandmother of the family who was Catholic complained, "I don't care what you call it or what you say, make sure you use holy water to bless the child." Unitarian Universalists don't use holy water since we think all water is holy. Life could not exist without it! Anxious to please the grandmother, this minister promised he'd be sure to use holy water.

The next day, the minister fretted about what to do. He could just use some tap water but perhaps the Catholic grandmother would know he had cheated somehow. So the next day he went to see the local Catholic priest and asked him for some holy water. The priest was incensed that a Catholic descendant was going to be baptized by a Unitarian Universalist minister but relented and went out of the room and brought back a small plastic bottle with water in it. "Keep the lid sealed before you use it so the holiness doesn't leak out!" cautioned the priest. The minister was very grateful and thanked him.

The next week the child dedication was performed. Right before the service the Grandmother asked the minister suspiciously, "You've got the holy water don't you?" The minister said confidently he had the genuine article. In the middle of the service he surreptitiously opened the plastic bottle and poured the water into a glass bowl right before he needed to use it so the maximum amount of holiness would still be in the water. But there was something odd about this water. It smelled really bad and it had a pale yellow color. The grandmother was horrified and asked the minister what was going on. Unmasked, the minister explained that he'd gotten the water from the local priest. "I just don't understand this," said the minister, "The priest said this holy water, made especially for my use, had passed completely through his holy presence."

A couple comes to a UU minister and asks if he will perform their wedding. They have already been to several other clergy who refused them. The minister is curious and asks the reason. The bride to be says, "First of all, I'm Jewish and he is Catholic. "That doesn't bother us at all--in fact we are a great religious home for interfaith couples." Says the Unitarian Universalist minister. The groom to be says, "That isn't the end of it. I'm not a virgin and neither is she." "Who would get married today if that were a requirement? Not a problem." Said the minister. "And we've already consummated our relationship." whispered the bride. "Still no problem." Said the minister. "The other ministers said our marriage could never work because I'm a Republican and she is a Democrat." Said the groom. "That's getting more serious, I agree, but that wouldn't stop me from doing the wedding." Said the minister. "He's a Libra and I'm an Aries." "Now we're getting into serious relationship issues but I'd still do it. I would not want to interfere with your personal freedom to decide for yourself who to marry." Said the minister.

The couple was very pleased and the minister began to discuss with them their wedding plans. Their meeting was at an end and the groom said, "Oh by the way, one last thing, our wedding is being catered by McDonalds." "Sorry! Now I know why I can't do your wedding." Said the minister. "I can't do a wedding where red meat possibly raised in a deforested region such as Brazil will be served."

We Unitarian Universalist ministers have a particularly difficult job in the hospital setting where we are asked to fulfill the roles and expectations of a Christian minister or priest on a pastoral call. I remember it wasn't easy for me to figure out what to do when a patient asked me to pray with them for example. There was an interesting case that came up where a patient was very close to death before the nurses recognized the situation and summoned the chaplain. The only chaplain on duty was an inexperienced Unitarian Universalist minister. Usually in these situations, the local Catholic priest gets called but there wasn't time so the nurse persuaded the minister to come up and give the fellow his last rites.

When the minister entered the room he sat next to the patient who was gasping for breath and agitated. "Please give me my last rites quickly, I think I'm dying." He said. The minister wasn't quite sure how to start the last rites but remembered that confession proceeded forgiveness in the ritual of the mass. "I'll be happy to do it after I hear your confession." Said the minister trying to appear priestly. The man between gasps confessed a litany of sins a yard long. He had raped, murdered, cheated, stolen and committed just about every sin imaginable multiple times. When he finished, he pleaded again, "I know I'm slipping away. Save me from eternal damnation. Give me my last rights now!" The minister, speechless for a moment, searched for something to say or do. Then a light bulb went off in his head and he said "You've led a miserable life and by all accounts should be going to hell. But I've got the ticket to heaven for you. When you get to the pearly gates and St Peter asks you to account for your sins, tell him you have the right to remain silent and plead the 5th."

I'd better stop before you read me my last rites. Thanks and you've been a great audience.

Sermon

(This may be one of those 7 minute sermons I mentioned earlier)

I don't know if you've noticed it but for the last couple of months, I've been spicing up my sermons with some more humor than I usually use. I bought a clean joke computer archive with thousands of well indexed jokes. Since then I've been slipping a one or two in each sermon.

I'm not sure if this was a coincidence or not but people have been commenting to me that my preaching has been improving. Being the analytical type of person that I am, I concluded that adding humor to my sermons was a smart move. Do you agree? I thought so. I figure if you don't like the rest of the sermon, you'll at least take home a good joke to tell your friends.

The problem with using jokes in sermons though is finding good ones. The gems are buried in a lot of dirty jokes. I have access to huge Internet joke archives which, for the most part, have some great jokes but often are offensive enough to eliminate them from use on Sunday morning. Given that finding good jokes can be a difficult task, and realizing that I'm a pretty funny guy already, I decided the best course of action was to become my own joke writer. I ordered several books on comedy writing and began researching just what is funny and how to produce it.

Unfortunately, these books had lots of their own jokes and technical advice about how to make money in the comedy business but made no attempt to explain what makes a joke funny. I was dissatisfied with this low brow approach to comedy writing so I decided to take advantage of my presence in Gainesville for the Florida District Annual Assembly to do some research at the University of Florida Library. What a joy to search the stacks of a major University! I've decided I need to make quarterly trips up to there to smell the old books, sit between the stacks and expand my mind.

Let me say first, that those first comedy books I ordered had some truth in them. Coming up with a single unified joke theory is quite difficult. Humor comes in many forms some written, some spoken, some visual, some auditory, and some in other ways. It is hard to group falling on a banana peel with a pun or a funny imitation of the release of intestinal gas from the body. Babies laugh when we play peek-a-boo with them and throw them up in the air. Nitrous Oxide and marihuana can cause spontaneous laughter, not that I have any personal experience of this but so people tell me. The humorous waterfront is extensive and varied.

I narrowed my focus for understanding humor to the kind of humor I might use in a sermon. This is a specialized area of humor because it excludes use sexual imagery, vulgar language, and sexist, racist or offensive references. This is what makes finding good sermon jokes so difficult since most humor falls into this category. One of the theories I read about humor by Leonard Feinberg[1] claimed that all humor has an aggressive dimension to it. Dr. Martin Grotjahn states "Laughter is based on a sudden release of hostility in a well disguised form." Gershon Legman opines, "Under the mask of humor, our society allows infinite aggression, by everyone against everyone."

Much of the kidding, teasing, practical joking, that goes on in the name of humor is indeed of this type. Many forms of humor such as insults, irony, ridicule, sarcasm, satire, burlesque, caricature, exposure, vulgar, imitation, impersonation, mimicry, parody, and slapstick all have strong aggressive components to them[2]. Feinburg looking around the world at the common denominators of humor concluded:

At the lowest level, humor seems to be the same in all cultures--laughter at physical deformity, at mental deficiency, at social ignorance and at victims of embarrassing situations.[3]

This is what Roy Eckardt calls, low humor[4]. The pleasure the listener gets out of it comes partly from generating a feeling of superiority. Low laughter exposes the hypocrisy of the other and elevates the self. It does not expose the listeners but rather separates and cloaks them. This is the kind of humor I laugh at and regret doing so for it reinforces my stereotypes and negative attitudes toward others. It isn't very useful or appropriate on Sunday morning.

The kind of humor best used on Sunday morning is another classification of humor Eckardt calls high humor. High humor doesn't laugh at people but rather laughs with them. It opens people to sympathy and goodwill, brings people together and emphasizes shared experience.

The contrast between the two types can be seen in one of the jokes "Sam the Man" did on crossing a Jehovah's Witness with a Unitarian Universalist. The first joke about knocking on someone's door for no apparent reason has a demeaning flavor to it suggesting that we don't know what we believe and cannot communicate it to others. The second one where the person knocks on the door and asks what do you believe has the humorous twist on what the Jehovah's Witnesses do yet expands us by showing we care about honoring individual belief rather than converting people to our way of thinking. In the joke about the little boy's misunderstanding of the word service, we recognize the universal apprehension of being in a new and strange place. The last rites joke engages us through identification with the minister rather than his objectification and ridicule. It is the universal comedy of wanting to be helpful yet stumbling over misunderstanding.

The skillful use of high humor allows us to laugh at ourselves and our institutions which also opens us to see both our strengths and weaknesses and engender compassion for the satirized characters. Garrison Keillor's "News from Lake Wobegon" is a masterful study in this form of humor and one of the reasons for its enduring popularity. Conrad Hyers suggests that this form of what he calls "laughter of paradise" is "a playful return to a past innocence and unity."

And there is yet another form of humor which has embedded within it a nugget of truth which can produce insight and new understanding in the listener. Sometimes this humor has an aggressive edge to it and other times it does not. The effect is to do just what preachers do every Sunday: reveal the truth about reality. As Carl Reiner put it, "The funniest joke of all is the absolute truth stated simply and gracefully."

Perhaps we are best served by the uplifting dimension of a good laugh which prevents us from taking the impermanence of the world too seriously. In Eckhardt's words:

Laughter is also a gentle block against idolatry, the ultimate sin. For to laugh at our many idols is to be helped in the quest to journey beyond idolatry. The rutted road of laughter is strewn with demolished Gods.[5]

There is one particular guru out in California I like who has written some very wise books. He sees human beings evolving during our lifetimes through seven stages of awakening. The final stage he calls "crazy wisdom". This stage is well symbolized by the laughing childlike pot bellied Chinese Buddha image playing with children. Their humor is innocent yet penetrates duplicity, deceit and equivocation to the marrow. They see things as they are and the endless humorous posturing of human beings pretending who think they know what is going on. Rather than seeing the suffering of existence as an endless tragedy, these enlightened ones know something about existence, and about liberation from our individual singularity of time and space, that relieves the tension and causes the release of laughter. This laughter Hyers calls "laughter of paradise regained" which Eckhardt interprets

Humor moves from playful innocence through truth and justice to humility and compassion... generated by an inner harmony, a profound sense of security[6]. It presupposes faith in some sacred order or depth-dimension of being, some common basis of worth and dignity, at the same time that it represents a persistent unwillingness to dogmatize its understanding of that faith and worth. The element of judgment in humor passes over into mercy and love[7].

That, I submit, is one of the better faith statements I've ever read about the core of Unitarian Universalism. At our core is not some profound theological statement or belief but rather a wordless knowing that inspires a warming smile at the cosmic joke of existence.

I'm not so sure I had to do all this research to discover what seems obvious now about a great joke. Still, the analysis has clarified my thinking about humor and how to construct better original humor for my sermons. I have a lot more to say about humor but I'm going to have to end my remarks here. While I can't promise a great joke every sermon, I hope we are all better aware by today's sermonic excursion of the liberating influence of humor in the religious sphere.

CLOSING WORDS

I close with these words by Conrad Hyers:

It does not matter whether the comic victory is ever achieved in the real world, whether good finally conquers evil, or justice everlastingly prevails over ruthless power, or the meek at last and invincibly inherit the earth. Such is the peculiar mythological requirement of linear views of history which can only justify time and history , flesh and blood, as that which leads to perpetual progress or some final bliss. In the fantasy of comedy, the human dream has already been achieved, and is achieved in every comic ritual--symbolically. But it is not achieved in such a way as to freeze life and its ongoing dreams. It permits the game to be played again and again. Its mission is not to annul history or conquer death or obviate suffering but to renew and celebrate life.[8]

Go in peace, make peace, be at peace, and have a good laugh along the way.

Copyright (c) 1998 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore. All rights reserved.



[1] Feinberg, Leonard, The Secret of Humor, (c) 1978 Rodopi: N.V. Amsterdam, ISBN 90-6203-370-9
[2] Berger, Arthur Asa, An Anatomy of Humor, (c) 1993 by Transaction Publishers, NJ, 08903, ISBN 1-56000-086-4, p. 18, Berger does an interesting classification of the categories and techniques of humor in this book.
[3] Feinberg, p. 24.
[4] Eckardt, A. Roy, Sitting in the Earth and Laughing: a handbook of humor, (c) 1992, Transactions Publishers, New Brunswick, NJ 08903, ISBN 1-56000-001-5, pp 22-23
[5] Eckardt, p. 206
[6] Eckardt, p. 24
[7] Eckardt, p. 24
[8] Hyers, Conrad, Comic Vision, pp. 163 as referenced by Eckardt on page 187.