The Satirical Gist of the World’s Religions
God’s comedy and the theocrat’s tragedy

Religion is supposed to be taken seriously, which is to say that if you mock someone’s religion you’ve committed a faux pas. The strictest religions reserve dire punishments for those who take their God’s name in vain or who mock the prophets.
Yet a religion’s repudiation of humour is a political tactic that attests to its leaders’ lack of existential depth or spiritual mission. Humourlessness in a religion is a measure of that religion’s calcification and inauthenticity. The greater faux pas, then, is committed not by the satirist but by the religious leaders and followers who take themselves too seriously and their myths too literally.
There are at least two persistent sources of comedy in religion, the historical and the mystical. Historically, comedy crops up to the extent that the religion has failed to achieve its goals. The more a religion appears to have failed in historical terms, the more humorous its apocalyptic or absolute pronouncements will seem.
For example, if the pioneers of a religion were downtrodden or martyred and the religion keeps alive the memory of those initial failures in its scriptures and traditions, the religion will express the classic comedian’s perspective, occupying the outsider role and using comedy for catharsis, to subtly poke fun at the dominators. Losers in life may also pre-empt an attack on them by deprecating themselves, beating their oppressors to the punch or making themselves seem pathetic and not worth beating. (This was Marshall Mathers’ winning tactic, for example, at the end of the movie “8 Mile.”)
The Comedy of Jewish History
Comedy, then, is largely an evolutionary strategy of losers to shift the discourse or to gain the upper hand by outmaneuvering the winners or the stronger players.
This is especially apparent in Judaism and Christianity which are riddled with failures. Judaism is famous for its comedic perspective which was gained by its long history of loss. Even when they fantasized in their scriptures that they were once a dominant force in their region, under Moses, David, and Joshua, in history Jews were more often the conquered than the conquerors.
Jewish scriptures are structurally comedic to honour that heritage. Jews empathize with the oppressed, holding up their deity as one of justice and morality. But Jewish monotheism sets up God to be a tyrant to satirize religion’s historical role in political persecution and domination. Jack Miles shows in God: A Biography how Jewish monotheism turned God into a realistic and therefore all-too human character, complete with flaws. By absorbing the roles of other deities in the Canaanite pantheon, God’s character became incoherent or psychologically complex. The biblical character of God could stand, then, for the human tyrant who lorded it over the Jews as the symbolic losers of all humanity.
Jews saw themselves as the “chosen people,” and that licence was comparable to the jester’s freedom in a medieval court. Prophets and comedians both take the moral high ground and speak truth to power, mocking the nobles for the sake of social reform or cohesion. Jews were sometimes criticized for being aloof and self-righteous; for example, the ancient Romans thought it rude that the Jews refused to honour the Romans’ gods by making offerings or attending festivals. But opponents had difficulty making those objections stick because Jews beat them to the punch.
Far from pretending they were morally perfect, Jews depicted themselves as deeply flawed. The protagonists of Jewish scriptures are all flawed and therefore realistic. King David is infamous for his adultery and murders. But for Jews, David is heroic because of his repentance, whereas his predecessor Saul had thought to atone with animal sacrifices (1 Samuel 15:22–23; Psalm 51:17). That contrast indicates the Jewish emphasis on self-criticism and personal authenticity.
The notion of a perfect God choosing a flawed population as his champions, who then fails repeatedly to protect his favoured people is inherently comedic. Judaism was implicitly satirizing the all-powerful theocracies of the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, and the Seleucids. Each empire justified its rule by claiming that certain powerful gods were on its side, but each empire collapsed or was conquered and replaced by the next one. That historical fact was implicitly comedic, at least in the long view, because it revealed the bathos or the anticlimax of imperial pretension.
Jewish monotheism satirizes that historical dynamic by exaggerating it. Yahweh is depicted as the ultimate ruler, but he’s let down by his subjects, by the flawed chosen tribe that stubbornly doubts God’s greatness and violates his commandments. Likewise, the gods of Egypt, Assyria, and all the rest must have been sorely disappointed by the defeat of their respective champions.
The very idea of championed sons of God who are sinful, or who are self-reflective enough to recognize their imperfections is surprising and comical. Rather than boasting of their greatness or deifying themselves and vainly seeking to rule an empire, like their polytheistic conquerors, Jews made the most of their lower, nomadic station. Jews were lowly in earthly terms, but ironically mighty in moral ones because like Socrates, Jews recognized their flaws and saw through the sham of history and the delusions of imperialists.
In the ancient world, religion was a political instrument in that the regimes were theocratic. Different social classes had their respective class of gods, so the pantheons symbolized the pyramidal social structure. Religious myths could be implicitly satirical, but more often they were used as propaganda to justify tyranny and bestial injustices such as patriarchy, slavery, and war.
Again, Jewish monotheism set up its comedic premise by taking religious propaganda to the limit, as Jews imagined a deity so majestic and dominant that he was beyond the limitations of religious symbols. The Jewish God was so perfect as to be incomprehensible, and there was only one God, not many. This means Jewish morality was universal, and God’s retribution inescapable. But what all cultures were supposed to recognize wasn’t the greatness of Jewish rituals, let alone the earthly might of the Jewish people; rather, the distinctive merit of this religion was the force of its satirical takedown of theocracy.
The Comedic Duds of Christian and Muslim Tyrannies
Jewish comedy continues with Christianity but is stifled by Christianity’s syncretism with the turgid, somber culture of Roman imperialism.
After the destruction of Jerusalem and the apparent demise of Judaism in the first century CE, traumatized Jews imagined new ways of carrying on their satirical/moralistic mission. The early Christians told the story of God becoming a man to empathize with his creatures, to learn their plight firsthand. But ironically in the story, God’s creatures are so lost that they’re blind to the identity of this divine incarnation named “Yeshua” (meaning “the savior,” so the punchline wouldn’t be lost). Thus, the blind sinners crucify the godman, their own creator.
The irony is palpable, as is the satirical power of this “gospel” or good news. Again, you have the surprising anticlimax that God’s creatures treat him as the lowest of the low. Mind you, the resurrection narrative buries the punchline, much as the folkloric epilogue of the Book of Job — in which Job is restored to health and happiness — skates over the philosophical and satirical criticisms levelled in the earlier confrontation between God and Job.
But this is how the jester gets away with his mischief, by burying the lede, pretending his accusations are harmless, or embedding them in gibberish. The Gospel of Mark comes across as the most authentic of the three synoptic gospels because of its truncated ending which gives short shrift to the resurrection.
In any case, Christians lost the plot of Jewish comedy as they enjoyed the greatest of ironies: they came to dominate much of the world, becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century. As any comedian will tell you, this empowerment would be death for comedy. Punching up is funny, because we root for the underdog, but punching down is just brutality which has pseudo-comedic potential only for psychopaths, bullies, and authoritarian conservatives.
For that reason, comedians prefer not to speak for the elites. The worst job they can imagine for comedic purposes is hosting an award show or working at the White House Correspondents dinner, although Ricky Gervais and Stephen Colbert famously turned the tables by speaking truth to power in the classic Jewish tradition. This is also why the court jester had to play the fool, to dissociate himself from the nobility and to be given free rein as an outsider even though technically he served at the nobles’ pleasure.
Likewise, comedians are known for being at their funniest when they’re “hungriest,” or when they’re just starting their career and have no reputation or audience to protect. From that lowly position they can slay their targets with abandon, but as soon as they gain a large following, they can lose their nerve. Of course, that dynamic is found in all the arts.
But the same dynamic played out in the rise of Christianity and Islam. The premise of Christianity is hilarious enough in the Jewish tradition: again, mistaken identity, surprising anticlimax, abundant irony, and even the slapstick of beating up on God in the form of a man. The story implicitly satirizes human wickedness and blindness, as the downtrodden smuggle in their explicit social critique in the form of Jesus’s Cynical, topsy-turvy prophecies about how the first will be last in God’s kingdom.
Yet Christians forsook that premise, exchanging the humble role of the downtrodden, self-deprecating outsider, which is proper for comedians, for the lofty, unfunny ones of the elite insider and of the totalitarian persecutor. Consequently, the worst, dystopian aspects of monotheism came to the fore in Christian theocracy, in a process that was repeated in the seventh century with Islam, with Muhammad the conquering prophet.
Christians and Muslims emphasized the mere literal and therefore unspiritual meaning of their myths, using them as political instruments in the old, pre-Axial and polytheistic manner, to justify their political domination. Christian and Islamic scriptures became tawdry exercises in theocratic propaganda, whereas Jewish scriptures had an independent, philosophical, literary, and righteous character precisely because of the Jews’ harmless, nomadic status in history.
Not all Christians were clueless about the comedic purpose of the Jewish side of their hybrid religion. The Gnostics got the joke; they took to heart the psychological depth of the metaphors. Of course the New Testament wasn’t really about the life of one godman who lived in first century CE Galilee. Jesus was the higher self in all of us, our divine potential ignored, submerged, or “killed” by our baser, egoistic self. To be reborn in the authentic Christian sense is to be enlightened, to possess the knowledge of our identity as anomalous, spiritual, creative beings.
Much as court jesters or politically incorrect comedians could go too far, whereupon the rulers or the crowd would punish them for their insults, the empowered Church persecuted the Gnostics. Even as Augustine, Origen, and the other Church fathers read the Bible largely as allegory and as being susceptible to multiple interpretations, the Church excommunicated and executed heretics like the Gnostics, controlling thought and pretending the “Catholics” or universalists deserved to rule because of some historical connection between Jesus and proto-Catholic popes.
So Christian theology became nakedly political and tyrannical; as such it lost the moral high ground to speak comedic truth to power. The Church leaders couldn’t help but be dreary bureaucrats and Machiavellian tyrants because they had an empire to run, inherited from Rome.
The Muslims, too, found themselves enmeshed in politics since they could preserve their prophet’s message only by reforming the Jahiliyyah, the age of ignorance in pre-Islamic Arabia with its corrupt polytheism. Muslims conceived of their spiritual task as that of submitting to God, which meant any impure practice was abhorrent, and the Islamic duty was to attempt to reform it or to stamp it out.
Christian and Muslim missionaries and evangelicals were like the annoying comedians who are “always on,” who can’t tell the difference between their life on and off the stage. They took the whole world to be a stage that supports their performance, and these religious extremists wanted to drag you out of your abode to treat you to their comedic routine. And woe betide you if you didn’t laugh with them.
The Dark Comedy of Mystical Traditions
I said that comedy could find its way into religion in two ways, through history and mysticism. The second way is more prominent in Eastern religions such as those from India and China, although the Western religions all have esoteric, Gnostic traditions, including Kabbalah in Judaism and Sufism in Islam. The comedic material in mysticism is the dichotomy between hidden reality and the illusory world. We’re preoccupied with superficial appearances and are ignorant of the oneness or the divine nature of an underlying reality.
Mystics exploit this contrast by pointing out that religious symbols and myths are necessarily deficient, since God’s infinity and purity transcend them all. Therefore, we shouldn’t take those symbols so seriously. Our deeper religious obligation is to transform ourselves, to be liberated from the false world and to experience the real one. Fiddling with the finer points of creeds was for busybodies and bureaucrats — unless you were a Jewish rabbi who used legalism as another source of comedy, going to Kafkaesque lengths to find hidden meaning in even the seemingly least significant bits of scripture, as in the Talmud.
Jewish monotheism works on this level too. While Jews forbade representations of God as idolatrous and blasphemous, they nevertheless depicted God in literary detail throughout their scriptures. Thus, you have the mystical dichotomy between the terrifying, inhuman reality of God as the absolute ground of being, and the poverty of our personifications and anthropomorphic symbols.
But the contrast is systematic and mature in Jainism, Hinduism, and Buddhism as well as in Daoism. The surprise in the Indian religions especially is that whereas we’re absorbed in samsara, in the world of sense experience and natural cycles, our spiritual mission is moksha, to free ourselves from that which we naively love the most. Our wisest, safest course is ironically the least preferable because we’re slaves to our bodies. The real world is more unified or less substantial than we typically imagine, so our religious task is mainly to shift our perspective, to acquire what the Gnostics called “saving knowledge” (gnosis).
Buddhist scriptures exploit this premise by contrasting the antics of the sage and of the novice. The novice or initiate would ask a question that betrays his ignorance, and the sage would use various devices to mock the implied status quo. Zen scriptures depict the sage as seeking to stun the monks out of their cerebral mindset so they could encounter the deeper truth’s simplicity, even going as far as to slap the monks or to beat them with rods. The slapstick is apparent, and Buddhists used koans or riddles to test their insights.
In its similarity to Stoicism, Daoism is in the same vein because the Daoist sage dismisses human artificiality as unnatural and therefore as weak and inferior, preferring natural spontaneity and forcefulness. This aspect of Chinese pragmatism, of deferring to natural power out of prudence has lesser comedic potential in itself. But the conflict between Daoism and Confucianism, which makes for the greater Chinese character sustains the Chinese sense of humour.
Notice, though, that Eastern religious humour is something of a distraction because their philosophical messages are dark and existential. Everything we think we love is bad for us, they say. Every natural form is an insubstantial illusion. We ought to be ascetics who take nothing seriously and who are freed from suffering only because they no longer identify with their human self. All of which is perfectly subversive and antisocial, so in this case we’re dealing with dry, black, or even gallows humour.
Moreover, Hindu monism proved tyrannical and thus a comedic letdown in the Christian and dour Islamic manners, with India’s literalistic caste system. The dark potential of Eastern religions is understandable, though, because they’re playing with fire, with the horrific cosmic truths of existentialism and naturalistic philosophy. Just as Jewish monotheism could be twisted into theocratic propaganda, the subversive dualism and monism of Eastern religions could prove maddening.
The Strategy of Religious Comedy
Perhaps you’re wondering whether this discussion of religious comedy implies that religions are all just jokes, properly speaking. There likely is some explicit, intended satire in various religions, including Judaism. More often, though, the comedic structure of the myths is implicit and unintended. Jews couldn’t help but tell funny stories about God and themselves because they were expressing their collective identity, which was based on their historical role as underdogs.
Still, there’s a deeper reason why authentic religions have a comedic aspect. Again, comedy is a social strategy for dealing with tragedy. To the extent that religions are vessels for profound philosophical or existential truth, religions are subversive. We’d rather not receive authentic spiritual messages because they’re not flattering and they’re antithetical to oppression (including theocracy) and to egoism. We cope with these messages, then, in at least two ways, by laughing them off or by literalizing and co-opting them and turning them into political tools to subjugate others and our godlike potential.
You can tell a religion is healthy by the extent to which its practitioners are able to laugh at themselves. “If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him” — that’s the sentiment of a religion that hasn’t lost the plot. By contrast, when a religion anathematizes thought criminals, the religion has been politicized and its leaders are acting in bad faith.
Indeed, all human thoughts and symbols must be pitiful and parochial next to the sublime grandeur of primordial reality. If you think you alone have the religious truth while everyone else is in the dark, you should have a look at the nighttime sky and recognize that we’re all equally in the dark. The spiritual, heroic, or existentially noble trick is to recognize that common plight and to tell funny stories about it to avoid going mad or to avoid living as an unknowing robot or turning to the dark side and politicizing your insights.
Theocrats take out their frustrations on their underlings by physically or mentally abusing them, whereas mystics and spiritualists/existentialists create fantasies to indirectly mock the world. The latter satirists understand the difference between symbol and reality, map and terrain, and they tell stories with the symbols to make a deeper point. They know the stories not only fail to capture the full meaning but are liable to mislead as idols.
The wiser course, then, is to have fun with the symbols, to understand that myths are just artworks (profound fictions), and to not take them so seriously such as by deeming them exclusive revelations that have to be politically imposed.