Freedom from Oppression, Freedom for Joy: Humor as a Liberative Spiritual Practice

Humor has long been used as a nonviolent tool in resisting oppression and fighting for freedom. Its pedigree extends from the history of religious satirists (Lindvall 2015) to the peaceful 1986 Filipino Revolution (Astorga 2019) to the work of Muslim comedians in the U.S. after September 11, 2001 (e.g., Amarasingam 2010, Farsad 2016) and beyond. This interdisciplinary, co-authored paper explores how humor can also serve as a liberating Christian spiritual practice, that is, a practice that draws on Christian spiritual tradition, requires disciplined cultivation, and can bring about personal and even communal transformation toward human flourishing. It will illustrate its thesis through examining the work of Desmond Tutu and his collaborators, both in struggling against apartheid (first speaker) and, more recently, in promoting an interfaith spirituality of joy (second speaker). 

In proposing humor as a spiritual discipline, it is important to acknowledge Christianity’s ambivalent attitude toward humor and laughter (e.g., Morreall 2024; Houck 2016). Much of Christianity’s traditional suspicion is based in the assumption, famous at least since Plato, that humor necessarily expresses superiority (as it certainly has, for instance, when Tertullian imagines his eschatological laughter at heretics condemned to hell in De Spectaculis XXX). Another objection arises from the sense that laughter can challenge the order of the passions, upending the physical self-control required by asceticism especially in monastic contexts; this concern is buttressed by the claim that Jesus never laughed (e.g., Chrysostom, Basil, and Bernard). Yet several approaches within Christianity have allowed some degree or kinds of humor, as in the Rule of St. Benedict. Some strains in Christianity have even insisted on humor’s value, as in Luke’s promise of eschatological laughter for those who weep (6:21); Thomas Aquinas’s retrieval of the virtue of eutrapelia, or good humor, from Aristotle (ST II.ii.72, 168; similar views are voiced by Clement, Jerome, and Augustine); Reinhold Niebuhr’s insistence on humor as the appropriate response to life’s incongruities (1946); and Josef Ratzinger’s approbation of the medieval tradition of the risus paschalis as “that laughter which testified to the freedom of the redeemed” (1997). Ratzinger’s point is further illustrated in hagiographical narratives in which martyrs like St. Sabina and St. Lawrence invoke laughter as they approach death. In this light, the Christian ambivalence toward humor can be read as a prudent hesitancy: humor needs to be cultivated so that it can be responsive to the surrounding community and be grounded in humility (a word related etymologically to both “humor” and “human”) rather than flippancy (the famous objection of C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape). When properly practiced, humor can nurture spiritual and eschatological freedom from the world, and its capacity to disrupt social order can enable counter-cultural perspectives grounded in faith and justice.

The first speaker, who worked against apartheid in South Africa, will analyze the role of humour in an acute state of oppression and violence, with reference to the South African situation and its spiritual roots. Anti-apartheid activists like Tutu and Allan Boesak demonstrate how humor can be rightly used to express and pursue freedom, both external and internal, despite and in the midst of suffering and hardship.  As South African scholar Tinyiko Maluleke has put it, such humor sought not only political liberation but a “decolonization of the mind of the oppressed,” using “wit and humour . . .  in pursuit of the goal of mental emancipation” (2021). Tutu’s humor often used self-deprecation to promote shard humility and humanity, rather than humiliation of either self or others (cf. Helen Gadsby’s Nanette). As Michael Battle has shown in numerous works, this approach expresses the South African concept of ubuntu, briefly defined as the view of community in which all are interconnected, including oppressors and oppressed; as Tutu once explained it, “A person is a person through other persons” (Dalai Lama, Tutu, and Abrams 2016, 270). Such a perspective links practices for personal spiritual formation to the freedom and spiritual healing of the entire community. 

As a spiritual practice, humor can serve this perspective well: as Battle puts it, “Tutu’s humor might help us learn not to take the isolated self as seriously as the self in relation to others” (1997, xvi). In this context, humor can call out injustice, but instead of entrenching the divide between oppressed and oppressor, it invites shifts in perspective and empowers personal and communal transformation to live differently in freedom. Humor’s ability to disrupt order can disarm fixed mindsets and open the possibility of dialogue. In addition, by bringing the possibility of lightness into dire situations, humor can expand community, resisting oppressive cultural boundaries. 

Building on that analysis, the second speaker will examine humor as a spiritual practice in a wider, global context, particularly as shown in Tutu’s later interfaith work with the Dalai Lama in The Book of Joy (Dalai Lama, Tutu, and Abrams 2016) and the documentary Mission: Joy (2021). The Book of Joy explicitly includes humor among spiritual practices, linking it to humility as a way to lighten one’s attachment to oneself and allow more openness toward others. Despite cultural differences in humor, laughter is a universal human phenomenon, and Tutu observes that humor–including the self-deprecation that marked much of his work against apartheid–promotes “bringing people onto common ground” by pointing to “our shared humanity, . . . our shared vulnerabilities, our shared frailties” (220-21). Such humor, Tutu notes, requires cultivation, an active willingness to perceive humor (222), particularly through the kind of oppression experienced by both Tutu and the Dalai Lama. By considering humor as an interfaith spiritual practice and a component of joy, their collaboration demonstrates that humor’s value is not temporary: not only can it work against oppression in the pursuit of political freedom, but it can also sustain spiritual freedom and virtuous community when some level of political freedom has already been won. Thus the spiritual practice of humor provides an opportunity to live differently in spiritual and communal flourishing.