Laughter at the Foot of the Cross, by M.A. Screech, Penguin, 328pp, £30 in UK.
There used to be a schoolboy's tradition of rummaging through the sacred texts for naughty bits. It was erudition of a kind, but sadly it has vanished. Kids today can giggle and snort at their ease by browsing the Web or the magazine stand in Eason's, but they end up not knowing their Bible.
There is a Christian apologist's tradition of mining the same texts for some relief from the gravitas. If Jesus was perfectly human, the argument goes, he must have laughed. And if we cannot find the laughs, at least we can feel the joy.
One picks up this book with some foreboding, fearful of its author's intent, certain that it will not recapture the scatological humour of youth. The title page alone arouses suspicion - Laughter at the foot of the cross . . . by Screech!
One is wrong. This is erudition in the grand style of the Anglican vicar who is also an Oxford don, soaked in the literature of the Renaissance and the ancient philosophers, and well capable himself, one suspects, of giggling at the naughty bits. He draws copiously on his knowledge, and his earlier studies of Erasmus and Rabelais, to explore the varieties of laughter around the Christian experience. From Plato and Aristotle to the Christian humanists of the Renaissance, the story is organised in fifty-three sparse chapters or snippets, which sketch the laughs in the holy books and the attitude to laughs of just about everyone who pondered the subject.
Biblical laughs are not that many and not that funny, it must be said, but Screech finds a few which would tickle the back of the class if they could follow his exegesis. If it is amusing to think of your granny having sex, read about Sarah and Abraham in Genesis 21:6-7. Or the children who shouted "a! Baldy!" at Elisha as he went up to Bethel - but that is Screech's gloss on the portentous version in II Kings 2:23. It's the way they tell them that robs the sacred authors of their best lines.
It seems odd to attempt a full-length book about jokes in a literature so inhospitable. The school boy in Screech, however, yields to the apologist. "Truth from the Word of God dripped down on to Scripture . . . It is the best of guides to moral and spiritual laughter." There is no entry for "joy" in the index, but it suffuses the text in a mist of reverence. "Charity opens the floodgates to joy, and joy can lead to ample laughter." Or nausea.
Mercifully, Screech is too scholarly to be content with joyriding. He has a deeper theological purpose. Is the ability to laugh a uniquely human property, as Aristotle claimed, or was Erasmus right that monkeys do it as well, only deadpan? If Aristotle was right, there may be a theology of humour which can help us reinterpret the humanity of Jesus. We have the literal text to inform us that Jesus walked, rode, rebuked, and - most famously - wept. But did he laugh, and what difference would it make if we saw humour as an instrument of religious conviction?
"Laughter at religious error became widely acceptable from the Renaissance," the author tells us, drawing on the authority of his favoured Renaissance authors.Screech is too limited in his sources and in his vision of Christian commitment, however, to provide a theology of humour. Contemporary texts on religion would have served the apologist's purpose to more profound effect.
The Life of Brian, as shocking to Christians at first showing as it would have been to medieval piety, employs a range of humour and irony to expose the hubris of theological certitudes. The film is not bothered about "error"; our real hang-up is Truth. Cleese and Palin are surely as relevant to the modern context of Screech's concern as Rabelais and Erasmus.
The limitation of sources is compounded by the narrowness of vision in an otherwise enjoyable book. The apologist in Screech lies uneasily in the same bed as the schoolboy. Following the humanists of the 16th century, he applauds the mockery of error in the more absurd teachings and lusts of their time. But what about the lust for truth and the cruelties visited on humanity in its name?
The modern humanist, Umberto Eco, makes the point brilliantly - and with biting relevance to the joyful apologist - in what must rank as the supreme postmodern joke: "Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth."
Bill McSweeney teaches International Politics in the Peace Studies Programme of the Irish School of Ecumenics.