| Satire, a flat tire, and cold pancakes | ||||
 THE LAST WORD Issue 157, January/February 1998
We can dish it out, BUT WE CAN TAKE IT TOO. The Door is often the butt of someone else's pitiful little attempt at humor. For instance, one of our distributors went into bankruptcy last year owing us well over $10,000. Ha, Ha. Or how about this one: I got a call last spring – around the time we ran the naked centerfold of W.V. Grant – from someone with a strange voice identifying himself as an agent of the U.S. Attorney's office. "Mr. Anthony, I'm informing you that you are under investigation for the interstate transport of pornographic materials." Time stood still. My face twitched and an imperceptible bead of perspiration appeared on my forehead. Somewhere, a cock crowed, a shadow momentarily obscured the sun, a priceless vase was shattered, a member of the British Royal Family stepped on a discarded wad of gum. After a pause, the caller broke into laughter. It actually was Paul Coggins, the U.S. Attorney for the North Texas district. "You really went over the edge with that naked centerfold," he chided. Ha Ha! Hooboy! Lawyers can really be thigh-slappingly funny. The point is, The Door knows what it's like to get skewered, and we've learned one thing from it. It's good for us. Jesus certainly knew how to send up the Pharisees, the self-absorbed and the overly religious. A couple of times he chose a camel – the largest unclean animal – as a comic analogy: "Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat and swallow a camel" (Matthew 23:24). "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God" (Luke 9:60). As physical comedy, that would make a terrific sketch for Monty Python or Rowan Atkinson's Mr. Bean. As a cartoon subject, animators could go wild with the possibilities of squeezing and compressing a goofy looking camel into someone's mouth or through a needle's eye. (We are not, of course, thinking of Disney animators here!) But why didn't Jesus just say, "The poor enter heaven more easily than the rich"? We think it's because humor bypasses certain human defenses to deliver it's message, like those new missiles that won't explode until after they've penetrated the concrete and steel of Saddam Hussein's command and control bunkers. (Now there's a guy who needs to laugh at himself.) Several recent books and articles have analyzed the humor of Christ. Syndicated columnist and author David Yount commends G.K. Chesterton, The New Yorker, late stand-up comic Sam Kinison, and even The Door, in proposing that God communicates with mankind through the funnybone. "Who knows?" Yount writes. "A lot of people burned at the stake might have been spared if their persecutors had possessed a better sense of humor." True, but why? Laughter has always been considered mysterious and even dangerous. Plato recommended that "there must be a restraint of unreasonable laughter and tears, and each of us must urge his fellow to consult decorum by utter concealment of all excess of joy and grief." Chesterton, on the other hand, affirmed "joy is the gigantic secret of the Christian" and speculated that Jesus hid something from all men when he went up a mountain to pray; "I have sometimes fancied that it was his mirth." If it were not for the medicine of created laughter, there would be no antidote to pride and vanity among men, according to Blaise Pascal: "God has created us with self-consciousness, which makes conceit possible; but He also created within us the ability to laugh, and thus provided a balance to the danger." The problem is that most religious people seem to have been out to lunch when funnybones were being distributed. Instead, usually you find them pushing around a karmic wheelbarrow of rigidity, hypocrisy, pomposity, presumption and pretense. And that wheelbarrow has a flat tire, putting them in a very bad mood, indeed. As Aldous Huxley said of the Abbe Gandier in The Devils of Loudan (see, we can be pretentious, too): "A long religious training had not abolished or even mitigated his self-love; it had served only to provide the ego with a theological alibi." Here's a personal example: In 1971 (this was even before I became a believer) I had occasion to have a late-night breakfast at a Fort Worth pancake house with Kenneth Copeland, Pat Boone, and Cal Habern, one of the co-founders of Trinity Foundation. Copeland was then in the very early stages of his fabulously successful ministry. But he made a comment I have never forgotten that illustrated Huxley's point precisely. Upon receiving his breakfast order, Copeland took one bite, and called the waitress back to the table. He handed the plate back to her and proclaimed, "God doesn't want me to eat cold pancakes." Cal and I laughed, but Copeland was serious. He proceeded to explain that he was a "King's Kid" and that God wanted him to go "first class" at all times. It was the first time I had encountered the "health-and-wealth" gospel. The bizarre incident stayed with me and probably kept me from becoming ensnared in the word-faith theology after I became a Christian a few months later. Thanks, Ken. The one failing that is essentially laughable is vanity. The specific remedy for vanity is laughter, but it can sometimes be painful. The danger for The Door and any satire magazine is to leave humor to "sit in the seat of the scornful." Truly redemptive laughter goes beyond scorn to a recognition of our common predicament, remembering that we are all "made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who subjected the same in hope" (Romans 8:20. KJV). In other words, there's a little bit of Copeland in all of us. Laugher is not humiliating provided we are all humiliated together. So The Door, by God's grace, will continue to use satire and humor to deflate overblown religious egos and expose hypocrisy and absurdity (including our own). And we'll continue to push the barriers. If we are to find those barriers, we will sometimes go over the edge. Bear with us. We pray our efforts bring forth fruit necessary for repentance... as well as bringing forth a few cheap laughs, and, uh, maybe even a wheelbarrow full of new subscribers.
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Thalidomide babies are not funny.