When joking leads to discrimination

The cover of latest edition of Charlie Hebdo, which shows the prophet Muhammad weeping by Luz. It was produced by staff members who survived the attack against their office. Photo by Mariontxa.

Joking always lurks in the wings of arguments over free expression and the right to offend. Often, the publication of cartoons of Muhammed acts as the trigger for these controversies. But in the West, mocking a minority faith like Islam will pretty much always be punching down. We can see this quite clearly with the example of a joke that Boris Johnson once told in a national newspaper in the UK: in response to the proposed ban of the burka in Denmark, he made a remark comparing women in burkas to letterboxes.

Implicitly, Johnson was reminding Denmark of the liberalism he approved of, a society that would ridicule rather than ban what it didn’t believe in. But the moment that joke was in print, Muslim women in the UK reported an instant spike in abuse towards them, both verbal and otherwise. Liberal rhetoric of freedom, tolerance and “only joking” actively led to conditions that created discrimination, inequality and unaccountability for the victims of that joke.

The butt of the joke

It’s not hard to see why comedians in particular might bristle against censorship. Indeed, the comedian Rowan Atkinson, also known as Mr Bean, wrote to The Times to say he had long appreciated the right to insult religion, and he thought that Johnson’s joke was a pretty good one. That really bothered me at the time because it seemed to assume a level playing field making everyone fair game, whereas Atkinson himself had previously handled such sensitive material rather more delicately.

In his early “Welcome to Hell” sketch, for example, he plays a guard at the door to Hell. After welcoming thieves, lawyers, philanderers, the Germans, the French and the atheists, he then welcomes Christians into Hell, with a little aside: ‘The Jews were right, I’m afraid.’

Now, maybe I find that sketch funny because I’m Jewish and bound for heaven. But I think it’s probably funny too because Christianity was the dominant world religion and main source of millennia of persecution of Jews and Muslims and various others – and so in that sketch, it’s being rendered the butt of the joke in a way that wouldn’t work had Atkinson reversed the terms. Had he welcomed Jews into Hell, because ‘the Christians were right’, not only would that not have been quite as funny, but it might even have seemed like a punchline intended to obliquely endorse that long history of persecution.

Justice in joking

A pretty good joke in theory, in other words, can be pretty bullying in practice. That is why one burka-wearing Twitter user, compelled to respond to Johnson’s joke at her own expense, replied by turning to her only recourse, which was a better joke. In her case, that meant posting a picture online of herself hugging a post box with the tagline ‘Great day hanging out with my bestie ☺’.

A Muslim woman in London wearing a niqab, using mobile phone while shopping. Oxford Street. Photo by Powerofflowers.

It was a bestie pic that bested Johnson by showcasing not only her sense of humour, but what a sense of humour ideally needs, which is a sense of justice. We all instinctively know this from our own everyday experiences of humour, where the pleasure of repartee with our friends depends upon the atmosphere of equality between us. A volley of wits can only really be funny to the extent that the wags manage to sustain their back and forth by constantly balancing and rebalancing the scales.

The funny side of faith

In one of the major books of Jewish mysticism, Abraham’s fearful trial of faith on Mount Moriah is described as a joke with a classic switcheroo at the punchline. The only son that God has demanded from Abraham for this ultimate sacrifice suddenly gets substituted with a ram, as if to say, ‘Ha, I got you. Only joking,’ and Abraham fell for it.

This also chimes with the modernist Jewish writer Franz Kafka’s much later claim that that whole biblical episode was essentially a joke on the Jewish people, who thought they’d been chosen by God for something very prestigious and special. Actually, they were like the school kid who races to the front of the class in the hope of claiming a prize only to find the other kids laughing at the “kick me” sign stuck to his back. And this is interesting, because if the father of monotheism is viewed even by the faithful as more like a fool than the sublime knight of faith that the Protestant theologian Kierkegaard considered him to be, then that clearly subverts various conventional ideas we might have about religion.

Kierkegaard and absurdity in faith

Yet, truth be told, Kierkegaard was a religious philosopher who found the most confounding things funny. When a businessman walks to work and a tile from a roof falls down and strikes him dead, he once stated, ‘then I laugh heartily’. And so since, as we know, even God likes to laugh when you tell him your plans, maybe there isn’t such a big difference between a fool and a knight of faith, a figure which, for Kierkegaard, was always intended in the best possible sense to be a character of the absurd.

Kierkegaard believed that faith can only really pertain to someone who gets along very well with nonsense and eschews our ideas of what the sensible is. As such, popular stereotypes of piety might have missed the levity within so much religiosity, and missed the idea that our most divine calling could even be this: to be a laughing stock; a state where everyone is laughing not with you but at you, without your seeking recovery or retribution. It’s an absurd idea because, if we’re honest, we can’t easily imagine feeling that way. But it remains easy enough to comprehend the despot whose only desire is to stop people laughing and wreak vengeance on the world.

The seriousness of jokes

Moses is walking in the hills. He slips, finding himself hanging between Heaven and Earth. He calls out, ‘Is there anybody there?’ A voice booms down from above: ‘Yes, Moses, I’m here. It’s God. Don’t worry. I’ll save you.’ Pause. ‘Is there anyone else there?’

While joking’s irreverence helps to bring religion down to Earth, it does so not without its own moral seriousness. The joke above insinuates God’s responsibility for the endless torment of Jewish history by making the religion less hierarchical and more democratic. But there are other instances of jokes where the horrors of history are sufficient excuse for excluding God altogether, as we find in the more disturbing case of Holocaust jokes, like the following:

A Holocaust survivor dies, gets up to heaven, meets God, tells God a Holocaust joke, and God doesn’t laugh. The survivor shrugs: ‘I guess you had to be there.’

That’s very dark and disturbing because it’s a Holocaust joke, but it’s also clearly a joke about jokes and about the need for jokes, even regarding the Holocaust. At the same time, it’s not a joke that claims anyone can crack any joke, because sometimes there are jokes where ‘you had to be there’.

Speaking of the unspeakable

Paris, France - Nov 5, 2020: Woman reading in living room the latest newspaper Charlie Hebdo featuring a caricature of Erdogan. Photo by Hadrian.

What that joke nicely illustrates is that when speaking in jest one may speak of unspeakable things, and that includes sacred things. It’s jokes that help us to get past the censors, both the external ones and the internal ones. That’s why any attempt to censor or repress laughter or joking is bound to be futile. Such censorship presumes we can master those elements of our lives – our bodies, our words, our feelings – which our laughter and joking shows there can be no real mastery of.

Indeed, laughter is one of the most common experiences we have of something excessive and irrepressible inside us that’s liable to appear when we least want or even expect it to. Anyone who wants to censor joking should be wary, therefore, because what they might well be doing is laying down the repressive conditions for what could risk turning into a more explosive or even violent outburst of hysteria later on.

Discover more about

religion and the moral seriousness of joking

Baum, D. (2017). The Jewish Joke: An essay with examples (less essay, more examples). Profile Books.

Baum, D. (2017). Feeling Jewish: (A Book for Just About Anyone). Yale University Press.

Baum, D. (2012). Respecting the ineradicable: religion's realism. Textual Practice, 26(3), 519–540.

Religion and the moral seriousness of joking