Pun Salad

I came to this book via a laudatory National Review review by Sarah Schutte. And even though I am a very-fallen-away Lutheran, I braved the word "Christian" in the subtitle. The author, Peter Kreeft, is a philosophy professor at Boston College. (Probably not coincidentally, I obtained the book via Interlibrary Loan from BC.)

It's short, a mere 93 pages. And very readable. Kreeft is unafraid to be funny in a book about humor. In an early chapter about the relation between humor and health:

[Humor] is a cause of physical health. It sends good chemicals into the brain. It makes you happy, and that makes you healthy. (Soul moves body as well as vice versa.) All other things being equal, the longer you laugh, the longer you live. If we never stopped laughing, we'd never die. OK, that's not quite true, but at least we'd die laughing.

Kreeft's thesis is that humor (like other properties that set us apart from other creatures) is a gift from God. Who, he argues, is kind of a jokester Himself. He supports his argument with numerous biblical references. But perhaps even more jokes. Here's a well-known one (which I've snipped from elsewhere):

A Jewish grandmother takes her baby grandson to the ocean for the first time. For the occasion, she has dressed him in a smart little sailor outfit. Without warning, a large wave folds over the young boy and swoops him out into the ocean. The grandmother looks up at the sky, “Please God, save my grandson. I will do anything if you return him to me. I will pray daily, I will volunteer weekly. Please God, I will do anything.” In a flash, another wave hits the beach, and the grandson washes up on the sand. The grandmother looks the boy over, then looks up at the sky and says, “He had a hat.”

Jokes (only a few clunkers) are scattered throughout, and a concluding 34-page appendix is mostly jokes with only a smattering of connecting narrative.

I'm afraid I still lean toward a more naturalistic explanation of humor: it's part of the package of emergent properties of our sufficiently complex nervous system formed over a few billion years of dumb old evolution. Like free will, consciousness, language skills, love, etc.

But this book would make an excellent gift for your local theologian. There's plenty of inspiration here for numerous sermons.

One flaw I noticed: Kreeft misidentifies the "Indy shoots the guy with the whip" scene as being in the Temple of Doom movie. It was in (of course) Raiders.