The Christian entertainer

I cringe at how inadequate these treatments are, but assuage my conscience with the reflection that this is supposed to be a preface, not a treatise.

To say a couple of words about entertainment, it is connected with art in that the "passive" kind of entertainment is one in which we sit back and let something happen to us; and what happens is a sort of low-level esthetic experience, whereas "art" in quotes generally attempts to say something complex or profound. That is, television programs do say something esthetic; but esthetically they tend to be variations on "2 + 2 = 4," where what is said is nothing terribly taxing to the mind, and there is enough of a variation not to make it perfectly obvious that it is the same old thing. When it is exactly the same esthetic statement week after week, it becomes boring and no longer entertaining. Esthetic sophisticates are apt to find it boring anyhow, because they see that the variations are not relevant, and are tired of hearing the same hackneyed ideas--when the ideas are not recognized as positively false.

Television is not, however, in its shallowness, something to be deplored. We don't always want, nor should we always be forced, to concentrate and study either scientifically or esthetically. We no more always ought to be reading books of the level of The Critique of Pure Reason than we ought to be subjected to esthetic fare of the level of Hamlet. There are times to relax and enjoy yourself. The entertainer is the one who supplies this need.

Let me examine briefly just two of the most popular forms of entertainment, humor and spectator sports, and show how both of them are actually ways in which we understand something, and learn facts about the world.

What humor is is basically a statement (whether esthetic or perceptive) that things are not as you would reasonably expect them to be: the world is absurd, and apparently contradictory.

Now there are three different attitudes you can take to being presented with a contradiction that seems to be taking place--let us say, you open a carton of milk, and pour out a glass of clear, tasteless liquid. You can rely, as the scientist does, on the assumption that there are no real contradictions, in which case you regard the situation as a problem to be solved, an effect for which you intend to discover the cause. With this attitude, you are interested in how the water got into the milk carton. Or you can take the "good/bad" attitude toward the unexpected water, and consider that the milk carton ought to be filled with milk, and be angry; or, finally, you can laugh.

The third attitude takes no "stand" on the issue, but simply accepts the fact that the world does not conform to our expectations of it; and it is this fact that the world is not reasonable according to our a priori idea of reason that is what is the essence of humor and what makes us laugh. If we don't like it that the world is not reasonable, then we suffer, and we regard the situation as evil; if we are curious as to how to make sense out of it, we are investigators; if we accept it, we think it is funny. Humor does not try to do anything about the absurdity; it simply accepts it as a fact.

None of these attitudes is wrong, necessarily, though any of them can be perverted. The scientist who studies a starving child to find out how starvation affects the nervous system has let scientific curiosity get in the way of his obvious obligation not to let the child he is studying starve, whatever the scientific value of the knowledge that can be gained. The person obsessed with evils and the righting of wrongs is, as I have been at such pains to point out, often the person who ruins what is there in the attempt to get rid of the evil. And the "sick" humorist who is so detached that he can see that suffering is funny (the practical joker, for instance, who laughs at the ridiculous position you get into as you crack your spine on the floor when he pulls the chair out from under you) is a person whose humor says he is "above" us all, and can say with Puck, "What fools these mortals be."

But be that as it may, there are incongruities and absurdities that don't involve damage, or even damage that is significant enough for us to have to regard as deplorable rather than funny. And even horrible damage can be enjoyed as funny in certain contexts, as in the cartoons of the coyote and the road runner. The cartoon coyote is so unreal that we don't have to feel sympathy with him, and can laugh as he creates his ingenious ways of destroying the road runner, and these ways backfire in all sorts of unexpected directions, always involving him in total destruction--from which he walks away in the next frame unscathed. But as soon as we see this sort of thing done by a real animal, or even a cartoon human being, then we feel (rightly) uncomfortable when we laugh; we can't morally even enjoy the pain and torture of an animal, much less a fellow human being.

It is the task of the humorist to make us see the ways in which the world is not what we would expect it to be. He is therefore teaching us when he makes us laugh. If the joke is old (some fact we already know), it is not funny; if it is not seen by us as true, it is not funny; if we can spot the incongruity too early so that it does not strike us, the joke is boring--and so on.

It think it can be seen that humor has a lot that is Christian about it. The world, created by God whose mind is beyond reason, is not reasonable; and from our point of view this transrationality of the Creator shows up all over the place. Consider the fact that we don't have many multifunction organs; the eyes see but don't do anything else, the ears just hear, and so on. But the organ we use for our highest physical function, the reproduction of another material spirit, is also the organ we use to get rid of our liquid garbage. That's the kind of God who made us.

The Christian is not so "moral" that he can't see how funny this is; since he adopts the Divine way of looking at things, from which nothing is either good or evil, then he is predisposed toward laughter rather than indignation when confronted with a world which does not conform to our idea of reasonableness. He can see humor in everything, from toenails to tiaras, from rutabagas to the Resurrection. The Resurrection funny? Jesus himself played a joke on Mary Magdalene by coming up behind her as she was weeping at the tomb and letting her think he was the gardener; and he played another on the students locked in their room by suddenly appearing there and saying, "Hello." We get all solemn about "Peace be to you," but that was the way you said "hello" in those days. Think of the look on their faces!

Now of course, the Christian humorist is human as well as divine, and though certain things are funny from a strictly divine point of view, they cannot be funny to a human. The Nazi holocaust has much that the Nazis must have laughed at about the incongruous ways the Jews died; but no one who has a spark of humanity about him would think this was funny. It is forbidden to be indifferent to such things. Similarly, one who knows what is going on in an abortion is not going to enjoy abortion jokes, and so on. The Christian humorist will not be solemn, but he will not be immoral--because as Christian, he is human, and what is anti-human is not funny.

But what is the Christian sportsman--the baseball player, for instance--teaching? The value of teamsmanship? No, not really. Sports are interesting mainly to those who have tried playing the sport in question (which is one reason why soccer has not yet caught on in the United States as a spectator sport) and who know how terribly difficult it is to do what they see the sports professional doing.

What the spectator is looking for and enjoys, really, is seeing acts that he knows involve superhuman ability performed with apparent grace, ease, and enjoyment. He has held a bat and has swung at a curve and missed; and he sees Eric Davis make a blur of his bat as the ball comes smoking at him, and the ball disappears into the seats, as Davis gracefully lopes around the bases. And then he sees him in the outfield make a leap and a backhanded stab at an impossible fly, pull it down, and fire in to second to pick off the runner, all in one smooth motion. It is poetry.

And that, of course, is the point. The emotions involved in seeing the gracefulness, knowing that this grace means that the man's body is under the perfect command of his mind, teach the spectator what the mind can do to our despised flesh. Yes, sports teaches what the mind can do, cooperating with the body, because we know that it is not simply raw talent, but training, training, training, until the body is so much the tool of the mind that the whole secret of the game is mental, not physical.

Anyone who has done anything at all with sports knows this: the edge is the mind, not the body. Even in weight lifting, which I do, it is the same. It is the attitude you take toward the weight you are going to lift that is the main factor in whether you can lift it or not, and whether you can lift it well and gracefully, or whether you are awkward about it. Weight lifting is perhaps the most "physical" of all of the sports, yet even here it is mind over matter, really. All of us are physically capable of lifting four or five times the weight we can lift even in the best conscious state--as can be seen in times of emergency, when a mother raises the end of a two-ton car that is on top of her son. How you can train the body so that you can call on its reserves and how you can make a body the instrument of apparently superhuman feats of strength, is what weight lifting as a sport is about.

Thus sports, especially spectator sports, speak about the human spirit and its cooperation with the body; they say that the spirit and the body are one, but the spirit rules; but it expresses itself in the body, and the result is human beauty. Spectator sports are an art form, and one of the few art forms that it isn't "sissy" to enjoy; that is what gives them their great appeal to men.

The Christian sportsman has nothing to be ashamed of when he appears on television apparently extending his childhood playing a silly game. He is teaching the world the marvels of the embodied spirit when the spirit is joyfully embodied, not at odds with the body which limits it. What could be more Christian than this?