A Christian sense of humor

In 2009, Maverick Books published John R. Erickson’s Story Craft: Reflections of Faith, Culture and Writing from the Author of Hank of the Cowdog. With permission from the publisher, we’re posting in our Saturday Series a chapter each month through January. Here’s a chapter titled “Hank and Theology,” where Erickson concludes, “Only the Maker of galaxies would have thought to give mankind such a marvelous gift as a dog.” —Marvin Olasky

Hank and Theology

Every year since 1983 I have done somewhere between fifty and a hundred live performances for audiences in just about every state except those in the Northeast, where the idea of importing cultural material from Texas is still viewed with suspicion.

Most of my performances have been in school settings, sometimes private or Christian schools but usually public. I’m there because, when I perform my stories, it creates an interest in reading, even among students who aren’t fond of it. Kids who enjoy my programs rush to the library and dive into the Hank books. After they’ve read my books, they move on to other authors. I get paid for turning non-readers into readers.

Public education in the U.S. has received a lot of criticism in the past decade, much of it deserved, but I have had the honor of working with teachers who were dedicated to their profession in ways that are almost beyond belief. Consider the challenges they face every day.

Public schools have become a dumping ground for every major sociological problem in modern America: poverty, racial unrest, illegal immigration, welfare, child care, broken families, drugs, illiteracy, pornography and child abuse, and the decline of manners, civility, and standards of decency.

It all flows like a big sewer into public education, and when a teacher walks into the school at seven-thirty in the morning, that’s what she faces. While the people of America fund eight hours of school-based “free” daycare, while senators and judges and professors and artists invent new ways of dodging questions of morality and value, the teacher takes a deep breath and walks into the middle of it—in her classroom.

There, she must face the effects of a culture that has lost the wisdom and will to make distinctions between right and wrong, up and down, evil and goodness, pornography and art, and she can’t dodge the questions. She stands alone in front of the class … and what will she tell these children?

The teachers I know are making a quiet stand against the slick barbarism of popular culture. They teach manners and patriotism and reverence and civilized discipline to children, some of whose parents are “too busy” to do it themselves. For this heroic effort, teachers are often maligned by the press, scolded by pious legislators, threatened by the ever-nasty ACLU, and tortured by the paperwork demands of state and federal bureaucrats.

I don’t know why teachers go on, holding back the sea, but I’m convinced that if they ever give up hope and walk off the job, America will simply collapse upon itself and cease to function.

When I figured out what teachers do—what they really do—and realized that they saw me as an ally, I came to understand that I had become a part of their struggle to hold back the sea.

Most of those teachers were women, and their maternal instincts told them that their children would be safe with my stories. It was the same instinct that tells a mother that children shouldn’t play with snakes. I also noticed that most were Christians. Their objective was not to evangelize, but simply to protect innocent children from literary material that might harm their spirits—and against which they had no means of self-defense.

Instinct might have also told them that there is something deeply Christian (and Jewish) about the act of reading. Both Christian and Jew are, and always have been, People of the Book. When God chose to give us His law, He didn’t draw pictures. “The tables were written on both their sides; on the one side and on the other were they written” (Exodus 32:15, emphasis added). God’s law was written so that it could be read.

When Paul and the other apostles wanted to record the events they had lived and witnessed, they didn’t beat on drums or communicate through first-century rap songs. They wrote it down so that it could be read by future generations.

In their own quiet way, teachers are making decisions about the culture. The ones I’ve known understand that a story is ultimately an equation that yields insights into meaning, purpose, value, and justice. These elements in balance are what allow a story to make readers either better or worse.

The teachers and I rarely discussed this in the open, but we didn’t need to discuss it. They already knew, and they figured it out long before I did.

In their own quiet way, teachers are making decisions about the culture.

And then there was the letter I received from a mother. I’ll never forget it. Her daughter had recently died of leukemia. She said that during her daughter’s last days, the family gathered in her hospital room and read Hank the Cowdog books aloud. It was something they had done in happier times, and she thanked me for the gift of laughter.

I was dumbfounded. When a mother tells you that she read your book to her dying child, you need to sit down and think about it because you’re standing on holy ground. What people do at the approach of death has something to do with religious faith.

But how can there be anything theological in funny stories about a dog? The Bible doesn’t even say much about dogs, and when it does, the references are hardly flattering. We see them lapping blood, eating crumbs, devouring Jezebel, and licking the sores on Lazarus. (The ancient Egyptians seem to have been fonder of dogs than the Hebrews).

Nor can we say that humor has been a driving force in our Protestant heritage. Of the seven books of theology sitting on my desk at this moment, none has an index listing for “humor,” and my Strong’s Concordance of the Bible shows roughly three times as many entries for “sorrow” as for “laughter.”

C.S. Lewis points out that nowhere in the New Testament are we told that Jesus laughed. But Lewis adds, “It is difficult, in reading the Gospels, not to believe that He smiled.” [Lewis 1995:4] In fact, He might have had been smiling when he told the disciples, “Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye will be satisfied. Blessed are ye who weep now: for ye shall laugh” (Luke 6:21, emphasis added).

When detractors in the secular press describe Christians as dry and humorless (the thin-lipped man and wife in Grant Wood’s painting American Gothic), maybe there’s a reason for it.

When detractors in the secular press describe Christians as dry and humorless, maybe there’s a reason for it.

Over the years, I’ve gotten some testy feedback from Christians who weren’t always amused by what they found in the Hank books. Back in the nineties, we heard from a pastor in East Texas who was upset that the first book contained a scene where Hank eats silage (fermented corn stalks) and gets tipsy.

I got the idea from friends who grew up on farms where silage was fed to hogs and cattle. They told delightful stories about livestock made drunk by green silage. Other stories told of birds made drunk by eating fermented berries off of trees.

Drunken hogs, dogs, coyotes, cattle, and birds make funny stories, and they are part of the organic experience of every kid who has grown up on a farm or ranch, yet the pastor in East Texas seemed convinced that John Erickson was trying to promote drunkenness among school children.

Some Christians have objected to my character Madame Moonshine, a “witchy little owl” who claims to have magic powers. In The Further Adventures, Hank is stricken with a serious malady, “Eye-Crosserosis,” caused when he spent too much time staring at the end of his nose. He goes to Madame Moonshine, hoping she can cure him.

Her treatment consists of giving Hank a riddle to solve: “How much wood would a woodpecker chuck if a peckerwood’s a checkerboard square?” The question is so complex, Hank has to use algebra to solve it, but at last he comes up with a solution: 5.03. Madame Moonshine is amazed (not really) and proclaims him a genius (he agrees), and his vision returns to normal.

I have never met a witch or wanted to, and until recent years, I didn’t suspect that they even existed outside of books by C.S. Lewis and L. Frank Baum. I have used Madame Moonshine’s “magic” as a way of injecting humor into the stories and solving plot problems, yet, to my amazement, some Christians find darkness and paganism in the character.

Witch isn’t the only word in my stories that has caused alarm. I once had a long discussion with a father who asked if I could guarantee that the expression “what the heck” didn’t appear in my stories. I said no, I couldn’t make that guarantee, and added, “I would like to move to your hometown. It must be a wonderful place. You don’t have much to worry about.” We shared a laugh, but he remained wary and didn’t buy any books.

Some customers are offended by Rip and Snort, the coyote brothers, because they entertain themselves by having belching contests, something my peers and I did in junior high school. (We were good at it, and very proud). A few customers have complained that Rip and Snort are actually racist stereotypes of “Native Americans,” because they speak a broken, grunted form of English, and Hank describes them as “savages.” (How else would a ranch dog describe a coyote?)

When I did Hank performances in Chinle and Winslow, Arizona, at both ends of the Navajo reservation, I never heard this complaint, nor did I hear it when I entertained six thousand school children in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, capitol of the Cherokee Nation. Oddly, the people I was alleged to be offending weren’t offended. Perhaps they had a sense of humor.

Oddly, the people I was alleged to be offending weren’t offended. Perhaps they had a sense of humor.

We also heard from a mother who complained about a “sex scene” in one of the books. She had responded to our ad in World magazine and had bought a complete set of fifty Hank books. She sent them back to Maverick Books and we gave her full credit.

When pressed for details about the “sex scene,” she pointed to a chapter in The Halloween Ghost, where Slim Chance, a bachelor cowboy of thirty-two, prepares supper in his shack for Miss Viola, an old maid of twenty-eight. The problem was that they ate alone in Slim’s house, unsupervised!

Several years ago, I got into a heated exchange with a Christian filmmaker who had read a screenplay co-written by me and my son Mark, based on the Hank the Cowdog stories (it has yet to be produced). He took the position that Christian writers should scrutinize every line of their scripts to be certain they teach “life lessons” that reinforce a biblical worldview. He felt that our script fell short in that department.

In principle, I agreed with most of what he said, yet I couldn’t escape the feeling that under his rules, humor would suffocate. Finally, I leaned across the table and said, “Jim, this is humor. If nobody laughs, it’s a bad script!” He stared at me for a long time, puzzled, as though it had never occurred to him that making people laugh was something a Christian writer ought to be doing.

Is there something about humor that makes it unbiblical or un-Christian? Are we so solemn by nature, so dedicated to a ministry of teaching that we can’t indulge in an occasional outburst of laughter? I would hate to think so. If we are, then in addition to neglecting a welcome gift from our Creator, we’ve become the caricatures the secular media believe us to be, and we make ourselves easy targets for parody.

The richest source of parody is a character who has no sense of humor, and all too often, that’s us. The louder we preach, the more ridiculous we appear to those who don’t want to hear anything we have to say, and the moment we mention the Bible, the audience reaches for the “off” button.

In the postmodern world, this is a serious problem for Christian writers. Gene Edward Veith calls it “Christian familiarity.” The audience has heard the message so often, “the breathtaking truths of Christianity … have become humdrum and mundane,” causing the message to “fade from our personal and cultural consciousness.” Veith says that C.S. Lewis wrote his Chronicles of Narnia in an attempt to “defamiliarize” Christianity. [Veith 2008:30-1]

I would suggest that humor can achieve a similar result and that it does teach “life lessons,” but outside the usual didactic method employed in nonfiction writing and documentary storytelling. Didactic teaching involves a fixed relationship between teacher and student: The teacher always controls the message.

In humor, the impact of the message is never quite under the author’s control. When the audience laughs, we’re never sure whose face has caught the pie.

This makes humor a risky medium. Maybe the audience will laugh in the right spots and maybe they won’t. Maybe they will view the story as biblical and maybe they won’t. Maybe they will grasp the nuances of meaning that humor can expose and maybe they won’t. Humor is a gift from author to audience, and once it’s passed along, it can’t be called back. Writers who insist on controlling the message will never feel comfortable taking such a risk.

Humor is a gift from author to audience, and once it’s passed along, it can’t be called back.

A lesson that humor can teach is that when we take ourselves too seriously we are committing the sin of pride. The author of Proverbs knew a lot about pride and had some choice words to say about it. “When pride cometh, then cometh shame (11:2) … Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall (16:18) … A man’s pride shall bring him low: but honor shall uphold the humble in spirit (29:23).”

Jesus listed pride as one of the “evil things that come from within and defile the man” (Mark 7:22). C.S. Lewis called pride “the Great Sin … the essential vice, the utmost evil … the one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves.” [Lewis 2001:121]

Excessive pride not only cuts us off from our fellow man, but also from God. Again, C.S. Lewis: “In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that—and therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison—you do not know God at all. As long as you are proud you cannot know God.” [Lewis 2001:124]

Lewis saw humor as an antidote to pride and used it to great effect in his work. In discussing Lewis’s approach to humor, Terry Glaspey wrote:

One of the powerful truths about humor is that it assumes an ideal against which we judge ourselves. If there were no ideal or expectation to fall short of, there would be nothing to laugh about … Humor helps us to realize that from God’s point of view the self-important human being is a pretty funny creature! [Glaspey 2005:128]

Indeed, a Christian worldview should throw a bright light on the humor in our human dilemma—that we are part-angel and part-animal, shaped by Divine Intelligence but built out of mud, and find ourselves sharing this planet with spouses, parents, children, politicians, and preachers who are just as odd as we are.

A Christian worldview should throw a bright light on the humor in our human dilemma.

The possibilities for comedy are endless, yet we Christians have not exactly set the world ablaze with our humor. But humor has always been present in the oral tradition of storytelling where jokes, malapropisms, yarns, riddles, aphorisms, and puns have provided a much-needed source of strength and release. Reader’s Digest wasn’t the first to figure out that laughter is good medicine or that funny stories about dogs speak a universal language.

I have often thought that the bond between humans and dogs shows the unmistakable stamp of Divine Intelligence. Dogs are so perfectly suited to be our companions, it couldn’t have occurred by chance.

They’re always glad to see us when we come home. They love us when we’re unlovable and forgive our every shortcoming. They have learned to fetch our birds, herd our livestock, guard our homes, and babysit our children. They teach us humility and make us laugh. When they die, they break our hearts and remind us of our own mortality.

As the saying goes, a dog is our best friend … and that couldn’t have been an accident. The incredible bond between humans and dogs brings the arguments against intelligent design to a dead stop because when you add up all the atoms in a dog and all the atoms in a human being, you don’t get the joy and love that have bound us together for unknown centuries.

Only the Maker of galaxies would have thought to give mankind such a marvelous gift as a dog, and my wife has observed many times that dogs are living proof that He has a sense of humor.

From Story Craft: Reflections of Faith, Culture and Writing from the Author of Hank of the Cowdog by John R. Erickson. © 2009. Published by Maverick Books. Used with permission. All rights reserved.