Jesus, a Stand-Up Comedian

“If God would stop telling jokes, I might act serious.”
– Tukaram (Muslim poet)
“My Lord told me a joke
And seeing him laugh had done more for me
than any scripture I will
ever read”

– Meister Eckhart (Christian mystic)

I think Jesus is one of the top comedians of all time.

He makes you laugh hard.

You are slapping your thighs, jaws unhinged with laughter until you realize the joke is on you. For Jesus’ comedy has a sharp edge to it: It exposes your contradictions, and comedy’s oxygen for laughter is the exposing of contradictions.

You can choose to laugh at yourself, which is the beginning of transformation because people who take themselves seriously fear change. People who can laugh at themselves have taken the first step towards change.

Comedy is also a great way to get past defensiveness. Laughing relaxes your body, and relaxed body is a relaxed mind. It is Trojan Horse of sort, except that what it wants to sneak past the impenetrable wall of defensiveness is truth. Once truth is in, you can’t stop it from its work of dismantling lies.

I think parables work very much like a stand-up comedy routine. They build on common assumptions until the unexpected punchline upturns all of the previous assumptions. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s so knee-slapping funny! How else do you explain 5,000 people listening to Jesus while deaf to their growling stomachs? No teaching, no matter how good, can sustain a crowd that long without humor. At the end of many parables, people clapped and said, “That’s a good one!” They went back home and said to others, “Hey did you hear the one about the slave who buried his treasure?”

The humor in parables is lost to us because no matter how we reconstruct the historical context through commentaries, we simply don’t get all the cultural references in Jesus’ words. There was a wealth of common stories, tropes and assumptions Jesus plumbed when he shared parables. For example, when he says, “The kingdom of Heaven is like …” he was accessing the common memory bank of all previous Kingdom of God stories told by other rabbis. We can only explain ourselves into the common assumptions that are the piano keys of parables — and when you explain a joke, you have lost the punchline.

Another thing that keeps us from fully understanding the humor is that we are usually reading the parable with our eyes alone. Even the material of great comedians of our day isn’t as good on paper as it is in the air where it hits our ears. Part of the humor is the physicality of the comedian, the body of the comedian and the air-vibrating words themselves, spoken and inflected. Comedy is a physical experience…
(continue to read at Presbyterian Outlook)

America as Idea

For the first six years in America, we lived as illegals, but I did not know it. My father kept the fear of deportation to himself. His visa was approved by a bureaucratic mistake that he did not bother to correct. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan offered amnesty through the Immigration Reform and Control Act, and we became legal. To mark this freedom from having a pathway to citizenship, we moved out of our roach-infested apartment east of Queens and into a house on Long Island where the American dream awaited us.

On Wednesday evening — I still remember, just two weeks in our new place — we returned from midweek worship to graffiti all over our front door and garage, ugly black paint hissing, “Go back home Chink!” We were Koreans, not Chinese, but prejudice can’t see distinctions.

I’ve heard that racist slur before…..

(please read the rest of the column at North State Journal)

Courage to Compromise

hamilton

“Hamilton” is a juggernaut musical currently fetching at least $700 for prime seats. It’s a civic class in hip hop, George Washington’s cabinet argument as rap battle for the future of the fledgling American economy: Jefferson’s rural and agricultural against Hamilton’s urban and commercial. Reason in rhyme with best diss wins, which is not too far from the truth. Jefferson and Hamilton are at the opposite ends and no one wins. So they strike a compromise, both losing to win.

A piece in the musical titled “The Room Where it Happens” is a retelling of that compromise over a dinner. Hamilton gets the federal government to assume state debt and tax individual states for it while Jefferson gets the capitol, destined for Pennsylvania, closer to his home on the Potomac. Historians call that dinner the “Compromise 
of 1790.”

The current demonizing of compromise as the bane of Washington politics is a travesty, a straw man used by candidates to win cheap votes which leads to the farce of politicians running as “non-politicians.” To some, Mr. Trump’s non-political background and political ineptitude makes him the best politician.

In previous columns I argued that conversation and compromise, the scapegoat for everything ugly in politics, is what we must get better at. My closing argument is for more compromise…

(as this is a piece I did for North State Journal, a North Carolina state wide paper, please follow link to continue reading – 1 week free trial available.)

 

 

Stories in Midst of Tragedy

Philando-Castile-shooting16189542220756-1200x630five cops in dallas

The violent tragedies of the deaths of two black men and the five police officers shattered my heart, as it did many Americans. The tragedy called for words but also made words feel useless. A column can’t dispense any advice worth holding, but I have two tiny stories that have framed the tragedies for me. Perhaps they can be chairs for people to sit and converse. No healing happens without sharing, and no useful action is birthed without conversation.

I was watching the Facebook stream of Philando Castile, his white shirt soaking red, body slipping down the passenger chair, his neck arched, ridges of his Adam’s apple pushing through the taut skin as his head slumped, and Diamond Reynolds looking through her phone camera directly at me, giving witness, with the surprising distance of a journalist, with only a slight tremble hinting at the wreckage of her heart.

as this is a column printed with North State Journal website please go to their website to continue to read (one week free trial available).