Can preaching be funny? Some great Christians through the ages have been dubious. John Wesley admonished pastors, “Let your whole deportment before the congregation be serious, weighty, and solemn.” Along with his teetotalism, Wesley must have been a real treat at cocktail parties.
Conversely, one can’t get too far into the corpus of the esteemed Martin Luther’s sermons without coming across a comedic barb (of course, it was often directed at the papacy). As the good doctor once said, quoted as an epigraph to C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, “The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.”
Furthermore, humor is sprinkled throughout the Bible. Perhaps most famous is God’s naming Abraham’s son Isaac, “He laughs” (Genesis 17:19). You think as well of the exchange with Balaam’s donkey (Numbers 22) or the madcap prison break of Peter (Acts 12). And it’s commonplace to note that there’s a humorous touch in Jesus’ nickname for the apostolic brothers James and John: Boanerges, or “Sons of Thunder” (Mark 3:17).
And so there is surely a place for humor in our faith, and perhaps even for preachers to be funny—though that is not to say they should be comics by any means (if you want to try your hand at stand-up, stick to the open mic night at the bar). What, then, is the role of humor in the pulpit? What could be the uses of comedy in preaching?