Comedy and Our Collective Healing
Yael Leibowitz
This was the integral part of our inner, mental struggle for our human identity, the fact that we could still laugh at things…Humor was an integral part of our spiritual resistance. And this spiritual resistance was the pre-condition for a desire to live (Felicja Karay, Holocaust Survivor).
Eglon, the king of Moav, terrorized Israel for years. He was fierce, scary, and he created an alliance with Israel’s worst enemies. But then one day, Eglon met his demise while sitting on a toilet. A left-handed Israelite named Ehud outwitted the corpulent king and, as the Tanakh describes, the dead king lingered in his own bowels and cellulite for hours before his guards even realized what had happened. I dare you not to laugh. I assure you, the ancient Israelites did. They also laughed when they read that the Philistines, after stealing the Ark of the Covenant and provoking terrifying questions about God’s continued presence among His people, came down with an intolerable case of hemorrhoids. The Israelites laughed at double entendres used to refer to idol worship, such as gilulim, which can alternatively mean fetish or excrement. And they laughed when their zealous prophet Eliyahu suggested that the prophets of Baal scream louder for perhaps their god couldn’t hear them if he was daydreaming or in the bathroom.
Tanakh is littered with sad and scary moments - moments when we feared our enemies’ potential, and even at times, our loss of self. Those moments are taken seriously by the Tanakh, because as we know, Tanakh is a serious work. And that is also precisely why, in those very moments, the Tanakh makes us laugh. It uses scatological humor to demean those we feared; to make them small, despicable and, by extension, less scary. And in doing so, the Tanakh teaches us that there is an alternative to paralyzing fear, and that alternative is laughter.
Avigail knew this truth, which is why, as her entire household was about to be killed by David’s militia because of her husband’s insolence, she looked David square in the eyes and said of her husband Naval, “what do you expect, his name means boor, and a boor he is.” A sly smile must have crept across her lips in that moment, as David’s fury dissipated, and humor saved her estate. A shared joke, Avigail knew, is the surest way to bridge the gap between two people. And, as the Tanakh teaches us, laughter bridges something else as well.
Both Avraham and Sarah laughed when God told them they were going to have a child, because in their moments of prophecy, the chasm between their yearnings and their reality was just too vast. The incongruity between their hopes and their pain was overwhelming. So, they laughed, because sometimes laughter is the only thing that can fill the space between dreams and despair. Sometimes, it is the only way to react to the disparity between what we want from life and what life has offered. God called Sarah out on her laughter, and at first she denied it, worried that perhaps it signaled skepticism. But God did not criticize her, nor did He punish her, He simply acknowledged it. And then, He gave her a child, who was not coincidentally named for the joyous laughter generated by his birth. The ability to laugh, God taught the first two believers, does not signify a lack of faith, it signifies the resolve to hold on to faith when logic and reason are telling you to let go. By laughing at the way things are, we implicitly insist that they should be different, and it is that insistence that enables us to go on.
Megillat Esther was written by Jews who thought they were safe in the Diaspora, but the sporadic rise of those who hate us left them confused, and with their previous conceptions unhinged. It made them doubt the institutions they thought they could trust, and worry about their children’s future. So, they made a choice to resist the devastating psychological effects of near genocide by laughing. And they charged us to do the same. One day a year, the Megillah tells us, rather than feeling helpless and frustrated, laugh at the absurdity of it all. One day a year, laugh at the repetitive nature of our history and at the perennial desire of our enemies to wipe us out. Once a year, read from a comic scroll that depicts a buffoon of a king incapable of making independent decisions, an evil villain who ends up hanging from his own gallows, eunuchs who save the day, and an objectified woman in a misogynistic court who ends up, effectively, ruling the empire – and laugh! Not because you think men like Haman will not rise again; You know they will. Laugh to protest that evil, to tell it that no matter what it tries to do to us, we will never let go of the conviction that things should be different.
Megillat Esther, like the book of Iyov, tries to make sense of the unpredictability of our world. Like the author of Iyov, the author of Esther wrestles with the harsh truth that our happiness is not automatically guaranteed. But Megillat Esther offers us an alternative way to integrate life’s tragic moments. Get together and laugh, she says. It won’t make the pain go away, but it can exist alongside it. And when you laugh with those who know your pain, then you will be able, for just the briefest of moments, to take their hands and step beyond it. And when you do, you will remember that there is a part of yourself, and a set of beliefs, that you refuse to abandon.