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Hello, fellow wayfarers … How gallows humor is what we need right now to overcome cynicism … Why I made the shift from Twitter to Bluesky … What I learned from Nancy Guthrie about how to read the Bible and how to suffer well … A Desert Island Bookshelf from Down Under … This is this week’s Moore to the Point.
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How a Dark Sense of Humor Can Save You from Cynicism
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"A dark sense of humor can be an early sign of dementia." I didn’t read that in a peer-reviewed medical study but on a social media meme, right before I left the platform formerly known as Twitter for bluer skies.
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That means I have no idea whether the claim is true or false. But when I read it to my wife, she said, "Well, then, you’re in trouble. You think gallows humor is a fruit of the Spirit."
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I think she’s thinking of moments such as election night some weeks ago, when I raised my glass and said, "Next year in Guantanamo!" I don’t quite think dark humor is a virtue, but I do think it can be a blessing sometimes. And at least a little bit of it might be what we need to combat cynicism in a cynical time.
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One of the hardest things for me to get used to as a young minister was the joking that would go on "backstage" at funerals. The funeral directors looked appropriately somber and sympathetic with the families, but the minute the elevator doors closed, they were telling jokes and one-upping each other with puns and anecdotes. Some of the most resonant laughter I’d ever heard was around a casket. I was unnerved.
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I tried for a while to spiritually and psychologically diagnose this sense of humor: It was the result of routinization, perhaps. This had become a job for them, and with the familiarity of it, they had grown numb. That kind of dark humor is indeed a warning sign—maybe not of dementia, but certainly of cynicism. One can see this all over the place these days with the sort of "LOL, nothing matters" humor, a hyena-like quality of this twisted time, a way of signaling that one is not inhibited by the naive strictures of morality or sincerity or hope.
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But not all of those funeral directors were cynical. For some of them, the humor, though dark, was a different kind of coping mechanism. The laughter was to keep them from normalizing the grim reality of their daily task. Laughing was a way of reminding themselves that death does not, in fact, have the final word.
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In his book A Far Glory: The Quest for Faith in an Age of Credulity, sociologist Peter Berger argues (rightly, in my view) that abstractions posing as "proofs of the existence of God" convince almost no one that God is there. Even if they do, they don’t settle the really important question: Which God is there? The God of the philosophers or the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? The God who is the "Ground of Being" or the God who loves you?
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Instead, Berger argued that for many people, the most compelling "evidence" for God comes in the unplanned moments of ordinary life, when "signals of transcendence" seem to break through the everydayness of it all.
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None of these signposts, he wrote, are decisive and definitive on their own. A baby is born, and you are overwhelmed by a love that seems to be about far more than just mammalian biology. By morning you can convince yourself that that kind of gratitude and awe was really nothing. But these realities—when faced honestly—evoke a longing that points us to something beyond the ordinary. It takes a decision of faith to find in these moments signals of transcendence, Berger wrote, but "the faith in these signals is not baseless."
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"It takes my own experience seriously," he argued, "and dares to suppose that what this experience intends is not a lie."
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Of all these signals, Berger wrote, the one that intrigued him most was humor, and, specifically, the kind of humor that emerges in dark times.
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"There is something profoundly mysterious and puzzling about the comic, most of all its power to provoke, for an instant at least, what is suggestively called ‘redeeming laughter,’ even in moments of singular terror or grief," he wrote. "We all know that these emotions will return once the moment of laughter has passed. But in that moment, all the fears and sorrows of existence have been banished; in that moment, if you will, my laughter intends eternity."
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Berger asked whether this is all just an illusion—and, without a frame of trust in some larger reality, it would seem to be nothing more. But for that one brief instant, the darkness actually is broken. The fear and nothingness is replaced with laughter.
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Elsewhere, Berger wrote about why we find things funny and located a crucial part of it in incongruence, the difference between the way things are and the way they should be. The incongruence itself, he argued, ought to be something of a sign that we are not quite at home in the world as it is.
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Frederick Buechner argued that the gospel simultaneously inhabits the worlds of tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale (not meaning made-up fiction but the reality to which fairy tales point, in which the tragic gives way to the comic). The parables of Jesus, he suggested, work that way—they take ordinary reality and turn it upside-down in shocking, surprising, incongruous ways.
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"Switching on the lectern light and clearing his throat, the preacher speaks both the word of tragedy and the word of comedy because they are both of them the truth and because Jesus speaks them both, blessed be he," Buechner writes. He continues,
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The preacher tells the truth by speaking of the visible absence of God because if he doesn’t see and own up to the absence of God in the world, then he is the only one there who doesn’t see it, and who then is going to take him seriously when he tries to make real what he claims also to see as the invisible presence of God in the world?
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If all that you see is comedy, you are in denial. If all that you see is tragedy, then you are in despair. But if you see them both, you will learn how to both laugh and cry—and sometimes to do both at the same time. You will see that the darkness around you (and sometimes within you) is real. But you will also see that it is not ultimate.
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A little bit of gallows humor can break the spell, just for a moment. It can remind us that even when we laugh, there is much that is broken—and that even when we cry, underneath it all, there is joy.
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A moment of laughter in grave times can shake us out of the fear that can come when we look for signs of God’s presence in a fallen universe. It can remind us that the sign is the absence itself—and of the pain of longing that it evokes. A little bit of humor in a dark time can shake us to hear the words our mothers in the garden needed to hear 2,000 years ago: "Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you …" (Luke 24:5–6, ESV).
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Not all of us will ever get dementia, but all of us tend to forget. We see the tragedy and forget to laugh. We see the triviality and we forget to cry. A lot of dark humor can make us cynical, but a little bit of it can help us remember that on the other side of the valley of the shadow of death is a wedding—a party so full of laughter that we will never again think of any gallows, other than the cross that made everything sad come untrue.
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Speaking of humor, I have mentioned here before that I first realized Twitter had changed when I made an inside joke about a pastor friend—known for his radical opposition to all things prosperity gospel—driving a Bentley.
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He wasn’t, of course, and it didn’t take comedic genius to get that it was a joke. But mobs of people responded with outrage and cries of hypocrisy. I remember thinking, Am I just especially subtle, or are lots of people dumber, and meaner, than I ever knew?
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You can come to your own conclusions on that query, but Twitter went from being a place where I could "meet" new people, catch up with old friends, and interact with folks about common areas of interest to … (gestures broadly). Twitter came to be all gallows, no humor.
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I found that I would post things but never read replies. I would look at news feeds I followed but virtually nothing else. Even that, though, was a soul-draining experience. Despite the fact that I wasn’t following trolls or provocateurs, they kept showing up in my feed—or people interacting with them did. I really didn’t care about the live ongoing rendition of "Springtime for Hitler" by some old friends’ interns. So I just didn’t take the time to really use the platform.
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Like about a million people a day, I have joined Bluesky, and signed up expecting to hate it. But I don’t. Instead, I find that it reminds me of "old Twitter," in the sense that I can actually see stuff I’m interested in apart from the algorithm trying to force-feed me white nationalist trolls, etc. I can catch up with what’s going on with friends, answer and ask questions of people, and even laugh.
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A friend told me that, over on the old platform, some people say that Bluesky is an echo chamber. I haven’t bothered to look, but it’s actually the opposite. We can communicate without having to stop with some random guy screaming, "Winston Churchill was actually the bad guy!" or "The Son is actually subservient to the Father!" or whatever.
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Plus, it feels kind of like the title of the old parenting book Get Out of My Life, but First Could You Drive Me and Cheryl to the Mall? except that it’s Get Out of Here, Heretic—Wait, How Dare You Leave Me? Some religious institutions also work that way.
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So, I’m over there at the handle @drmoore.bsky.social. Let me know if any newsletter readers are over there too. You will have to endure country music commentary and so forth, but I promise to limit the gallows humor to only what is necessary.
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How to Love and Learn from the Old Testament
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One of my all-time favorite living Bible teachers is Nancy Guthrie, who lives right down the way from us here in Nashville.
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On this week’s podcast, I talk to Nancy about how the Bible helped her through family suffering and how she helps others in similar situations, without a trite kind of "Well, God works all things for the good" dismissal of their pain. We discussed what she learned writing her new book Saved: Experiencing the Promise of the Book of Acts.
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We also talked about how she knows the Bible is, in fact, true; how to deal with difficult passages such as the warfare texts of Joshua; what it’s like to navigate stereotypes when being both a woman and a teacher of Scripture; and how to maintain the attention needed to pray and to read Scripture.
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"The Bible is the one thing in the world that the closer scrutiny you give to it," she tells me, "the more it holds up."
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You can listen to our conversation here.
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Next Wednesday is Thanksgiving Eve, so I won’t be in your inbox then. I’ll be back on December 4, and Advent purists should know that I will be playing Christmas music by then (and I might even be playing it now). You can air your grievances with me about that on Festivus.
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Every other week, I share a list of books that one of you says you’d want to have on hand if you were stranded on a deserted island. This week’s submission comes from reader Chris Dalton,who writes: "I live in a small town in northern Victoria called Elmore with my wife and three kids. Victoria is one of the states of Australia."
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Chris notes that he recently "nervously preached for the first time." He continues, "I have encountered your ministry through your podcast, books, and articles. Your newsletter is so helpful in my walk with Christ."
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Here’s Chris’s bookshelf:
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- Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett: In the last year, I have become a huge fan of Ann Patchett. I was lucky enough to see her in person this year at the Melbourne Writers Festival. Books of hers I have particularly enjoyed are her essay collections These Precious Days and This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage. These books are not in the photo because I keep giving them away to friends. Truth and Beauty is the wonderful story of Ann Patchett’s friendship with fellow author Lucy
Grealy. Also worth a read.
- A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson: As a young person, science seemed so boring to me. My science teachers seemed to almost exhale dust. Here, Bill Bryson tells the story of science in a way that is unputdownable. Maybe I would have been a physicist if I had read this at 14 years old!
- Yellow Notebook by Helen Garner: Helen Garner is an Australian treasure. I love her beautifully crafted nonfiction writing. She is a stunning essayist—I particularly recommend Everywhere I Look (which isn’t in the photo because, like Ann Patchett books, I keep giving it away). Yellow Notebook is the first volume of her diaries.
- If the Dead Rise Not by Philip Kerr: Philip Kerr is the best historical fiction writer about Weimar Germany and the Third Reich that I have read. Kerr’s character Bernie Gunther is the "everyman" detective and, later, policeman, trying to morally navigate his way in a world fallen into darkness. The history and the humor in the Bernie Gunther series of novels is fantastic.
- The Years of Lyndon Johnson series by Robert A. Caro: When a friend told me that I should read a four-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson—and that the fifth volume dealing with his actual time as president hadn’t been written yet—I thought he was by definition certifiably insane. Yet Caro’s sprawling story of Johnson is mesmerizing and sets out to answer a profound question: "How can a very bad man possibly do a very good thing?"
- Cultural Amnesia by Clive James: Another Australian treasure. Clive James is another beautiful essayist and his memoirs are worth a read. This book is a series of short essays on great Western cultural identities, from Tacitus to Margaret Thatcher. The catholicity of his range is astonishing.
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