Screwtape teaches a seminar on the different kinds of laughter and explains which serve the purposes of Hell. I was joined by David Niles and Adam Minihan, lifelong friends and co-hosts of The Catholic Man Show.
S4E19: Letter #11 – “I love to laugh” (Download)
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Timestamps
00:00 – Entering “The Eagle & Child”…
00:14 – Welcome
00:53 – Chit-Chat
01:53 – Adam and David
09:38 – Song-of-the-week
10:22 – What makes you laugh?
15:28 – Quote-of-the-week
15:48 – Drink-of-the-week
20:26 – Toast
20:42 – Chapter Summary
21:28 – Discussion
53:01 – Unscrewing Screwtape
56:28 – “Last Call” Bell and Closing Remarks
YouTube Version
After Show Skype Session
About a month after posting this episode I recorded a short video:
Show Notes
Opening Chit-Chat
- I had Dave and Adam introduce each other.
- I first came across their podcast, The Catholic Man Show, while I was walking the Camino De Santiago. I was apparently one of their first listeners outside of Oklahoma. Adam took the opportunity to apologise for getting my name wrong when they gave me a shout-out! I’ll have to check, but I think they called me “Steve”…
- I asked them to give a quick pitch for their podcast.
Song-of-the-week
- Today we were discussing Letter #11 from The Screwtape Letters, a letter which Adam and Dave mentioned on an episode of your show a couple of months ago.
- Since this chapter is on the subject of laughter and humour, the episode title comes from a song in my favourite childhood movie, Marie Poppins. The episode title is I love to laugh, which for those of you who haven’t seen the movie, is sung in a scene where the children have a tea party on the ceiling…
- I asked Adam and Dave about their favourite comedy shows. Since both of them are fathers, I asked them to demonstrate the virtue of hilaritas by sharing with the listeners some of their best Dad jokes.
Quote-of-the-week
- The quote-of-the-week came from today’s letter:
“Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made… If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armour-plating against the Enemy that I know…”
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #11)
Drink-of-the-week
- The drink-of-the-week is a blend, Buchanan’s Deluxe
- Nose: Slight hints of peat, orange zest and vanilla cream.
- Palate: Vanilla continues, with plenty of orchard fruit in tow. Caramel sweetness.
- Finish: Cigar box and peat smoke.
- Adam made the pitch for me and my wife moving to Tulsa.
Patreon Toast
- Each episode we toast one our our Gold-level supporters on Patreon and today we are toasting Alex Swetz, but since I’m in the presence of greatness, I’d like you guys to do the toast!
Alex, may you always be free from flippancy and filled with joy…
Patreon Toast
Chapter Summary
- Moving on to the one-hundred word summary of today’s letter, which was first published in The Guardian on 11th July, 1941…
Hearing that the patient’s worldly friends are great laughers, Screwtape describes four kinds of laughter…
One-hundred word summary of Chapter 11
“Joy” is the kind of laughter which appears between friends reunited on the eve of a holiday. It must be avoided at all costs!
Next there is “Fun”, emotional froth arising from the play instinct. It is not much use, except as a distraction.
The next is “The Joke Proper”, which stems from the perception of incongruity. It can be used to destroy shame.
Finally, there is “Flippancy” which is to be encouraged as it protects the patient from God like a suit of armour.
Discussion
The Coterie
- Listeners will recall that Wormwood’s patient had recently made two new friends and Screwtape was overjoyed at this, their being worldly, skeptical and superficially intellectual. And Screwtape’s joy continues in today’s letter, because the patient’s new acquaintances have introduced him to their whole circle of friends. Screwtape notes with glee…
All these, as I find from the record office, are thoroughly reliable people; steady, consistent scoffers and worldlings who without any spectacular crimes are progressing quietly and comfortably towards our Father’s house.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #11)
This reiterates the lesson from Letter 7, in that Screwtape is perfectly happy with fairly unimpressive faults as long as it ultimately results in the capture of a soul.
- Screwtape’s comments also show the importance one’s friends play in getting you to your final destination, either Heaven or Hell. As a supporter of The Catholic Man Show on Patreon, I get to experience their online community, The Council of Man, and I’ve seen the good that community, even an online community can foster. I think we’ll find the description of these folks as “scoffers” important as we go through this latter.
- Adam hates mint-chocolate chip ice-cream – please pray for him.
- I ended this section by quoting St. Paul:
Do not be misled: “Bad company corrupts good character.”
1 Corinthians 15:33
The Four Laughters
- From what Screwtape says next, it seems that Wormwood in his last letter described this broader group of friends as being “great laughers”. Screwtape is suspicious of this description, receiving the impression from his nephew that laughter is always in Hell’s favour. He therefore devotes the rest of this letter to describing the different types of laughter and which of them can be used for their cause.
- So, C.S. Lewis, the author of “The Four Loves” now writes to us (through the voice of ) about “The Four Laughters”…
Laughter #1: Joy
- The first kind of laughter Screwtape describes he calls “Joy”. This is always a rather loaded term with Lewis. Here’s how Screwtape describes it:
You will see…[Joy] among friends and lovers reunited on the eve of a holiday. Among adults some pretext in the way of Jokes is usually provided, but the facility with which the smallest witticisms produce laughter at such a time shows that they are not the real cause. What that real cause is we do not know.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #11)
- I think it’s worth noting that Screwtape is confused by joy. He doesn’t really know the cause and it all seems rather disproportionate to him – small witticisms produce great laughter. I suggested that the cause of this joy is love, which is why it’s utterly incomprehensible to the demons. Joy also requires humility and self-forgetfulness, something which isn’t in abundance in Hell:
…humor involves a sense of proportion and a power of seeing yourself from the outside. What ever else we attribute to beings who sinned through pride, we must not attribute this. Satan, said Chesterton, fell through force of gravity. We must picture Hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment…
– C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (1962 Preface)
Screwtape connects joy to music somehow:
Something like it is expressed in much of that detestable art which the humans call Music, and something like it occurs in Heaven — a meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience, quite opaque to us. Laughter of this kind does us no good and should always be discouraged. Besides, the phenomenon is of itself disgusting and a direct insult to the realism, dignity, and austerity of Hell.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #11)
Laughter #2: Fun
- The next king of laughter Screwtape calls “fun”. He says:
[It] is closely related to Joy — a sort of emotional froth arising from the play instinct.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book III, Chapter 11)
This kind of laughter is of very little use to Screwtape:
It is very little use to us. It can sometimes be used, of course, to divert humans from something else which the Enemy would like them to be feeling or doing: but in itself it has wholly undesirable tendencies; it promotes charity, courage, contentment, and many other evils.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book III, Chapter 11)
Laughter #3: The Joke Proper
- Next up, Screwtape describes “The Joke Proper”, laughter from jokes, which he says depends on the “sudden perception of incongruity”. Screwtape says this kind of laughter is much more promising.
- Rather surprisingly, he says that he’s not primarily thinking about indecent or bawdy humour. He says second-rate tempters rely on that but the results are often disappointing. In fact, in a rare moment of humility, Screwtape even admits to trying to rely on indecent jokes when he first started out! He says it’s often disappointing because people can have different kinds of relationships with bawdy jokes:
The first sort [of person] joke about sex because it gives rise to many incongruities: the second cultivate incongruities because they afford a pretext for talking about sex.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book III, Chapter 11)
In post-production, this reminds me of a comment by Douglas Gresham in a documentary:
I compared this issue to what St. Paul said about eating food sacrificed to idols:
Thus, sinning against your brethren and wounding their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ. Therefore, if food is a cause of my brother’s falling, I will never eat meat, lest I cause my brother to fall.
1 Corinthians 8:12-13
Screwtape then points out that a profitable use for jokes is in destroying shame. He says that it’s particularly effective with one particular nation:
…it is specially promising among the English who take their “sense of humour” so seriously that a deficiency in this sense is almost the only deficiency at which they feel shame. Humour is for them the all-consoling and (mark this) the all-excusing, grace of life. Any suggestion that there might be too much of it can be represented to him as “Puritanical” or as betraying a “lack of humour”
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book III, Chapter 11)
Jokes are all-excusing. Cruelty can be disguised as humour. How many times has someone said something nasty and then hidden behind “Just kidding! It’s a joke!” It makes me think of nasty characters Jane Austen novels.
Laugh #4: Flippancy
- Screwtape comes to the final type of laughter, flippancy, making light of something important in a disrespectful manner. Screwtape says that it is the best kind of laughter, in part because it doesn’t require cleverness:
…any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book III, Chapter 11)
- We might not think this too bad, but Screwtape tells us what will happen over time once the habit has been established:
If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armour-plating against the Enemy that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter. It is a thousand miles away from joy: it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practice it…
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book III, Chapter 11)
- Lewis’ word choice here puts me in mind of his spiritual autobiography, Surprised By Joy where he speaks about loosening his “armour” towards God, opening himself up to God.
- What does Screwtape love so much about flippancy? We said that i t’s lazy and doesn’t take God or virtue seriously. It’s inherently sacrilegious.
- I commented how flippancy escalates in a way which reminds me of Psalm 1, where the man goes from walking, to standing to sitting:
Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers…
Psalm 1:1
Screwtape Unscrewed
- Do: Pay attention to who is influencing you
- Do: Build a supportive community
- Do: celebrate joy!
- Do: have fun!
- Do: make jokes, (but be careful!)
- Do not: be flippant
