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"Humorless prig" is redundant

"Humorless prig" is redundant

Last updated on: August 4, 2013 at 1:25 am by Fred Clark

"Humorless prig" is redundant 2013-08-04T01:25:37-04:00 Fred Clark

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Is humor redemptive? Or, put another way, is not allowing oneself to have a sense of humor a sin?

I think it can be. Or, rather, I think it can be the consequence of sin. Joylessness often is.

What brings this up was a recent alert — I mean, ALERT!1! — that popped up on Facebook, lamenting and condemning an allegedly soon-to-be-published "gay friendly Bible." Responses from the Anti Kitten-Burning Coalition included the usual sorts of thing:

"America has gone mad. Like Sodom and Gomorrah. We are truly at the end times."

"This is OUTRAGEOUS!"

"Mess with rewriting the bible, you'll experience the wrath of god."

"God help us. Pray for our nation."

Etc., etc., etc.

This alleged revision of the Bible was supposedly to be published by something called "Pink Cross Publishing."

Here, let me Google that for you.

Hmm. Just one result, for a discussion site called "CafeMom" on which the same ALERT!1! was posted with 265 hyperventilating comments, many similar to those quoted above.

But what's this?

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 1 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

Yes, please, let's do that.

Ah. Now we get two search results. And the second one is for something called "Dead Serious News" — a parody site not quite managing to be as funny or incisive as The Onion or Lark News.

It seems the story was a clumsy parody bit originally posted in April of last year.

So it's just another example of the IndigNation getting stirred up due to their failure to recognize a joke. The result is that they're worked into a tizzy over something fabricated and wholly imaginary.

So in other words, it's a weekday.

We've previously discussed how an addiction to self-righteous indignation and smug superiority creates an endless, self-reinforcing vicious cycle (literally vicious) of the sins of pride and of bearing false witness. And we've discussed the crippling effects this has on the functional intelligence of those trapped in this cycle of smug. But encountering this umpteenth example of the IndigNation's inability to recognize or appreciate jokes, I realized we hadn't yet dealt with this aspect of the self-righteousness trap.

Smugness and the sin of pride makes you humorless. It reduces your capacity for recognizing humor, your ability to get jokes. And it almost totally eliminates your capacity for contributing humor, your ability to make jokes.

I realize that in the grand scheme of things, this may seem like a less important consequence than the soul-corroding evil or the harm done to others or the self-destructive abandonment of critical thinking. But joy matters. Cutting oneself off from humor isn't good for you. It's a way of cutting yourself off from redemption — from the gaiety transfiguring all this dread.

And it's just possible that pointing out their humorlessness will sting more for the members of the IndigNation than will pointing out the other malignant consequences of their addiction to self-righteous self-congratulation. They don't really seem to care that their bearing false witness does harm to others. And they don't seem to miss the capacity for critical thinking that they have surrendered.

But, as Sinclair Lewis noted in Main Street, the accusation that one lacks a sense of humor is an insult "which no human being will endure."

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