Divine Comedy: Humor in Walker Percy’s Novels, the Bible, and Saintly Lives
Citing the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, novelist Walker Percy posited that the comic and the religious view of life are of the same essence. A provocative notion, indeed, especially given the lived experience of Percy, whose early biography prompts the question: what business had he to take a comic view of life or faith or anything? For the childhood of Percy was marked not by the Good Humor memories of halcyon summer years, but by unthinkable tragedy. Percy’s grandfather died by suicide when he was a year old. His own father died in the same manner when Percy was 13. And when his mother died just a couple of years later it was widely suspected by many, including by Percy himself, that she too had succumbed to suicide. This was hardly the grounding for a career as a comedic novelist. Or so it would seem. But I would argue that Percy developed his well-formed sense of humor, which was sometimes, although certainly not exclusively, dark because of—not despite—his childhood trauma. Some see tragedy and humor as opposite sides of the same coin. But, more often they are the same side of the same coin—trading places as to which emanates from the other. Evidence for this abounds. Have we not all seen, and likely experienced ourselves, humor arising from tragic circumstances? And do we not all recognize the wisdom of the adage that “many a true word has been spoken in jest?” Many a true, and often, tragic word.
Tragedy and comedy walk hand in hand in all of Percy’s novels, perhaps never more strikingly so than in Love in the Ruins. Here is the story of a man broken by the death of his young daughter, the betrayal of his wife, and the ravages of his own addiction. Here is also, arguably, Percy’s funniest work. The humor begins right at the outset, with the book’s appositive subtitle: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Very Near the End of the World. The protagonist of this book is Dr. Tom More, named for St. Thomas More who, it turns out, was known for his great wit and prayed for a good sense of humor, a meditative practice perhaps all of us should take up in face of the outrages, assaults, and humiliations of daily life to which we, like Tom More, are heir. Love in the Ruins is a cautionary, apocalyptic tale, an allegory, a high adventure, a war novel, a political satire, a mystery, a spiritual journey, and more all rolled into one. And it is very funny. This is a work that skewers human hypocrisy, and the absurd, contradictory approaches people take to faith, politics, and social causes. No group is spared the jaded, but always on target, critique of Dr. More—believers, non-believers, conservatives, liberals, activists, over-achievers, slackers, Whites, Blacks. There are carnivorous Hindus who, despite their professed gentleness, vegetarianism, and reverence for the sanctity of all living beings, wreck Tom More’s marriage and fall upon his barbecued steaks like starving jackals. There are country club Christians who present the Lord as the greatest pro golfer of all time—a title I have yet to come across in any exegesis—and there are social justice warriors who practice creative non-violent violence. “That is violence in the service of non-violence.”
The census offered by Tom of the denizens of Paradise Estates, the suburban enclave where he lives, and which will soon become a kind of Paradise Lost, is literary snark in its highest form:
In Paradise Estates there lived . . . all manner of conservative folk, graduates of Bob Jones University, retired Air Force colonels, passed-over Navy commanders, ex-Washington D.C. policemen, patriotic chiropractors, two officials of the National Rifle Association, and six conservative proctologists.
Love in the Ruins was first published in 1971, fifty-five years ago, but it takes place in a future where there is extreme political and racial polarization to the point of civil war, conspiracy theories abound, and there are disputes over federal elections. There are also major divisions in the Church, saying “Merry Christmas” is politicized and the younger generation is living in protest with Louisiana’s Honey Island swamp filled with disaffected Tulane University dropouts. I doubt many Tulane students have decamped to the Honey Island swamp, or could even find it on a Google map, but doesn’t the rest of this sound eerily familiar?
Probably the most memorable exchange in Love in the Ruins occurs near the end of the book. Tom has returned to the Sacrament of Confession for the first time in eleven years and he is unsparing in his self-indictment, readily owning up to “drunkenness, lusts, envies, fornication, delight in the misfortune of others, and loving myself better than God and other men.” The priest is not really surprised by this confession—he knows Tom well—but the Damascus jolt comes when he asks Tom if he is sorry for his sins. If you have been to Confession—ever—this is a rather standard question, with a definite right or wrong answer. But Tom’s answer is anything but standard. He says, no, not really. The priest is flummoxed and annoyed. But when he presses him if he is truly unrepentant, Tom admits: “I’m sorry.”
“You are?” the priest asks.
“Yes.”
“For what?”
“For not being sorry.”
This is a moment of pure Percyian magic, freighted with both profundity and humor. The answer Tom gives is funny and even flippant at first glance but, upon closer inspection, it reveals a true contrition and humbling acknowledgment of just how far this particular penitent is from God and how regrettably so. The priest is not without his own comic view of life and the afterlife. He says he often imagines himself in the outer circle of hell, where the heat and discomfort seem only slightly less tolerable than the Louisiana summers Percy endured, when, “Along comes Our Lady who spies me and says: ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, you here? This is ridiculous.’”
But the religious-comic spirit in which Percy’s genius operated goes far beyond the ideal of the joking priest or the cheerful nun. It went deeper, I think, than holy humor. Percy seemed to indicate that humor—rather than serving as an accompaniment of a good homily or a welcomed virtue in the religious—can be a form of holiness itself, a detaching of oneself from the world. Through mockery, the humorist highlights the absurdity of the things that the material world and material man values—power, wealth, self-importance, etc. Done right, comedy can expose the ultimate vanity of all things—the “vanities of vanities.” That phrase from Ecclesiastes brings us to another source of humor that surely inspired Percy—the Bible itself. While certainly not considered a comedic work—at least not by believers—the Bible is filled with witty asides and sarcasms. For instance, to many a modern parent, Solomon showed the height of his wisdom (and wit) not through his famous pronouncement in the dispute between the two women claiming motherhood of the same child, but in this gem from the seventeenth chapter of Proverbs, “The father of a numbskull has no joy.”
There are many other instances of irony and humor in the Bible, which employ all the elements of comedy—sarcasm, exaggeration, absurdity, the unexpected twist. There is the scene in First Kings where Elijah taunts the false prophets when their god does not respond to their full-throated appeal for him to consume the sacrifice: “Call louder, for he is a god and may be meditating, or may have retired, or may be on a journey,” Elijah mocks. “Perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened” (1 Kings 18:27). St. Paul practices biting sarcasm with the Corinthians when he tells them, “Being wise yourselves, you gladly put up with fools” (2 Cor. 11-19). In the book of Numbers there is a talking donkey who can see an angel with a drawn sword in the middle of the road when the prophet Balaam, who is riding her, cannot. And the donkey tells the prophet, in plain human language, to quit beating her and urging her onward. This is fantastical humor, of course, and yet is a talking donkey all that surprising to today’s readers? Our nation is in the midst of mid-term elections. Have we not all heard plenty of jackasses talking in the past few months, with the promise of more mulish vocalizations to come? But this is a level of cynicism unworthy of the subject of this paper, whose great-uncle was a U.S. Senator and who was by no means apolitical himself. So please be a studious, serial, and conscience-bound voter. Our civic duty and Catholic tradition demand it. Plus, it is a great way to kill an hour. And if you are lucky enough to live in a state like mine and Percy’s, you can go ahead and vote two or three times on Election Day—even if you are dead.
The many Saints and Popes who were known for their good humor, and of whom Percy was surely aware, underscore the truth of the notion that if we take the soul seriously, we can take everything else lightly. In his famous “self-interview” Percy humorously referenced Saint Simeon the Stylite, a fifth-century ascetic who lived atop a pillar for thirty-six years, as evidence that God can sometimes select “a local nut” to accomplish his will. The author also knew, of course, of Saint Philip Neri, who used humor and silliness to combat pride and once shaved half his beard and went about town in mirthful self-abasement. Such a comedic spiritual exercise finds modern expression in the standup comedian, especially the ones who practice the self-deprecating variety of wit. Knowingly or not, such comics experience the fulfillment of the promise of Christ that “whoever humbles himself will be exalted.” The comic denigrates himself as the target of his own ridicule but then, if the humor works, is exalted by the laughter and approbation of the crowd.
Saint Teresa of Avila embraced the comic-religious ethos when she declared that “a sad nun is a bad nun.” And, of course, there is her famous remark to the Lord that, “If this is how you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few of them.” There is also St. Lawrence’s darkly humorous directive to his executioners while being burned alive to “Turn me over; I’m done on this side.” And for a more contemporary example, when reporters took note of the vast Vatican bureaucracy and asked Pope John XXIII how many people actually worked at the Vatican, the Holy Father thought for a moment and then answered, “About half of them.”
Tragedy and humor also appear side by side in Percy’s first, and most famous novel, The Moviegoer. Bodily death and suicidal ideation haunt the book’s pages, but the protagonist Binx Bolling, like so many of Percy’s leading men (they are all men) sees death in the very “everydayness” of daily living and in the tedium of what Paul Simon would term its dangling conversations. But Binx makes his observations with great wit:
For some time now, the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead. It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence, it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can. At such times it seems that the conversation is spoken by automatons who have no choice in what they say. I hear myself or someone else saying things like: “In my opinion the Russian people are a great people, but—” or, “Yes, what you say about the hypocrisy of the North is unquestionably true. However—” and I think to myself: this is death. Lately it is all I can do to carry on such everyday conversations, because my cheek has developed a tendency to twitch of its own accord.
In The Moviegoer, Love in the Ruins, The Second Coming, and other works, Percy poked fun at the approaches to faith by individuals or entire sects, but never at authentic belief and the genuinely sacred. This is the type of faith-based humor perfected by Flannery O’Connor and one which has informed my own work, especially in the novel The Knights of Wade. Now, I only raise the latter point to introduce my book, in an otherwise unrelated context, and as a gentle reminder that The Knights of Wade is available for purchase for only $ 19.95 at bookstores everywhere and on Amazon.
But seriously, I think there is a richness and good-heartedness in pointing out the foibles and contradictions practiced by ourselves and others on the journey of faith. My hope is that the Lord himself laughs at us and with us in the same way. Are we not told the Lord delights in his people? I like to imagine that maybe, on occasion, what the Lord finds so head-shakingly funny about us is our feeble attempts at piety, our half-measures and wandering grasps at holiness, our childlike bargaining and resentments. God is our Father. He loves like a good parent loves. What mother or father has not laughed at their own child’s mischief and failings? I am not talking about serious misdeeds, but what about the clumsy attempts to hide evidence of the broken vase or the pilfered last cookie or one’s search engine history or any effort to conceal misbehavior which often turns out to be as futile and as laughable as the pitiful subterfuge Adam and Eve undertook as they tried to hide themselves in the garden from their All-Seeing Creator. It seems to me that the act of attempting to conceal sin reveals a fear of the Lord in the very midst of disobedience. And that can be funny. Is the fact that it can be funny, the very thing that softens the heart of God and makes us so forgivable? To quote Binx near the end of The Moviegoer, “it is impossible to say.” But what is clear is that ours is not an easy path. The road to heaven is narrow and rough and can be lonely. Why not have a few laughs along the way?
Speaking of laughter, I have truly completed the errand of a fool if, in the reading of this paper, you have not had a few laughs. The last thing I wanted to do was to write a paper on humor, edifying or otherwise, and elicit no laughter from the reader. In doing so, I would have fallen headlong into the conundrum of which E. B. White warned: “Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process . . . .”
My prayer is that you keep the laughter (and the frogs) alive.
