Kierkegaard and the Legitimacy of the Comic: Understanding the Relevance of Irony, Humor, and the Comic for Ethics and Religion by Will Williams

Abstract

Reviewed by: Kierkegaard and the Legitimacy of the Comic: Understanding the Relevance of Irony, Humor, and the Comic for Ethics and Religion by Will Williams Ronald F. Marshall Kierkegaard and the Legitimacy of the Comic: Understanding the Relevance of Irony, Humor, and the Comic for Ethics and Religion. By Will Williams. New York: Lexington Books, 2018. xxi + 201 pp. H. V. Martin's classic, Kierkegaard the Melancholy Dane (1950), made it sound like Kierkegaard did not have a funny bone. Professor Williams of Le Tourneau University has now laid that to rest by showing that "it is an error to read Kierkegaard as solely listing a series of direct propositions, ignoring his irony entirely" (132). Williams adds that "the comic is not just illustrative of his edifying project, but [End Page 85] essential to it" (94). That is because "the comic can both prepare one for becoming a Christian and remind one of how a Christian is supposed to live" (185). Williams, however, does not jettison Kierkegaard's seriousness in the name of lightheartedness, because Kierkegaard is not about "the uproariously despairing play of an untamed irony" (132). Without that check Kierkegaard would be linked up with Jeremy Sisto as Jesus playing tag with his disciples in the movie, Jesus (1999). Williams first elucidates the concept of the comic in Kierkegaard's book, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, which he believes is Kierkegaard's best treatment of the subject. He then shows how this analysis is confirmed in three later works—Prefaces, Upbuildoing Discourses in Various Spirits, and The Corsair Affair. In the last part Williams shows how deconstructivist and theological appropriations of Kierkegaard's humor neglect his serious side (122, 177). Williams gives a Kierkegaardian definition of humor as a polemical incongruity that subverts a prominent norm (6, 7, 16, 34). He thinks this definition shows that Christianity is "the most humorous view of life in world-history"—in keeping with Kierkegaard's judgment, that Christianity is "the least conformed to the expectations and understandings of the world" (55n147). Even though Williams finds this definition useful, he concedes that it is a construct and that in the end Kierkegaard questioned all neat, composite definitions of humor (178). I wish Williams would have tested his key definition of Kierkegaardian humor by applying it to examples from Kierkegaard's writings—including 250 of them in Thomas Oden's The Humor of Kierkegaard: An Anthology (2004). One example has a wise man telling an unbeliever that praying for help in a storm at sea is no time, at long last, to start praying because "if heaven discovers that you are on board, the ship will capsize" (Oden, 134). This remark is in keeping with the definition's standards. They are also illustrated when Kierkegaard has a man say what he liked about Sunday's sermon—"Well, there were some really good things in it—for example, the Lord's Prayer" (Journals, ed, Hongs §2:1760). Another comment sees New Testament Christianity being related to the state church the way a most sorrowful melody is "played with the beat of dance music." [End Page 86] (Journals, §§3:3623). These examples prove Kierkegaard's point that "the wisdom of the secular mind is always relativism…. If I forget this relativity, then the comical appears. And no one will care about my acting out of fear and trembling before God. It is absolutely impossible, absolutely, for a Christian not to make himself laughable. For what is more laudable than the absolute in this world, which is a world of relativity" (Journals §1:492). Williams shows that Kierkegaard's humor undergirds the fact that he was not a "Nietzschean critic of traditional Christianity, nor a proud aesthete whose fine art is to be appreciated without understanding, nor a perverse self-torturer whose writings are primarily to be plumbed for their prurient biographical details, nor a Deconstructionist Mad Hatter who makes witty banter while important matters go unexamined, but a perceptive Christian who is concerned that the traditional faith is being mishandled and distorted in the name of fashionable philosophy and cultural complacency" (182). Ronald F. Marshall First Lutheran Church of West Seattle Seattle, Washington Copyright © 2022 Johns Hopkins...