Abstract
The contrast between Homo Ridens and Homo Religiosus is launched and followed by the tug of war between the laugh of God and the sin of laughter. Funniness in jokes with religious content is explored through the incongruity-resolution model developed by Suls, a psychologist expert in artificial intelligence: among the faithful abound believers whom it deems inappropriate the hilarious endings invented, with ulterior motives, by humorists. The transgression model in graphic design, elaborated by Alvarez Junco, provides the frame of reference to discern the camouflage of four frescos and a sculpture by Michelangelo, who knew more than he appeared, and was a dissident, but not a heretic. Humor cannot be reduced to jokes, and the taxonomy created by Long and Grasser (cognitive and experimental psychologists) has been used to accentuate the nexus between witticism in daily life interactions with religious connotations: their eleven categories have been portrayed using literary narratives authored by well-known European and Asian writers. Efforts have been made to draft them with the sense of humor that corresponds to the heading. Psychologists pay attention mainly to individual or group experiences, that is, religiosity. Artists have relied on camouflage to ensure that inquisitive persons do not react by penalizing.
Highlights
Millennia after millennia, religiousness and amazement have often gotten along well enough, because wondering is the art story tellers master when they seek to impress, and what they cause is a smile, and what they reap is applause
Throughout history and across cultures, religion and humor have been acknowledged as universals, but their nexus has been overlooked, and has received scant attention from psychologists, psychiatrists, philosophers, and anthropologists during the 20th and 21st century (Carbelo-Baquero 2006)
This understanding of how laughter emerges cognitively was substantiated experimentally, 123 years later, by Eysenck (1942), with three humor tests that included 100 verbal jokes, 52 humorous drawings with captions, and 37 paired photos sharing one similarity as well as other entirely different details: “laughter results from the sudden, insightful integration of contradictory or incongruous ideas, attitudes, or sentiments which are experienced objectively” (p. 307)
Summary
Religiousness and amazement have often gotten along well enough, because wondering is the art story tellers master when they seek to impress, and what they cause is a smile, and what they reap is applause. The notion of Homo Ridens (laughing person) may be dated back to Aristotle (384–322 BC) He made clear in his essay On the Parts of Animals that men and women are the only animals that laugh (Aristotle, 350 BCa, Book I, Section 10), and in his essay History of Animals stressed that the first laugh marks the baby’s transition to humanness, and the primary evidence of having acquired a soul in the new-born was laughter (Aristotle, 350 BCb, Book VII, Section 10). The focus of this article is on a sample of creative religious authors exhibiting astonishment and sense of humor They had been painters, sculptors, writers, nuns or monks, story tellers: they produced, they invented, they dreamed up, and knew how sensitive religious topics are, in some religions, but not in all. A case study of narratives and graphics has been the methodology used, and examples are integrated into those categories hanging, each time, from the previous numbered epigraph
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