IN THE spring of 1951, Britain was still recovering from the attrition of total war and austerity, and badly needed a tonic to lift its drooping spirits. Salvation came at the beginning of May. The Festival of Britain, with its reaffirmation of faith in the nation’s future, drew enormous crowds.
Just a few weeks later, and on a much smaller scale, a group of four friends gathered in the Grafton Arms, just off Victoria Street, in London, to plan a new radio show. Talented, strange, and naturally comedic, they were united in their pursuit of the silly and the outrageous. A producer from the BBC heard about the project. After listening to a very scratchy recording and despite his initial apprehensions, he commissioned a radio comedy series, aptly titled Crazy People. Neither he nor audiences in need of uplift were to be disappointed.
Casting Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, Peter Sellers, and Michael Bentine in bizarre roles that involved ridiculous and absurd plots, the programme was broadcast on the Home Service. By the end of the first series, it had nearly two million listeners. Success led to the recording of a further nine series being under the new title The Goon Show. It brought fame to its creators, and the uniform lunacy of their weird characters helped to keep a tired nation both human and hopeful. Episodes included “The Dreaded Batter Pudding Hurler (of Bexhill-on-Sea)”, “Tales of Men’s Shirts”, and “The Phantom Head Shaver”.
Several of their nonsense songs, including the “Ying Tong Song” and “I’m Walking Backwards for Christmas” became hits. Catchphrases like “the dreaded lurgy” entered common usage and can still be heard today.
INVITED into the surreal world of Neddie Seagoon, Bluebottle, Count Jim Moriarty, and Hercules Grytpype-Thynne, audiences found laughter and relief in their antics and outbursts. Special effects and peculiar sounds added to the mirth. On one occasion, Milligan filled his socks with custard and swung them at some plywood in order to achieve a squelching sound.
But the relentless quest for fresh and funny material brought casualties. Milligan blamed his subsequent breakdown and the demise of his first marriage on the constant pressure of writing assignments and — true to the subversive values of the show — reportedly tried to murder Peter Sellers with a potato peeler.
THE show that influenced, among others, the Beatles, the Monty Python team, and Suzy Eddie Izzard serves as a reminder of the power of laughter. It carries intimations of the holy and the promise of redemption. Time spent laughing is life restored, even in the harshest or cruellest of conditions. In the most solemn settings, humour can assert itself, ribbing the portentous and inviting us to think lightly of ourselves when self-importance threatens.
Aristotle wrote: “No animal laughs save Man.” Some will argue that chimpanzees share this characteristic, but try telling them a joke about a man who goes into a bar and they are unlikely to be deflected from devouring their bananas.
The Goon Show (the word “Goon”, incidentally, was lifted from a Popeye cartoon) deserves three cheers for its exuberant madness and the way it helped the people of Britain “to believe in tomorrow” — one of the aims of the Festival of Britain.
It also points to a tension that has existed in Christianity from its beginning. Patently, most of us enjoy laughter and are enriched by it, but should we? St Francis certainly thought so, and described his brothers as “jokers and jesters of God”. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer reliably informs us that medieval pilgrimages embraced piety and pain on the journey to Becket’s shrine, but there was no shortage of banter or ribald humour en route as The Wife of Bath’s Tale and The Miller’s Tale make abundantly clear.
The Christian tradition has also found a small corner for the concept of the “holy fool”. It would have been quite something to witness St Basil the Blessed walking naked through Moscow, or St Symeon throwing walnuts at an astonished congregation, and eating sausages on Good Friday. In each case, their apparent folly questioned worldly values that are turned upside down in the kingdom of Christ.
ALONG with these strange and laudable exceptions, there also exists within Christianity a puritanical spirit that has too often diluted much of the joy of believing, preferring only sobriety or worse in this supposed vale of tears. Some sincere Christians have not been at ease with even happy or gentle laughter, interpreting both as contrary to a gospel that, in their estimation, privileges seriousness and restraint over levity and mirth.
Theologians and biblical scholars have often noted that the Jesus of the New Testament weeps but never laughs. Hymns that urge the faithful to “Be sober and keep vigil, the Judge is at the gate” reinforce the religious imagination that has been captured by the cross and “the man of sorrows, acquainted with grief”.
Critics of Christianity however, including Nietzsche and the poet Swinburne, have been dismayed by devotional art and iconography that seem to portray a grim Galilean preacher who has made the world “grow grey with his breath” and has no capacity for joy.
THERE is a paradox at the heart of Christianity. On the one hand, it is manifestly a religion of joy — “Rejoice in the Lord always and again I say rejoice” (Philippians 4.4) — yet the same apostle, Paul, can write, “ I have unceasing anguish in my heart” (Romans 9.2). He seems to recognise the dilemma of discipleship: we are “sorrowful but always rejoicing” (2 Corinthians 6.10), committed to One who is derided, but also messengers of “the good news of Christ” (2 Corinthians 10.14).
The paradox is real and is not always recognised. Given the choice, however, between a forlorn world that merits only penitential tears and perpetual sorrow, with no capacity for making merry, and one that places laughter within the divine economy of salvation, we must surely opt for the latter.
Christ in all his strangeness and mystery comes to us in his words and compassion — his silence and his sufferings. But, as the Christian creeds and councils of the early centuries repeatedly insisted, he is known to us most assuredly in the fullness and extent of his humanity — one recognisably like us. Without laughter, could we ever be truly Christ-like?
Canon Rod Garner is an Anglican priest, writer, and theologian.