April Fools: Humor in the Bible

The Bible might have a reputation as one of the most humorless books around. I mean, it starts with a bang, but quickly descends into genealogies, massacres, and accounts of obscure kings. The New Testament gospels are pretty interesting, but let's face it, not all that funny. So on April Fool's Day, where's the humor?

There is some, believe it or not. Remember, the Bible is fundamentally rooted in oral culture, and so the kinds of stories that are fun to tell are often the kinds of stories that find their way into the Bible. Those stories are, occasionally, pretty funny. And if you know the original Hebrew and Greek, the text is actually littered with word plays and puns.

I'll just share one example to illustrate the point. The book of Acts is pretty ho-hum from a humor standpoint (lots of traveling and preaching and people getting stoned, and not the kind that makes them giggle). But there's one story in particular that stands out as probably, in my opinion, the funniest in the entire Bible. It's the story of Eutychus in Acts 20:9-12. I recommend reading it on The Brick Testament, and if you click on that link, you'll see why.

Eutychus was listening to a sermon by Paul. They were apparently in an apartment building, and not a house, since they were on the 3rd floor. (You can see a Roman example of the sort of building they were probably in, in the picture up at the top of this post). Paul was in town, and started preaching. He went on, and on, and on, and.......on and on. Finally Eutychus, who was sitting in the window, fell asleep. He fell out of the window, 3 stories to the ground, and when they got to him, he was already dead. Paul had killed Eutychus with his boring sermon.

Somehow, Paul is able to revive Eutychus. Everyone is relieved! Lesson learned, right? Wrong. Paul marches right back upstairs, Acts tells us, and continued to talk until dawn.

See, now that's funny! Who doesn't love a joke about boring preachers who just don't get how boring they are? And it's right there in the Bible! I imagine this as a story that Christians would have told each other for generations, remembering the time Paul, one of the most important and influential Christians of all time, literally bored a man to death.