Overview

What's so humorous about the Bible? Quite a bit, especially if experienced with others! Nine biblical scholars explore their experiences of reading and hearing passages from the Bible and discovering humor that becomes clearer in performance. Each writer found clues in their chosen biblical text that suggested biblical authors expected an audience to respond with laughter. Performers have a powerful role in either bringing out or tamping down humor in the Bible. One audience may be more disposed to respond to humor than another. And each contributor found that experiencing humor changed the interpretation of the biblical passage. From Genesis to Revelation, this study uncovers the Bible's potential for humor.

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9781666711301

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Reviews

"""So often books about humor end up being humorless attempts to overexplain the joke--especially when written by biblical scholars! This volume is nothing like that. The essays in Peter Perry's collection deftly pair right-sized analysis with keen insights into how humor functions in biblical texts and their performance. The result is as perceptive as it is playful. With this volume, biblical performance criticism has taken an important step forward."" --Travis West, author of Biblical Hebrew: An Interactive Approach ""The contributors introduce us to humor's rhetoric, ancient and modern, theoretical and practical. They locate probable humor in multiple strands of the biblical traditions so that we see where it impacted audiences and the likely shape of that impact. As someone who believes that communities worth engaging always have a healthy sense of humor, I found this a fascinating expansion of our understanding of biblical communication events."" --Phil Ruge-Jones, co-editor of The Bible in Ancient and Modern Media"

Author Information

Peter S. Perry is assistant affiliate professor of New Testament at Fuller Seminary and pastor of St. John's Lutheran Church in Glendale, Arizona. He is the author of Insights from Performance Criticism (2016) and The Rhetoric of Digressions (2009).

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