Abstract
As pastoral care practitioners better understand humor they will be able to better utilize it as a tool in their work. With this in mind, the present article puts forth a possible additional explanation for the pleasure gained from humor and based on that suggests possible practical uses of humor in pastoral care settings. According to Simon Critchley, defining humor is “a nicely impossible object for a philosopher.” Hence, this article does not attempt to understand or define humor in any complete sense. It merely acknowledges the phenomenon called “humor,” and seeks to relate it, in a theoretical manner, to our existence as humans in relation to God. The article borrows from the three traditional humor theories and recasts them around truth and righteousness, proposing a fresh approach here called “righteousness relief.” That is, humor is pleasurable because, through the incongruous juxtaposition of truth and untruth, it affirms our operating norms, thus relieving us from the fear that our perception of truth and reality is not “right,” and from the fear that we are alone in it. The article then offers a few suggestions as to how this understanding might be utilized in pastoral care situations.
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It also encompasses the theories of Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard, and, more recently, Tom Veatch, John Morreall, and others.
It should be noted that many fail to detect humor here for other reasons.
Presumably this is why so many women love their man—because “he makes me laugh.” While this is insufficient grounds for a stable relationship, the shared humor of a couple reveals shared norms.
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Webster, D. Righteousness Relief: A Possible Additional Explanation for the Pleasure of Humor and Its Pastoral Implications. Pastoral Psychol 70, 557–567 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-021-00966-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-021-00966-1