Humor Improves Survival Prospects

Greetings to all,

I was reminded recently of fart jokes and thought that having already identified jokes in the Bible, specifically in the Gospels of Matthew and John, I should expect to find fart jokes, a traditional form of humor, somewhere in the larger text. The first possible deposit of flatulence humor that came to mind was the breaking of seals and sounding of trumpets, followed by dire consequences, in the Book of Revelation. I don’t propose to answer in this letter the question of whether the passages in Revelation that follow the structure of certain genres of fart jokes are meant to be taken as humor, though I will explore this issue below. Nevertheless, I will present timely material of considerable import, in this era of war that may all too easily produce an apocalyptic end state that is clearly desired by some, based on their idiosyncratic interpretation of the Book of Revelation. To begin, I’ll discuss a discovery I made after the Book of Revelation presented itself for scrutiny.

Revelation 13:18 has tantalized scholars, heavy metal musicians, and humorists. Many readers will find the verse familiar:

“This calls for wisdom. Let the person who has insight calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man. That number is 666.”

In childhood, I was told that three and seven were perfect numbers; that six, being one less than seven, represents imperfection; and that the assemblage of three sixes therefore represents perfect imperfection, hence Satan.

This kind of reasoning is a large part of what drove me out of religion the first time. I’m not clever enough in the necessary way to make sense of this argument, and what’s far worse is that it deprecates imperfection. Pushing people to be perfect is destructive. I know this more than most, for I was an almost relentlessly adultified child. The kind of adult who would encourage me to be a kid by, for example, cracking a fart joke or smiling at my own attempts at age-appropriate comedy, was almost entirely unavailable, in part because I was ensconced in a WASPified Catholicism that was bent on seizing and consolidating political power via performance of moral superiority in a mid-Atlantic accent painfully learned at places like Fordham University, where my maternal grandmother taught speech correction or elocution for some time in the 1930s, and St. Gregory’s School in Loudonville, where the correction of my own hard r’s in the mid-1970s was hardly the only effort to modify my identity.

Please click the link in the last sentence to watch Donald O’Connor and Gene Kelly dance the rage I feel over what was done to me by Catholicism in service of careerism and the melting pot. You’ll get the joke: They can dance, sing, and act on the big screen, and in Kelly’s case, choreograph and direct, to boot, but they’re being forced to erase themselves, at least to the extent of sounding like everyone else on that screen. Melting hurts, but the hell of it is that it took talent to erase yourself and, in my case, play an adult role from far too early. The hideous parody of God into which I was lowered to be melted needs to be rendered inoperable and stored in a museum as a warning to the future.

My understanding is that many scholars find the number 666 to be a reference to Emperor Nero, made via some form of mapping between names and numbers. I see Nero in the negative space of 666, and I see the larger society that made Nero’s reign possible and today’s United States in 666, as well. All numbers, not to mention all people, possess remarkable qualities to those with insight or the patience or passion to keep thinking about them. The first point to notice in arriving at my interpretation is that the number 666 may not be what the author actually wants us to consider.

What is the number of a man? Numbers, arguably, exist independent of people, but numerals, which are representations of numbers, are human in origin and thus numbers of a man, so to speak. Let’s look at the Roman numeral for 666, regardless of what language the author was using.

We see that 666 = DCLXVI, making it the smallest number to contain all the individual Roman numerals from I to D. Furthermore, all of these individual numerals are arranged in descending numeric order, and the largest individual Roman numeral, M, is missing. What tale does DCLXVI therefore tell me?

The numeral DCLXVI suggests to me a society characterized by rigid social hierarchy, symbolized by all the individual numerals appearing in descending numeric order, with a nonentity at the top, symbolized by the absence of M. Furthermore, the number six hundred plus sixty plus six can symbolize mediocrity, since groups of twelve are common in the Bible, and 6.5 is the middle of the arrangement 12, 11, 10, …, 3, 2, 1.

Is it self-evident that the author of the Book of Revelation, referred to as John, was talented? Just maybe, John resented the tyranny of mediocrity and the empire’s rigid social hierarchy topped by a person who would never have achieved significant rank except by virtue of birth and of palace intrigue. Maybe John chose to express his rage cleverly, in the numeral DCLXVI, much as the people who made the movie Singin’ in the Rain (notice the omission of the second “g”!) expressed their rage in the speech correction dance scene and as I’m expressing my rage in this letter, in more straightforward, and hence less clever, fashion.

Does that sound likely to you?

Surely, the mood of Revelation is angry, but clever folk don’t seek revenge through fire and death. No, clever folk avenge themselves by inducing their targets to engage unwittingly in self-parody. That’s the best revenge for clever folk who happen to be good with words. Is there any evidence that John may have achieved such vengeance?

Please don’t get me wrong. People in the middle of any distribution are at the ends of some of the other distributions, and vice versa, besides which, tyranny is inherently mediocre at best. I’m reminded of a couplet from Courtney Barnett’s song “Avant Gardener”:

“The paramedic thinks I’m clever ‘cause I play guitar.
“I think she’s clever ‘cause she stops people dying.”

I’m reminded, too, of John repeatedly being told by the angel not to worship them but rather to worship God. Same thing as Courtney Barnett wrote, right? At least, I see no difference, and I value the man in the pulpit. I respect him for working hard to fill a role for which I’ve made myself utterly unsuited in order to fill a role few should occupy. I simply don’t respect his attempts to tell me what sin is and that I should submit to a healing that would destroy who I am, a healing few indeed would desire.

He wants to eradicate sin. I want to minimize the killing of children. Neither of us is apt to succeed any time soon, but we keep plugging away. Is that funny? The corpses of children certainly aren’t funny to me, nor are people who worry publicly about trivia, like how many husbands last week's Samaritan woman had, to the extent that they remain silent about the ongoing wholesale slaughter of children and other innocents that's raising the temperature in a world awash with gasoline.

Deep breath.

Okay, here are some of the jokes I find in the Book of Revelations:

Revelations 2:4-6: John tells the Ephesians they'e horrible, but at least they hate the practices of the Nicolaitans.

Revelation 7:4-8: Think about reading this aloud, ponderously, looking members of the congregation in the eye at the end of each line for emphasis. Try it with an audience.

Revelation 17:7: The beast with seven heads and ten horns is hilarious to me, because it’s a great homework problem for a combinatorics class; because it’s irritating to my compulsive side, which wants to know the distribution of the horns among the heads; and because of the contrast between its vagueness and the beating of the dead horse with far too many heads bearing the word “specificity” in Revelations 7:4-8, linked in the preceding item.

Revelation 7:1, 8:6-13, and 9:1-19: Please read these passages with the idea in mind of seven fart jokes. I especially like Revelation 9:6, “During those days people will seek death but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will elude them.” At least, that’s a great joke to have in one’s back pocket when an offensive smell manifests unexpectedly or when the sermon runs too long.

Was John, or, for that matter, God in a vision He sent John, actually out to induce humorless people to satirize themselves? Isn’t such a purpose holy, to the extent that it enables the people to see through leaders who really need to retire?

Farting could serve that purpose, too. Imagine how much better the world would be today if one of the generals Pete Hegseth harangued on masculinity and wokeness back in October of last year had unclenched their brass sphincter to produce an audible expression of their opinion, thereby starting a chain reaction that would soon fill the room with gas and drive Hegseth from the stage. Imagine the same for Gov. Hochul’s speech at the University at Albany (State University of New York, USA) in October of 2024, in which she called for domination of the next chapter of human history, surely a preposterously evil design that screams aloud to be ridiculed with flatulence.

Since the moment has not yet been seized, now is the time. As was true of the Greek doctor in I Claudius, I don’t care which end you let it out. Speak, fart, or forever hold your peace.

Yours in God, regardless of models of God,
James

P.S. Nero was genuinely a beast. So was his mother. So were lots of rich Romans. In some ways, Pres. Trump is eerily reminiscent of Emperor Nero, but if you have an iron stomach, read the story of Sporus to see one difference. It’s not as if John’s rage had only one reason behind it.

These stories enable us to talk to one another. I like the Book of Revelation the way I like a Terry Gilliam movie, for its anti-consumerist rhetoric, its commentary on improving how we regard rank as the basis for civilization, its grotesque imagery, and the humor I find in it. I don’t like the Book of Revelation as a blueprint for conducting geopolitics or violently dragging God back to Earth on our schedule, rather than His. What do you think?

P.P.S. Besides improving survival prospects, humor is one of the things that make survival appealing, for example during mass on a hot day, the discomfort entailed in which was a traditional basis for jokes from Father Downs, the last pastor I had as a child.