ABSTRACT
One means for exploring the relationship among history, faith, and comedy is to consider continuities and discontinuities between Jewishness and Christianness. Jewish thinking and experience have, of course, always been cognizant of tragic elements within the human world. Christian comedy, never in violation of the Jewish envisionment, keeps that affirmation going under the aegis of additional, crucial, and unique historical events. Continuity is thereby shown, yet also discontinuity, between Jewish comedy and Christian comedy. Christian humor is grounded, of course, in the two-world symbiosis of Jewishness. The world of "jokes" is the world of God's creation; the world of "Jokes" is a pointer toward redemption. This chapter focuses on to epitomize the Christology of comedy, deriving as that Christology does from three Jokes: The Birth; The Life and the Death; and The Resurrection. All in all, the three Jokes that comprise the Christian faith are not immune to contamination by radical evil.
