ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book investigates the hypothesis that humor is somehow fundamentally coded liberal and that it articulates a fulsome resistance to authority. It outlines the groundwork for a productive, non-judgmental, and detached treatment of the way humor engages symbolical and social boundaries of all kinds, not just religious boundaries. The book offers a selective overview of religious comedy in literature from the late Middle Ages to the contemporary scene. It aims not only at providing a literary survey of the “greatest hits” of religious comedy in the West, but it also shows how the progressive expansion of unfettered comical expression has provided immeasurable cultural enrichment across the centuries. The book looks in depth at contemporary pop cultural manifestations of religious comedy in the Anglo-American world.
