ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the historical arc of religious humor in the Christian West, beginning with Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy (1320) and ending with David Javerbaum's The Last Testament: A Memoir by God (2011). Dante is a good starting point for this survey because he so influentially paired the ideas of comedy and divinity. The works that best illustrate the gradual evolution of religious humor in Christian culture include the following works and authors: any selection of representative texts intended to illustrate a given phenomenon leaves itself open to being criticized for incompleteness, tendentiousness, and other shortcomings. Like Mark Twain in The Mysterious Stranger, the French literary Nobel laureate Anatole France utilized the conventions of speculative fiction to develop a hilarious scenario based on Christian religious premises. In the Decameron, when Giovanni Boccaccio pokes fun at laypersons and clerics, he does so mainly in the spirit of “soft,” good-natured, playful humor.
