Our Big Question: Did Jesus Have a Sense of Humor?

In our podcast, The Soul’s Garage, we dove into a question that’s been on our minds: Did Jesus have a sense of humor? Now, we’ll admit our trepidation with this topic. As we’ve discovered, when you start analyzing humor, it becomes terribly unfunny. But we think it’s worth exploring the relationship between humor and faith anyway.

Challenging the “Serious Christian” Stereotype

We’ve always been bothered by the message that Christians are supposed to be serious all the time. You know that little voice that says, “Wipe that smile off your face. Don’t you know you’re here in church?” We think that’s missing something important.

Humorist Grady Nutt, whom we’re both devotees of, had a saying we love: “Laughter is the hand of God on the shoulder of a troubled world.” We really believe laughter is a gift from God—one we desperately need in these days of terrorism, road rage, and people feeling fearful all the time.

Here’s what we’ve realized: faith without humor becomes puritanical fundamentalism, while humor without faith leads to total cynicism. We need both working together to be fully human.

Finding Jesus’ Humor in Scripture

We discovered some fascinating examples that suggest Jesus used humor as a teaching tool:

• The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant – Jesus talked about a slave owing what amounts to “a bazillion dollars”—an absolutely ludicrous amount that would have had his audience snickering.
• Visual Comedy – Think about Jesus’ image of trying to remove a speck from someone’s eye while you have a log sticking out of your own. That’s pretty funny when you picture it!
• Clever Wordplay – When Jesus said, “let the dead bury their own dead,” he was essentially creating a profession of deceased morticians—which is kind of hard to do unless you’re in a vampire movie!

We know a lot of this humor gets lost in translation from Hebrew to Aramaic to Greek to English, but the original audiences would have understood these as intentionally amusing moments.

Why This Matters for Our Lives

We don’t think recognizing Jesus’ sense of humor is just academic—it has real implications for how we live:

• Permission to Celebrate – It gives us permission to find delight and joy in our spiritual journey.
• A Fresh Approach to Faith – We can move beyond those somber stained-glass depictions to embrace the image of a laughing Jesus.
• Hope in Hard Times – We can find laughter even in pain and loss, knowing that when we cry, Jesus cries, and when we laugh, Jesus laughs with us—not at us.

As our friend Carlyle Marney once said, “Jesus is imprisoned in stained glass.” That’s why we love the picture of the laughing Jesus—you know, the one with his head thrown back, having a hearty laugh.

Our Soul’s Garage Philosophy

We take our faith very seriously, but as you can probably tell, we don’t take ourselves seriously at all. We love G.K. Chesterton’s observation: “Angels can fly because they take themselves so lightly.”

We believe God can be encountered through humor, and we want to create a space where questioning, pondering, and wondering are not only allowed but encouraged. It’s a place where you can tinker with your beliefs and keep your faith running smoothly through all of life’s ups and downs—preferably with a good laugh along the way.

So be joyful! Discover some occasion for laughter, and you’ll feel the embrace of God. That embrace may be the hand of God on the shoulder of a troubled world—and it may be the hand of God on your shoulder as well.