Humor Us! Preaching and the Power of the Comic Spirit
Digital Logos Edition
Overview
Homiletics textbooks often discourage the use of humor in preaching, regarding it as trivializing or distracting. The result is that many preachers have failed to understand humor’s positive power, demoting it to the opening joke to get a guaranteed guffaw to warm up the crowd. Humor Us!, the second volume in the “Preaching and…” series, is a collaborative effort by homiletician Alyce M. McKenzie and humor scholar Owen Hanley Lynch that promotes humor, a force capable of great good, to its rightful place in the pulpit. Establishing humor as a divine gift, Humor Us! opens to preachers the world of humor studies with its positive portrayal of humor’s usefulness to speak truth to power, unite people in their common humanity, and strengthen them to cope and survive in tough times.
Humor Us! helps preachers understand how humor works and shows them, in very practical and specific ways, how preachers can put it to work in their sermons. It combines the wealth of knowledge of two highly regarded scholars-practitioners to show how humor can become a potent tool for sharing the good news in sermons. McKenzie and Lynch prove that humor, when applied thoughtfully, can foster compassion and a sense of common humanity, help challenge an unjust status quo, and invite listeners into a shared experience of the presence of God.
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- Opens to preachers the world of humor studies with its positive portrayal of humor’s usefulness
- Helps preachers understand how humor works and shows them how to apply it in their sermons
- Unwraps the gift of humor from both social-scientific and homiletical perspectives
- God’s Gift of Humor
- Humor as (Uniquely) Human
- Made in God’s Image: Humor and the Imago Dei
- Adding Humor to Our Homiletical Toolbox: Positive Benefits of Humor
- Strategies for Using Humor in Our Sermons
- Three Theories of Humor: Superiority, Relief, and Incongruity
- The Two Frames: Comedy and Tragedy
- Foes and Fans: Humor through the Centuries
- The Preacher as Jester, Fool, and Sage
- The Preacher as Comic Spirit
- The Preacher’s Knack for Noticing Humor in Inscape and Landscape
- Humor-neutics 101: Developing Your Knack for Noticing Biblical Humor
- The Preacher as Last Comic Standing: Crafting Original Comedy
Part I: The Gift of the Comic Spirit
Part II: The Sermon and the Comic Spirit
Part III: The Preacher and the Comic Spirit
To anyone who does even occasional public speaking, it’s obvious that humor gets attention, relaxes your audience, creates rapport, and makes your message memorable. But few books on preaching have delved into these and other benefits of humor. McKenzie and Lynch make up for lost time with this tour de force of historical research, funny stories, and advice for preachers. Their tips and questions ‘To Ponder’ alone are worth the price of this book. I was especially taken with their exploration of Christianity as a comic vision of life-as ‘the certainty of the ultimate victory of... hope over despair’ -with its links between humor and faith, hope, and love.
-John Morreall, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, College of William & Mary
How refreshing and exciting to see a book that directly and principally addresses the Christian religion and humor, indeed even taking a practical stance on how pastors can use humor in their communication. This book, through meticulous and extensive research, forthrightly seeks to bring together expertise in homilet- ics and communication to explore the topic of humor in preaching. Exploring humor as a gift from God, the authors admirably show from a variety of different approaches why humor is crucial to the human experience and highly desirable and useful for preachers' communication. In friendly, accessible, and at times funny text, the book explores humor and theology based on the essential humor in divine and human character, humor and homiletics and the work that humor can do in sermons, and humor in preachers’ lives that can be harnessed and used in their work and relationships. Preachers will find this work of great practical value, but anyone interested in the clashes and reinforcements of humor and the Christian religion through the centuries leading up to now will find it a fun and fascinating read. Not only did I learn about humor and its uses in Christian lives and giving sermons, I learned a lot also about preaching from reading this book, along with lots of practical advice about noting and using humor in presentations advancing the Christian church.
-John Meyer, Professor of Communication Studies, University of Southern Mississippi
Thank you, baby Jesus! Finally, a book that truly understands the electric power of humor in preaching. As a pastor and a professional comedian, I know firsthand how the savvy homiletical leveraging of humor can utterly transform the dynam- ics of a room (and a sanctuary). We owe it to ourselves as preachers, teachers, and human beings to read this wonderful book, absorb its wisdom, then use it to launch the good news of hope as high as it can fly.
-Rev. Susan Sparks, preacher, comedian, author
- Title: Humor Us! Preaching and the Power of the Comic Spirit
- Authors: Alyce M. McKenzie, Owen Hanley Lynch
- Series: The Preaching and…
- Publisher: Westminster John Knox
- Print Publication Date: 2023
- Pages: 256
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
- ISBNs: 9780664267018, 9781646982981, 9781646983148, 0664267017, 1646982983, 1646983149
- Resource ID: LLS:HMRSPRCHCMCSPRT
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-10-03T05:45:20Z