God Laughs in Antwerp

You have just returned from an International Conference on humour and religion called Deus Ridens. Were you amused or did you learn anything new?

The item of information most interesting to me came from Ulrich Marzolph of the University of Gottingen who spoke about 'The Muslim Sense of Humour' and from whom I got a new nugget of source material regarding the Gaħan story of Iġbed il-Bieb Warajk.

Some time ago, Mary Anne Cassar had identified the Turkish model, where the hero is Nazrudin Hodja. Previously, folklorists had taken it that the story was a Maltese original, since its point lies in the verbal ambiguity of a Maltese idiomatic expression.

However, the Turkish model has the equivalent of "keep your eye on the door" instead of "pull the door behind you". Cassar's analysis brought out the transposition of the skit from a Muslim to a Christian setting: The Roman Catholic Gaħan carries the door to his mother in church, while his Muslim exemplar carries it to the (women's) Baths.

Marzolph pointed out that the Hodja version is itself borrowed from a Buddhist source, where the farcical error results from the failure to keep absolute emotive neutrality in all circumstances. The chief delight in this meta-story of transcultural migration of a funny story is that the laughter-provocation survives the passage from Buddhist to Muslim to Catholic context.

Apart from this episode of Melitensian interest the chairman of the conference, in his concluding summary, regretted that not more jokes had been told. However, I confess that I myself had not heard the opening gambit, which was: When Moses came down from Mount Sinai, he told the expectant people: "I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I have persuaded Him to limit the Commandments to 10. The bad news is that adultery remains forbidden". Nor had I heard the parting shot, which was: The Imam told his congregation: "I have good news and bad news. The good news is that we have enough money to restore the Mosque. The bad news is that it is still in your pockets".

Was anything really serious said at the conference?

Hans Geybels, head of the Department of Pastoral Theology at Louvain and spokesman of Cardinal Godfried Danneels, referred to scholastic debates as to whether God could strictly speaking be said to laugh or perhaps only to smile, that He certainly could not help laughing when He heard human beings discuss Him and could not help doubling up in laughter when He heard them discuss whether He could laugh, or perhaps stop laughing.

The most serious, although also the wittiest, presentation came from the Dominican (not to be held against him, according to the chairman who was a Jesuit) François Boespflug, author of a booklet about the Danish Mohammed cartoons - certainly more amusing than the cartoons themselves.

On this occasion he gave an iconic history of anti-Christian caricatures over the ages, divided into five phases. Until the 20th century, the satire was generally directed at the clergy and Church institutions, hardly ever at basic doctrines or God Himself. Recently, however, the lampoons have mostly been directed at the figure of Christ Himself, and especially the Crucifix. Even more striking is the fact that the Cross, hitherto exclusively the symbol of Christianity, is being appropriated and utilised by many others. This phenomenon was deemed by Boespflug to be a remarkable visual feature of globalisation.

His conclusion was that there should not be any prohibition whatsoever of any attempts at laughing at God. He noted that visually recorded attempts of the kind tended to provoke harsher reactions from parties that felt offended by them than merely verbal derision generally perceived as being of a more passing nature. He felt that artists themselves, because of unwillingness to cause unnecessary pain, should refrain from making such images, but he would accept even mockery that was not really laughter-provoking because it hurt, rather than suppress blasphemy by force of law.

Was there any connection, laughable or otherwise, between the theme of the conference and Antwerp, the university city where it was held?

Antwerp is notoriously the city where 85 per cent of the world's diamonds are polished and its maritime museum is almost as famous as its precious stone centre. However, it is branded more as the city of Peter Paul Rubens, more or less as I and others have been seeking to persuade our Tourism Authorities to brand Valletta as the city of Caravaggio, of whom Rubens was one of the most enthusiastic contemporary admirers. Rubens was a Baroque artist in whose sacred as well as profane art there are occasional touches of humour, deliberate or otherwise, often in the shape of domestic animals.

I was most impressed that in the beautiful book commemorating the exhibition realised to mark the 50th anniversary of the Ruben's House in Antwerp, a chapter begins as follows: "St. John's Cathedral in Valletta, Malta, houses the largest series of Brussels tapestries in the world... no fewer than 11 of the pieces were woven to designs by Peter Paul Rubens... The seven dedicated to the Eucharist are based on the painting in St Paul's Church in Antwerp and other works by Rubens... The compositions in Valletta are lighter (in spirit, not in weight!) than the originals, displaying more feeling for nature and open spaces."

Ironically, another of the St John's tapestries, The Last Supper, is based on the painting by Nicolas Poussin, the great French classicist painter, who very famously said that Caravaggio had been born to destroy the art of painting! "Rubens' tapestries in Malta... form... one of the last apotheoses of Rubens's influence on Flemish tapestry making."

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.