Humor and Hermeneutics or: Stuff Facebook Tricks You Into Thinking Is Funny

This is an off the cuff, annoyed rant.  When one facebooks (is that the right verb?) one is inevitably infected by memes; be it some type of annoying chain letter status (if denying Christ before men is akin to not liking his Facebook fanpage...turns out Im damned) or, if you are one of the highschoolers from the youth group I work with, the strange aphorism-generating "The Awkward Moment When..." trend.  But recently I have noticed going Michael-Jackson-Holds-Kid-Over-Balcony viral are two pictures, the first of which is this:

The awkward moment when Facebook tells me all combinations have been achieved by my current Friend's list

If you cant read it because of the size of the picture, what it is is an "F you fundamentalist Christianity!" fresco which is attempting to deconstruct, with the sophisticated irony only an illustrated chart can convey, the "one man-one woman" cliche of marriage.  There are, for example, illustrations of polygamy (heres looking at you Abraham), Levirate marriage where the brother of a widow's husband is obligated to marry her, and Deuteronomy 22's idea that a rapist must marry the woman he rapes, etc...  The idea, of course appears to be an attempt to out-bible the bible thumpers (and, with the addition of + signs, outwit the other religious folks who are simply bad at math).  And the second picture receiving near David-after-dentist levels of virality is this: 

To be fair, this mob was sponsored by Irony

And obviously both are funny in that "not immune to bored, drunken bloggers with photoshop," sort of way. Silly protesters!  You didnt know we could make up your intentions and then digitally sumperimpose them on the interwebs!   And I mean, come on, who among us hasnt had a slow saturday afternoon to reduce a complex issue into a pastiche of arrows and Indie smarm?  Just try and cast the first stone, am I right?

And dont get me wrong: both are legitimately funny, and for their part make good points.  The bible is full of strange examples of marriage; and corporate protesters in their extreme and most crude manifestations are those people who havent envisioned a world where they not only have to brew, grow, and grind their own coffee, but then have to drink said laborious coffee to get the energy to plant, grow, and harvest the cotton to sew their own fruit-of-the-looms.  But before we push the irony envelope by simply photoshopping the angry mob into nakedness, or by making a secret bible marriage chart that would even make Da Vinci blush, maybe we should address the actual issues?

Ha!  Save us?  If you love us so much why don't you just marry us??


In the first place the marriage chart, while pointing out the many different types of marriage exemplified, fails to make any impact on the idea of marriage sanctioned by the bible.  It does not, for example, take into consideration the idea that any type of marriage (or, more generally, any type of action) portrayed in the genre of narrative can be either prescriptive or merely descriptive.  Thus the polygamy of Abraham is in no way a normative thing.  Ironically in attempting to counter-act the fundamentalist interpretation, they merely use fundamentalist hermeneutics and take it ad absurdum: that which is in the bible is normative.  But unfortunately this does nothing to strengthen their case since there is nothing to demonstrate polygamy was acceptable; what the author of the account is doing is merely recording what, in fact, happened. (And if anything the troubles that are recorded make it plausible to assume polygamy is frowned upon)


Or there is the case of anachronism; sure, it might be an utterly horrible thing to assume a rapist should marry his victim today, or that a widower's brother has to marry his brother's former wife.  But the atrocity we feel in these two acts assumes a broader world-view in which in either case the woman is not essentially left in the world as good as dead; a world where society (not just Jewish society, but all society, everywhere) saw that woman as a piece of filth who rated on the chain of being somewhere between dirt and those with an unwarranted appreciation for dubstep.  

Ok Im looking but I still dont see you in the picture...a little more to the left maybe?

What we miss in these laws is the utterly generous character they convey; what they are are not demonstrations that the bible has no consistent view of marriage, but the exact opposite.  In a world where if you were a man in power you could generally rape anything that moved to your hearts content, the Jewish law, for a woman, was the best woman's rights movement going.  But, regardless of where one falls on the interpretation of gay marriage (and I believe that wherever one falls, we must always act with love, charity, and understanding) the fact is that the funny chart does nothing to further its case.


Or take the picture of the crazy activists.  What is annoying about it is not that it points out a potential area of hypocrisy in the anti-corporation free-for-all.  Insofar as it reveals inconsistency, it should be applauded.  Its annoying tendency is rather that far from provoking thought, it retards it.  Of course there will be extreme anti-corporate activists who think that corporations simply need to stop existing to solve whatever problem their bandwagon addled brain has jumped upon.  But the real issue behind anti-corporation sentiment isnt the desire to end corporations (which would thus suffer from the hypocrisy that those who wish to end corporations utilize their product), but to end their abuse.  This of course is partially the fault of the activists themselves when they, for example, represent the problem in the simple terms that the CEO of a company makes X amount in multiples of the common worker.  But this is not the problem.  The problem comes when this multiple of the common laborers wages is registered within a scale that includes finite resources (so the workers cannot make living wages), abuse (where companies artificially exclude competition), exploitation (where companies have mass layoffs, outsourcing, and in outsourcing, major labor rights violations, undue political control etc...)  One cannot read, for example, Naomi Klein's two excellent major works, No Logo, and its sequel of sorts, The Shock Doctrine, and not be frozen in horror at the abuse of the corporate agenda.


Thus my ultimate point boils down to a question: how is humor, funny?  These two photos appear funny, but in actual fact are vacuous.  Humor should be thought provoking, but it turns out these two pictures, while funny on the surface, in fact invade and retard thought by reducing, not revealing, the actual issues.  Instead of a straw man argument they merely created a straw-man joke.  Accusing the activists of being anti-corporate while pointing out they are using the corporations products is through the artificial label "anti-corporate" creating an artificial irony.  Like I said they arent anti-corporate, in fact many of them probably work for the various corporations: if anything they are pro-corporation while nonetheless feeling the corporations could be run more fairly, though that doesnt play as well on the internet.  The picture and its captions are like making a straw man and dressing him in a silly hat and mismatched shoes, and then making fun of it for how poorly it dressed itself.  Sure, anti-corporatists who decry corporations while using their stuff is sort of funny, but what the picture makes us forget is that whoever made the picture with its captions made the irony.  Or saying that all these are forms of biblical marriage so take that ya stupid fundamentalists! is unimpressive.  If you want to try and shock you should probably take the absurdity of the argument all the way and say Jesus was into prostitution because he hung out with prostitutes.  What is actually funny is how these two pictures have manipulated several of my otherwise very intelligent friends to post them as serious discussion pieces; when in fact they merit little more than counteractive satire, or the small, dismissive shake of the head that understands the surface humor, but derides the ultimate lack of depth.


I think the only message these leave us is that if we take our positions seriously, we should leave the bullshitting about those who disagree with us at the door.