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Introduction: Trickster Mythology From Around the World
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16921 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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4 / 1990 |
4,209 Words |
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Roger L. Welsch
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I can't remember how our conversation wound up going in that direction, but some students and I in a University of Nebraska class in folklore once found ourselves talking about American courtship customs. The conversation was fairly predictable for an undergraduate class but enthusiastic enough to keep my attention. The surprise came when we took a step back to what it is that Americans look for by way of a partner in their mating rituals.
I have spent some time thinking and writing about concepts of beauty, modesty, and courtship, and I thought I had such matters fairly well pinned down - that is, until a young man who had already established himself as particularly bright and intense, the sort of "nerd" serious professors find particularly malleable, spoke up with some indignation. He said, "I understand what you're saying about beauty, but people don't really marry for beauty. They may pant at 'beauty,' but what they try to nail down for the long term is 'interesting.'”
He paused to let this insight soak in, and it did. Then he continued, "And in this country 'interesting' does not mean 'handsome,' 'rich,' bright,' 'sensitive,' 'romantic,' 'powerful,' 'virtuous,' 'promising,' or anything like that. In this country, 'interesting' means one thing: 'funny.'”
The young man was, of course, right. The capacity to be funny is not simply a trait, it is a talent. It is probably recognizable in the subliminal struggle for genetic maintenance as a survival skill. Conversely, there is no greater insult for an American than being labeled humorless.
It is therefore all the more remarkable in American culture (but not necessarily Western culture) that we have developed a godhead that appears to be devoid of humor. That is also remarkably inconsistent. If we are indeed created in God's image, and we have a sense of humor, then it follows, I should think, by all that is reasonable that God has a sense of humor too. (I suppose it also follows, if we are uncomfortably honest, that those who embrace a dour, even grouchy god are usually also utterly without humor and have perhaps indeed been crated in the image of a god without laugh lines!)
A more judgmental and less philosophical direction was taken by George Schwelle, who wrote in his unpublished manuscript "Visions," "The validity of a religion can be measured by the degree to which its gods laugh."
That contemporary American understandings of God do not consider (yet find or celebrate) a sense of humor does not mean that it has always been that way or that there is unanimity in such opinion. Apparent contradictions in the Old Testament may have been enjoyed originally, millennia ago, as rich ironies, more amusing than confusing; at least one important American anthropologist, John Greenway, has explained the absence of a Western folk trickster myth be reminding us that Jesus embodied the characteristics of the classical trickster of world literature, and that less dreary worshipers found (and perhaps in some hidden corners of enlightened Christendom still find) and laughed at the scenario of a child baffling elders, the poor unseating the rich, the humble rising to the Throne, water turned to wine, the holy consorting with the profane. That is to say, no contradiction was sensed between laughter and worship.
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