Taking Humor Seriously in the Pulpit (A Guest Post)
The Rev. Dr. Alyce M. McKenzie is George W. and Nell Ayers Le Van Professor of Preaching and Worship at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University. She joined the faculty at Perkins in 2000. Dr. McKenzie, an ordained United Methodist elder, is a member of the Horizon Conference of the United Methodist Church. In 2015 she was the Lyman Beecher Lecturer at Yale Divinity School. These prestigious lectures are the longest running homiletical lectures in the United States, first begun in 1871.
Dr. McKenzie is founder and Co-director of the Perkins Center for Preaching Excellence at SMU, a Center formed in 2013 dedicated to fostering excellence in preaching through innovative courses, workshops, peer groups, and online resources. The Center has started dozens of preaching peer groups around the Southwestern U.S.A. and beyond over the past 12 years.
One of her passions is helping new generations of preachers gain competence and confidence in their vocation of sharing God’s Word. She is frequently called on to be guest teacher/preacher at various lay and clergy gatherings and to consult with groups of clergy around the country on creating initiatives to foster preaching excellence.
Dr. McKenzie is the author of ten books and numerous articles, both for scholarly and popular audiences. To address the issue of shortened attention spans, Dr. McKenzie wrote Making a Scene in the Pulpit: Vivid Preaching for Visual Listeners. Her most recent book is entitled Humor Us! Preaching and the Power of the Comic Spirit, co–authored with Professor Owen Lynch from Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University. She is currently working on a book on spiritual companionship with Christ in an age of chatbots.
Dr. McKenzie was our guest lecturer in The Collective+ (PLUS) on 9/24/25.
Do you ever attempt humor in the pulpit, only to have people not laugh when you are trying to be funny or laugh when you are not?
I’m not sure which throws me off my game more.
It has made me wonder through the years: How to use humor in the pulpit? How much is too much?
I asked a colleague at Southern Methodist University, Professor Owen Hanley Lynch, a Roman Catholic humor scholar, for coffee to get his take.
We ended up collaborating on a book entitled Humor Us! Preaching and the Power of the Comic Spirit.
We found that we shared the same faith perspective on humor: We want to restore humor to its rightful place in the pulpit, a position more noble than insuring the guaranteed opening guffaw for the sermon or homily (which may have little to do with its theme!)
You might say we wanted to take humor seriously!
Taking Humor Seriously
While we realize humor is a double edged sword that can cut as well as heal, we believe God has a sense of humor, that there is humor in the Bible (!), and that humor is a divine gift we are meant to use to share the gospel.
Humor can do in the pulpit everything it can do in everyday communications, only in service of the gospel:
lower defenses when broaching a tough topic
strengthen us in trying times
unite us in a shared identity
and embrace us in the enjoyment of a moment of laughter at the sheer absurdity of human life and the joy that can shine through the broken places.
I had no idea until I started researching this book, just how droll the Church has been through the centuries.
The Historical Mistake of Removing Humor
St. Francis, with his joyful spirit, was a bright spot, but he was the exception that proved the rule.
And John Wesley, I’m embarrassed to say, showed no visible signs of humor, discouraging leisure in his schools because “the child who plays becomes the man who plays.”
Seriously?
Century after century, the Church has equated holiness with humorlessness and placed what some scholars have called a “pall of reverence” over portions of Scripture, which are clearly pretty funny.
Bald Elisha and the she-bears? (2 Kings 2:21-24)
Pompous Namaan, refusing to bathe in the Jordan? (2 Kings 5)
Peter’s jealousy over the future of the ‘Beloved disciple.’ (John 21:23)
Jesus’ ridiculous scenes of camels and eyes of needles and logs and specs?
The Gospel is a Comedy, Not a Tragedy (Literarily speaking)
To give humor its due, we preachers need to exchange a tragic hero/ine view of our ministry for a comic one.
Tragedies operate by a belief in fate. They feature lone, noble characters on a dramatic, but futile quest, ultimately foiled by their own tragic flaw.
That sounds like fun!
We’ve tried that.
How about exchanging the tragic spirit for a comic spirit—a sense that we are flawed and absurd and we are on a journey with a group of flawed, absurd people (the Church), and we will meet obstacles but we will take them in stride and the story will end with a party.
A comic spirit doesn’t mean we make light of important truths and joke about harsh realities, but that we keep our eyes on the joyful horizon of the Christian story.
Tragedies end with everybody dead or dying on the stage.
Comedies end with characters better off than they began.
Our Christian plot ends with resurrection and a banquet that signals new beginnings!
Don’t Forget the T-Shirts!
I’ll leave you with a couple of sayings that should definitely be made into t shirts!
“If you don’t think God has a sense of humor, look in the mirror!” Anonymous
“Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.” C.K. Chesterton
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