Stephen Colbert, when asked by singer Dua Lipa on “The Late Show,” about the role of his Christianity in comedy.
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“We’re always connected to the idea of love and sacrifice being somehow related and giving yourself to other people, and that death is not defeat.
….. I really liked the movie Belfast, which is Kenneth Branagh’s story of his childhood, and one of the reasons I love it is because…. it’s funny and it’s sad, and it’s funny about being sad.
In the same way that sadness is like a little bit of an emotional death, but not a defeat, if you can find a way to laugh about it.
Because that laughter keeps you from having fear of it.
And fear is the thing that keeps you from turning to evil devices to save you from sadness.
As Robert Hayden said, ‘We must not be frightened or cajoled into accepting evil as our deliverance from evil. We must keep struggling to maintain our humanity, though monsters of abstraction threaten and police us.”
So if there’s some relationship between my faith and my comedy, it’s that no matter what happens, you are never defeated.
You must understand and see this, in light of eternity, and find some way to love and laugh with each other.”
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Amen.
Some outsiders wonder how we can joke about our condition (which we often do). We wonder how we can’t.
You laugh to get through it, you pray to get through it, you take medication to get through it, and whatever your doctor says to get through it — you do to get through it, and all because we think of that phrase “get through it.”
To get through something presumes hope about getting somewhere, and we know where that somewhere, ultimately, is.
Some day, Jesus will tell us as he told the thief, “Today you will be with me in Paradise.”
Only by looking to Christ. As salvation was then, so it is now.
