Ontological Laughter is the Best Medicine

 Shall I compare thee to a Sumerian deity? Nah: 

A new examination of skulls appears to support a more grisly interpretation than before of human sacrifices associated with elite burials in ancient Mesopotamia. Palace attendants, as part of royal mortuary ritual, were not dosed with poison to meet a rather serene death. Instead, a sharp instrument, a pike perhaps, was driven into their heads.

The recovery of about 2,000 burials attested to the practice of human sacrifice on a large scale. At or even before the demise of a king or queen, members of the court -- handmaidens, warriors and others -- were put to death. 

Having said that, "Shoving a pike into someone's head does seem like an effective way to kill them, though." 

The point is, there are religions that are not at all funny, without even the possibility of being so. Why is this? What went wrong?

I wonder: do religion and humor coevolve? For laughter coincides "with an openness to the unlimited." In the Ultimate Joke, "What laughs is That which transcends all limitations by its utter superiority":

laughter may be a spiritual door by opening onto a level of reality that shatters the illusions of egoic self-importance.... the capacity to be able to laugh at oneself presupposes at least a minimal degree of dissociation from the ego, and this dissociation must presumably involve a self-transcendence of some kind (Laude). 

So, verticality. But there is also "transcendence from below," and one is reminded of how the Islamists laughed while committing their sadistic atrocities on October 7. According to Rob Henderson,

Sadism is sincere enjoyment from inflicting harm.

Baumeister writes, “The question of whether people enjoy harming others -- and, if they do, the question of how much evil can be explained by this pleasure -- is the single most elusive and vexing problem in the entire topic of evil....  for sadists, they derive pleasure from using power to hurt others. When they inflict pain, the victim’s cries serve as validation of their own being, their importance, their power.”

But a "Christianized" sense of humor is precisely an inversion of the sadistic power-driven Islamist kind: most conspicuously, the Beatitudes

almost exclusively focus on this spiritual reversal, “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven, blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted, blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth." This aspect of inversion of terrestrial values and “wisdom according to the flesh” is eminently highlighted by St. Paul’s admonition concerning the “foolishness” of the world and the “foolishness of the Cross”...

The wisdom according to the world is nothing but “self-deception” because it is based upon an illusory identity, that of the “old man,” an identity that is constructed out of the nothingness of the world. Christian “foolishness” is the first phase of a therapeutic treatment that aims at the restoration of true wisdom.

Laude asks "How can Christians be both 'in this world' and 'not of this world'”? The answer is "intimately connected to a sense of play and folly," like an ontological pun, or something. 

What about ontological sickness? Sounds serious. What is it, and is there a cure? "What could be called 'ontological sickness'" is

the association of other realities to God with all the spiritual and moral consequences that this association involves... 

So, idolatry? Thou shalt have no other gods before me, because supposing you do, you're entering a world of pain, and one that isn't remotely funny. Unless you think there's something amusing about inflicting suffering upon others, as with the Sumerians or Islamists. 

Some other passages from the book:

laughter may specifically serve as a weapon in a kind of moral and spiritual warfare. The devil can laugh at those whom he misleads, and the saint, too, may laugh in return at the devil’s final discomfiture...

He who laughs last will be the one who first laughed: Alpha and Omega. Which reminds me of the clown:

the clown is the human locus of an electrifying meeting of opposites. These extremes may be situated on the same level of existence..., [but] they may also be vertically connected, as the highest and the lowest, the noblest and the vilest.... The clown is a celestial being who reflects the heavens in a reverse way, as if in a grotesque mirror...

Extremes may be vertically connected, as the highest and the lowest. Does this not describe the Incarnation?

Does this imply that salvation, or redemption, or awakening, is comedy gold? "Such an understanding of laughter is apparent"

particularly in Zen where illumination is not infrequently connected with laughter.... there is probably no higher recognition of the spiritual dimension of laughter than that which associates it with a coincidence between the outburst of laughter and the shift in consciousness itself.... laughter may erupt simultaneously with the springing forth of an insight into one’s relativity, and into the ridiculousness of one’s ordinary existential “posturing.”

In this connection, the experience of satori is often associated with a loss of equilibrium that is akin to burlesque and bursting laughter...

More generally -- and tying the room together -- 

On an essential level, this funny, paradoxical, and often violent junction of opposites and disparate realities is nothing less than an esoteric allusion to the confrontation of the individual limitations entailed by the human state with the Absolute....

[I]ndividual existence, because of its radical distinction from “nothing,” tends to vest itself with a sense of absoluteness. Nearly every human falls into the trap of usurping the throne of the One...

Back to the sickness that has no name, or rather, many names, from original sin to avidyā to being stuck inside Plato's cave: the soul, "divorced from the spirit or disconnected from intelligence,"

absolutizes the individual status of man and the passions that ensue from it, thereby severing him from his Creator by claiming an illusory metaphysical independence. All disorders, imbalances, and forms of degeneracy result from this existential error and, in a sense, all sicknesses are manifestations or symbols of it.

Ontological laughter is the best medicine, or something.