If you’re religious, especially a Christian: can you take a joke?

Even better, are you willing to see the important critique which can often only be made through humor?

In God Mocks: A History of Religious Satire from the Hebrew Prophets to Stephen Colbert (galley received as part of early review program), Terry Lindvall explores the history of satire in the Classical world and in Christendom.

The work is thorough: the ways the Hebrew prophets and many Classical commentators used satire to make often biting social and political commentary becomes a template which would be imitated throughout the medieval, early modern, and modern periods in Europe and America.

The author certainly explores the popular and common examples: Elijah; Isaiah; Ezekiel; Juvenal; Chaucer; Pope; Swift; Muggeridge; Chesterton; Twain; Mencken; Monty Python; Colbert; and so forth. The author also considers many examples throughout Christendom which are not nearly as commonly remembered or popularized but whose commentary was prescient.

Some of the satire is ribald, but then again a lot of the conduct of Christians and clergy proved quite ribald throughout time. But it need not all be sexually titillating; there was plenty of opportunity to make satire of religious predilections, hypocrisies, fundamentalisms, and whatnot. And many times the only way to be able to really make such points without being driven out of town was through satire and humor.

The book dates from 2015, which influences the way the author speaks of Stephen Colbert; I’d be interested in his take now that he no longer has to maintain a character as he did on The Colbert Report, but Colbert’s takes are well informed by his faith, and he does remain one of the most significant purveyors of religious satire today.

The author proves not a little loquacious. I recognize the hypocrisy in pointing something like that out, but the level of detail and what seems to be the never ending prose does absolutely take away from the experience of the book and distracts from the quality of the subject matter. The conclusion especially would have benefited from significant cutting to get to the main point and not introduce a bunch more examples.

Nevertheless, for those who are willing to hear it, religious satire can prove an important part of critiquing those with power and standing and to expose what often proves ridiculous and hypocritical, and this work proves to be a significant contribution to understanding its history and development in Christendom. ( )

An interesting book that has some flaws. First of all it suffers from what I call the first rule of humor, "Discussing humor is inherently unfunny." And while satire isn't always or even mostly laugh-out-loud funny, it should lead one from a smile to a nod to thinking about the deeper underlying point. The author seems to recognize that his presentation gets a little dry and attempts a joke or two at what could most charitably be called a "dad joke" level. (As an expert on dad jokes, I know them when I see them.) A lot of the early satires that the author quotes verbatim are almost unreadable, which means we are then reading an explanation of some one else's satire, and it is a little tiring and not all that enlightening.

I appreciate the author's quadrant way of defining the different satirists.

I also thought the book would be better if it just had had believers doing the satire-ing. It is almost trivial for people who don't believe in something to mock or satirize it. But they don't have the fundamental desire for improvement to result, many times their goal is elimination which isn't in the spirit of true satire.

Finally the last part of the book is a love song to Steven Colbert. Possibly well deserved, but seemed a little over the top.

Worth the read, but it was a slog. ( )