I had the good fortune to catch up with an old friend this weekend. The conversation turned to (post-)seminarian humor. Seminarian humor is irreverent, to say the least. There’s something about spending three or four years of work-weeks reading, writing, and fretting about Life, the Universe, and Everything that turns humor perverse.

I carry a stuffed-animal Jesus in the back seat of my car–buckled in so he can’t get out of hand. I advise backseat passengers to keep an eye on him, in case he gets “handsy.” Tickle Me Jesus was a revenge gift from my campus minister, who I had sent a 400-page coffee table book on the fulfillment of biblical prophecy in our times. (Does he also know I put him on the mailing list for Chick tracts?) There’s the re-gifting of volumes of the Left Behind series, and the Wash Away Your Sins hand soap next to bathroom sinks. A friend breaks into an a capella solo of “Jesus, Jesus, there’s just something about that name” at a party. At another party seminarians dish Michael W. Smith videos. A new pastor nicknames the oldest woman in the congregation “My First Funeral.” What is it about seminary that produces this sense of humor?

And then there are more obscure examples. I’ve picked up the habit of exclaiming, “and then his body was eaten by dogs” whenever the Jesus Seminar is mentioned. (Justice will be done if that is John Dominic Crossan’s epitaph. Not that there would be much left to bury in his grave at that point.)

There is the chance that this is just my own sense of humor, or the sense of humor of my small circle of seminary-graduate friends. But I learned early on in meetings with clergy-type colleagues that when the door closed, the off color language and off color humor came out in spades. It was their way of letting each other know it was safe now, that we could quit acting like preachers already.

Other professions have their own dark senses of humor. It’s only natural. It’s a way to cope with the difficulties of being in that profession, difficulties that only other co-professionals are likely to understand. In many cases, it would be unprofessional to expect those being served to try and understand. So black humor becomes a secret handshake, a secret decoder ring for determining who is safe to confide in.

Professionals’ dark humor is usually at the expense of conditions or patients/clients. But clergy humor is just as likely to be about doctrine or god. Is there a hidden rage here? A railing against the divine hidden in snarky comments and off color remarks?

As far as my own case, I have to say, definitely, yes. I’ve often said that god and I are no longer on speaking terms, that what was first an uncomfortable silence has become an amenable estrangement. By any measurement, the god of my youth was a fraud and a liar. It’s not that I misunderstood him or had unrealistic expectations. I was told by several clergy that I had a preternatural understanding of things theological–a wisdom beyond my years. I was a poster boy for my faith, and my greatest regrets are bringing other folks into it, folks for whom it stills seems to work. But it quit working for me.

There are few figures more sad–or is it more funny?–than the priest who has lost his faith. I’ve known some. Trained to do nothing else and well into middle age, they have no choice but to carry on until retirement, repeating words of comfort they no longer believe and preaching sermons whose words wound them. I am fortunate that my faith left me while leaving seminary, when I still had time to get out.

I see three arguments against dark seminarian humor–it’s disrespectful, it’s immature, and it’s bitter. I’ll take all three in turn.

Disrespect. Here the argument is that the off color humor of clergy-types is disrespectful to the countless many who practice the faith, not to say the institutions and symbols which serve that faith. But this argument is levied against those who have sacrificed heart, head, and career to serve those countless many, their institutions, and their symbols. As Jesus said, “Don’t muzzle the ox.” The argument seems to carry more weight against those who have lost their faith–don’t mock those who still hold the faith dear to their hearts, who still draw sustenance from it. But the disrespect is to those who have borne the cross and yet not been resurrected. It takes their sacrifice for granted. Without empathy, it says to them, “But we played wedding and you didn’t dance; we played funeral but you didn’t cry.”

Immaturity. Here off color clergy humor is assigned to the same category as adolescent fart jokes–the mocking clergy-type just needs to grow up–an ad hominem argument to be sure. Satire and mockery were first used by the Hebrew prophets to topple idols and shock audiences into a new awareness of god. No one likes to see what they hold dear held up to satire and mockery, yet satire and mockery are legitimate tools. We ignore the place of Trickster spirituality at our own peril.

Bitterness. We live in a self-help culture, where all wounds must be healed. The presence of the unhealed person afflicts the comfortable healed, questions their comfort. The presence of the unhealed asks, Are you sure you are healed–perhaps you missed something? The unhealed upset normalcy, and people avert their eyes and pretend they are not there. But not all wounds can be healed. Who is to tell the drafted soldier that he cannot be bitter about losing his arm in battle, even as he is told the injury will cause him pain for the rest of his life? Will you tell him he should have dodged the draft? Avoided combat? That his wound was for a larger cause? That his fiance–who abandoned him to his injury–just wasn’t the right match? That he’ll learn to live a fulfilling life in due time? That at least he lived through it? Physician, heal thyself.

If I am bitter (and I am), it is because of my dislocatedness, my exile from the faith of my youth. Where now can I go to find comfort and repose? Back to the faith of my youth, which failed me? You cannot sing the songs of Zion in a foreign land. And besides, they only make my head hurt anyway.