The Four Laughs

What the cause of our laughter can tell us about our eternal destinies

Not every road that leads to Hell is obvious or easy to discern. How can you tell if you are on the straight and narrow path to Heaven or the broad highway to Hell?

In Letter 11, C.S. Lewis provides us (through the pen of Undersecretary Screwtape) with a surprising diagnostic question to help discern which road we are on: what do we laugh at, and why?

You may find yourselves laughing now at the very thought of diagnosing our eternal destinies based on what makes us laugh. But to Screwtape (and therefore Lewis), this is no laughing matter (err, I mean it’s a matter of laughs, not a laughing…well you’ll see what I mean).

Temptation as depicted in The Screwtape Letters is serious, solemn work. Lewis' demons are entirely and intentionally humorless. According to the 1961 preface, Lewis considered several popular depictions of the demonic in literature to be flawed. While he considered Dante’s devils the best, he took issue with numerous points of Milton and Goethe’s depictions of devils. In particular, he singles out Goethe’s Mephistopheles as “humorous, civilised, sensible, [and] adaptable” which “has helped to strengthen the illusion that evil is liberating.”¹

Lewis vowed to not make the same mistake, explaining that “humor involves a sense of proportion and a power of seeing yourself from the outside. Whatever else we attribute to beings who sinned through pride, we must not attribute this.”²

If this were all that Lewis had to say about humor here in The Screwtape Letters, it would be enough to be informative and instructive, but Lewis dedicates an entire letter within the work to the topic of laughter.

The Screwtape Letters is therefore a satirical, humorous work that uses humorless devils in a humorous way to illustrate its quite serious and important points. (Still with me? No? That’s ok, I don’t know if I am either).

In Letter 11, the humorless Screwtape passes on his observations on the causes of human laughter to his nephew Wormwood after noting that Wormwood’s patient has made new friends who are all “consistent scoffers…progressing quietly and comfortably towards our Father’s house.”³

This picture of scoffers on the path to Hell echoes the image found in Psalm 1, which describes the righteous man as blessed because he “walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers” (Psalm 1:1, NRSV).

Screwtape does not want Wormwood to assume that all laughter is equally useful to the Civil Service Below, however, and divides the causes of human laughter into what I have dubbed “The Four Laughs”: Joy, Fun, the Joke Proper, and Flippancy.⁴ (I can’t help but wonder if Lewis' writing on “The Four Loves” and “The Four Laughs” implies the existence of “The Four Lives”...)

Some of these four types of laughter are at complete odds with the demons’ goals. Indeed, Jesus himself states in the Beatitudes in the Gospel of Luke that laughter can be a sign of the kingdom of heaven itself: "blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh" (Luke 6:21, ESV). But some types of laughter are quite useful to the demons.

Which types of laughter are which, then? How can we know whether our laughs are the equivalent of a check engine light blinking on the dashboard of our souls?

Helpfully, Screwtape arranges The Four Laughs in order of least use to the devils to the most useful. The first two, Joy and Fun, are of little use to them. Laughter from Joy “should always be discouraged” and laughter from Fun “is very little use.”⁵

Laughter from The Joke Proper, “which turns on sudden perception of incongruity,”⁶ is more useful in Screwtape’s opinion, especially to destroy shame. Flippancy is the most desired of the Four Laughs for the schemes of the demons, for it can build “around a man the finest armour-plating against the Enemy that I know” and is “free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter.”⁷

The laughs are not just ordered by usefulness to the demons. The order also proceeds from those who laugh the most⁸ to those who laugh the least. Laughter from Joy comes readily and easily, while with Flippancy there is very little reason to actually laugh because the joke "is always assumed to have been made."⁹

The Flippant are well on their way to becoming as humorless as the demons themselves.

G.K. Chesterton wrote in chapter 8 of Orthodoxy¹⁰: "Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly...But the kings in their heavy gold and the proud in their robes of purple will all of their nature sink downwards, for pride cannot rise to levity or levitation. Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity....Satan fell by the force of gravity."

Does our laughter lift us up, setting us on the path to heaven? Or does it drag us—and everyone around us—down toward the grave? The next time something prompts us to laugh, let’s take a second to ask why we laughed and whether our laughter makes the demons shudder or celebrate.

Suggested Discussion Questions

• What are we to take from the choices Lewis made in depicting his demons as entirely humorless and dedicating a letter to the usefulness of certain types of humor to the devils of Hell? I have a few suggestions for us:
  Examine - what do we laugh at? Why are we laughing? What does it say about whether we are on the path of the wicked or the path of the righteous?
  
  Enjoy - enjoy the gift that laughter is, especially the laughter that proceeds from Joy and from Fun.

• What are some causes of laughter that you think Screwtape may have missed?

• What other examples of Lewis discussing or effectively utilizing humor in his other works can you think of?

-Josh "JRR Jokien" Ray is a lifelong fan of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien who loves spending time reading, drinking good coffee, and going on adventures with his wife and their three little halflings. He has been writing under his humorous alter ego on social media for the past decade and on Substack for the past three years. You can find him at @joshcarlosjosh on most social media sites and on substack at jrrjokien.com.

1. The Screwtape Letters © 2013 CS Lewis Pte Ltd.

2. The Screwtape Letters © 2013 CS Lewis Pte Ltd.

3. “Our Father” being the Devil. The scoffers are on the safe and gentle road to Hell from Letter 12: “Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts” (73). The Screwtape Letters © 2013 CS Lewis Pte Ltd.

4. The Screwtape Letters © 2013 CS Lewis Pte Ltd. Though Lewis is writing through Screwtape, there is no indication that this should be considered Lewis’ exhaustive list of causes or types of human laughter. As a demon, Screwtape’s insights on humanity are limited and should not be taken as Lewis’ fully developed thoughts on the subject.

5. The Screwtape Letters © 2013 CS Lewis Pte Ltd.

6. The Screwtape Letters © 2013 CS Lewis Pte Ltd.

7. The Screwtape Letters © 2013 CS Lewis Pte Ltd.

8. Speaking of Joy, Screwtape observes, “Among adults some pretext in the way of Jokes is usually provided, but the facility with which the smallest witticism produce laughter at such a time shows that they are not the real cause.”

9. The Screwtape Letters © 2013 CS Lewis Pte Ltd.

10. Lewis was familiar with this passage from Chesterton: he alludes to this final line of Satan falling through force of gravity in his preface to the 1961 edition when explaining why his demons are humorless.