The gas that really fuels the fire of Greek comedy is exaggeration: Take a simple gag and blow it out of all proportion. Re-read some of Jesus’ sayings with this in mind and you might find a chuckle or two yourself: Your neighbor may have a speck in his eye, but you’ve got a log.The difficulty, of course, with reading humour in the Gospels is that, like any ancient text, it is impossible to know what the audience reaction might be. Unfortunately, the narrator never chips in with a little "And the crowd were amused by his teaching, for he taught them with humour, not like their comedians." If only.
It is worth asking, though, how lines like the above have been depicted in our own time. I have been interested to see a shift in Jesus films in this respect. Up until recently, the "Log and Speck" logion was never told as a funny story in the films. But The Miracle Maker (1999) turns it into a comic parable, and Matthew (Visual Bible, 1996) has Jesus narrating it as a funny story, with a staff raised to his eye, and the crowd laughing:
Incidentally, the Thomas version (Logion 26) loses much of the comic absurdity in its omission of the middle of the Synoptic version, where the man tries to remove the speck from his brother's eye while he still has the plank in his own (see in Synopsis here). This is one of those occasions where Thomas is less memorable and works less well orally than do the Synoptics.
Incidentally, the Thomas version (Logion 26) loses much of the comic absurdity in its omission of the middle of the Synoptic version, where the man tries to remove the speck from his brother's eye while he still has the plank in his own (see in Synopsis here). This is one of those occasions where Thomas is less memorable and works less well orally than do the Synoptics.
