Vol. 65 No. 4 1998 - page 658

658
PARTISAN REVIEW
... at least certain manifestations of the comic suggest that this other
reality has redeeming qualities that are not temporary at all, but
rather that point to that other world that has always been the object
of the religious attitude. In ordinary parlance, one speaks of
"redeeming laughter." Any joke can provoke such laughter, and it can
be redeeming
in
the sense of making life easier to bear, at least briefly.
In the perspective of religious faith, though, there is in this transito–
ry experience an intuition, a signal of true redemption, that is, of a
world that has been made whole and in which the miseries of the
human condition have been abolished. This implies transcendence in
a higher key; it is religious in the full, proper sense of the word.
There is a rub, at least for Berger, in the recognition that "there is no
inevitable passage from the first to the second kind of transcendence" (oth–
erwise, every stand-up comic might consider himself-quite wrongly-as
a minister of God), but there are other "rubs" as well. As a character in a
Malamud story observes: "Jesus was a humorless guy"-which is precisely
what a demi-god ought to be. By contrast, the Hebrew Bible contains a
fair share of humor because it is out to tell the stories of vulnerable, very
human beings. No doubt other religions would raise their own objections
to the shotgun marriage between laughter and prayer that Berger advo–
cates. My own view is that he protests a bit
too
much about elevating
humor to a spot in the celestial spheres, but I readily admi t an attraction to
his thesis , first because
Redeeming Laughter
is one of the wisest, funniest
books I've read on the subject, and, second, because it sees humor as yet
another means of
tikkun olam
("repairing the world") at a time when all of
us could use a good laugh, and when our world is badly in need of mending.
SANFORD PINSKER
Plots and Counterplots
C ONSPIRACY:
H ow
THE P ARANOID
STYLE
FLOURISHES AND WHERE IT
C OMES FROM.
By
D aniel P ipes.
Free Press. $25.00
Who can quarrel with Daniel Pipes's assertion that we live in an age not of
increased plots but of increased fear of plots? It is hard to remember anoth–
er time when so many seemingly rational people exhibited so irrational a
"fear of nonexistent conspiracies" and developed so many far-fetched
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