L’umorismo tra sacro e profano : attualità e prospettive di ricerca

Overview & Synopsis

Engaging in a critical dialogue with traditional interpretations of the sacred, theologians, linguists, historians, and philosophers have been invited to reconstruct the fabric of the delicate relationship between humour and transcendence and characterize laughter as a two-way catalyst in the relationship between humanity and God. The essays collected in this volume prove that laughter and humour are not marginal or subversive elements in relation to the sacred, but are instead capable of shedding light on the relationship between the human and the divine. From the «God who laughs»—gleaned from comparisons with the ancient world—to humour as the language of friendship between God and humankind, and on to the modern rediscovery of comic elements in the Bible, a common thread emerges: laughter as a cognitive tool. In contemporary multimodal texts—queer representations of the divine or cinematic reworkings that play with the conventions of orthodoxy—humour proves to be the most effective tool for destabilizing hierarchies, challenging gender norms, and redefining the contemporary religious imagination. Throughout the essays, the comic does not negate the sacred: it questions, transforms, and opens it to new spaces of meaning—inclusive and dialogic— acting not only as a key to understanding the relationships that humans maintain with the transcendent, but also as an interpretive framework for the meanings and tensions that characterize our existence.