By Clement Harrold

November 13, 2025

Humor and laughter are essential parts of what it means to be a human being. Aristotle regarded risibility as one of the features that distinguishes us from non-rational animals. Indeed, humor is such a beautiful and complex part of being human that it’s difficult to see how it could have developed through purely natural means.

If human beings are the product of a blind evolutionary process, why on earth do we have a sense of humor? How did it originate, given that it has no obvious survival value? The fact that certain things cause us to break out into uncontrollable laughter is indicative that we are products not of blind evolution but of meaningful design.

It is hardly surprising, then, that the Scriptures also speak to the value of humor. In Ecclesiastes we’re reminded that there is “a time to weep, and a time to laugh” (3:4). The Book of Proverbs notes that “a cheerful heart is a good medicine” (17:22). In St. Luke’s version of the beatitudes Jesus declares, “Blessed are you that weep now, for you shall laugh” (6:21).

All of this raises an age-old question: Does God have a sense of humor? We can think about this question in a number of different ways. If we’re thinking about God in His divinity, then we should agree with St. Thomas Aquinas that He does not have a sense of humor in the same way that human beings do (see Summa Theologiae III.16.5). But this need not be a source of disappointment, because we know that what God has instead is something even better.

God’s Sense of Humor

As with everything that concerns God, this “even better” quality remains somewhat mysterious. Indeed, because God is infinite and we are not, our language about Him is necessarily limited. Hence we always need to be careful in ascribing human traits to Him, or in treating Him like one more being among many, when in reality He is Being itself.

At the same time, our Christian tradition does give us the resources for speaking—in metaphorical and analogical language—about the humor, the mirth, and even the childlike joy of God. This is appropriate, just so long as we remember that we are not speaking literally, and that God does not possess these things in the same way that we do. Rather, God is the source and end of all these good things.

With that being said, the very fact that God invented such marvelous things as humor, laughter, and play is suggestive that these things are, in some remote sense, faint images or distant echoes of the goodness and joy which exist for all eternity within the Blessed Trinity. Certainly the Psalms do not shy away from using metaphorical language to describe how God laughs at the wicked (see Psa 37:13; 2:4; 59:8). In the prophets, too, we are told of the joy which God has when His people succeed:

The Lord your God is in your midst,

    a warrior who gives victory;

he will rejoice over you with gladness,

    he will renew you in his love;

he will exult over you with loud singing

     as on a day of festival. (Zeph 3:17-18)

We can think too of the book of Genesis, when God told Abraham (aged 100) and Sarah (aged 90) that they would conceive a child in their old age. In response to this news, Abraham “fell on his face and laughed” (Gen 17:17). A little later on, Sarah reacts in much the same way (see Gen 18:11-15).

What God does in response is pretty funny: He instructs Abraham and Sarah to name their son Isaac, which is Hebrew for “he laughs.” It’s one of only a handful of instances in the entire Bible where God intervenes to name a child directly. Yet on this occasion God considered it to be a worthwhile intervention . . . presumably so that He could have the last laugh.

Pope Benedict XVI was a big believer that God has a sense of humor, even if it remains very different from our own. In a book-length interview given before he became pope, he shared:

I believe [God] has a great sense of humor. Sometimes he gives you something like a nudge and says, “Don’t take yourself so seriously!” Humor is in fact an essential element in the mirth of creation. We can see how, in many matters in our lives, God wants to prod us into taking things a bit more lightly; to see the funny side of it; to get down off our pedestal and not to forget our sense of fun. (God and the World: A Conversation with Peter Seewald)

The Heart of a Child

Oftentimes the people most in touch with “the mirth of creation” are children. Studies show that children on average laugh over 300 times a day, while adults on average laugh only about 15 times a day. Perhaps this is one of the considerations that led Jesus to warn us that “unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 18:3).

Might it not be the case that the habitual joy of children is more heavenly and more godlike than the habitual anxiety and grumpiness of adults? G.K. Chesterton was certainly open to this idea, as he explained in a famous passage:

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. (Orthodoxy, ch IV, “The Ethics of Elfland”)

Perhaps God delights in the mirth of creation far more than we do, for He has (in some remote and analogical sense) the heart of a child. And not only that, for in the fullness of time He also chose to become a child.

The Humor of the God-Man

Whatever we might say about God in His transcendent divinity, we can be virtually certain that in His Incarnation He took on a sense of humor much like our own. As the Council of Chalcedon famously affirmed, through His Incarnation the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity became “like us in all things but sin” (see Catechism 467). Since humor is not connected to sin, Jesus must have had a sense of humor.

There is some evidence of this in the Gospels, as Austin Ruse has observed. Without doubt, Christ had the greatest storytelling abilities the world has ever known. He also had a colorful way with words, and we can imagine the twinkle in His eye when He said things like “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Matt 19:24). There are even some indications that Jesus employed puns, such as when He castigated the scribes and Pharisees in Matthew 23:34: “You blind guides, straining out a gnat [Aramaic, galma] and swallowing a camel [Aramaic, gamla]!”

With all that being said, there is something rather striking in the fact that the Gospels never once record Jesus laughing, or even smiling. Different explanations might be given for this omission, but the one given by Chesterton is that Christ’s joy was so great, so intimate, so dazzling, that He kept it under a veil during His earthly life:

Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian. And as I close this chaotic volume I open again the strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I am again haunted by a kind of confirmation. The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth. (Orthodoxy, ch IX, “Authority and the Adventurer”)

Whether or not Chesterton is correct about the shyness of Christ, we can be sure that the Lord calls us to share in His mirth. We should therefore strive to lead lives of radical holiness and love, so that we might one day hear those precious words: “Well done, good and faithful servant; you have been faithful over a little, I will set you over much; enter into the joy of your master” (Matt 25:21).

Further Reading

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

About Clement Harrold

Clement Harrold earned his master’s degree in theology from the University of Notre Dame in 2024, and his bachelor’s from Franciscan University of Steubenville in 2021. His writings have appeared in First Things, Church Life Journal, Crisis Magazine, and the Washington Examiner.