There is a story in this week’s Crawley Observer which I really can’t resist referring to. It starts off like this:

Christians may not be known for their sense of humour – but that could all be about to change if one Horley preacher gets his way.

Hello? I am not a Christian, but if I was I think I would have a right to be a bit offended by that. Is a paper allowed to disparage an entire religion? I’ll admit that when I have had to go to some of the country churches I have found many of the congregation a bit dull, and some of the more modern evangelical churches can contain a fair proportion who are terribly worthy and earnest, but isn’t that true of the population as a whole? Just imagine substituting the name of another religion and see how it sounds? If the story started by saying, in effect, “Muslims are a miserable bunch” or “Hindus can’t take a joke” there would be an uproar.

Quite apart from that, maybe the newspaper needs to meet more Christians. I can think of quite a few who are funny. Frank Skinner – devout Roman Catholic, Kerron Cross – committed Christian with a blog full of beaver jokes, most of the vicars and priests I know in Crawley have a good sense of humour.

I have to admit that my mind was wandering a bit by the end of the story, when I came to this bit:

Tim believes that Christianity and humour have gone hand-in-hand from the very beginning, and that Jesus himself has been underappreciated for his comic talents.

And I had a mental image of Jesus dressed as Tommy Cooper and saying “bread, fish. fish bread. Haha!” or standing on a stage in a Galilee working men’s club saying how this Samaritan and a leper walked into a pub… but I’m sure that’s not what he meant. Mind you, Jesus did invent the joke of getting names wrong which became so successful for Trigger in Only Fools And Horses where he always calls Rodney by the name Dave. It probably cracked up the disciples when Jesus used to keep referring to Simon as Peter.