They do it every summer — pitch a big tent on the Common and have an "Old-Time Revival". 

Yesterday morning as I strolled through the Common on my way from the T to work I saw the tent and two dour old men, one on either side of the wide path that leads from Parkman Plaza to the Central Burying Ground, the chubby one to the right, the skinny one to the left, gravely pamphleteering passersby.

Not all passersby, of course.  And not exactly random passersby, either, from what I could see.  There was definitely some racial profiling going on, sorry to say.  As I approached, I watched the skinny guy on the left let three Araby-looking fellows pass by without offering any of them a shot at salvation.

And it wasn't because he was busy saving other souls, I can assure you.  Seemed to me he was actively withholding the possibility of salvation from certain ones.  Fair enough, I guess.  I mean, if I had a say in who'd be my neighbors for all eternity in the Great Trailer Park in the Sky I probably would not choose the pamphleteers.  I want Hidetoshi Nakata on one side, and the Ohio State wrestling team on the other, personally.  Oh, and the South End Knitters across the street, of course. 

Choose your battles, right?  And anyway, whoever heard of Arabs at an Old-Time Tent Revival?  Bedouins, maybe.  The Arabs, for their part, seemed like sweet-natured fellows and looked at the mean skinny evangelizer sheepishly as they passed, expecting the pitch that never came at them, and seeming, frankly, a little hurt at his disinterest in their souls.

Meanwhile, the chubby one was more generous — or maybe less discriminating (sometimes you can't tell the difference) — because he had managed to catch my eye.  I thought I might be able to slip past as he pamphleteered another guy ahead of me, but I didn't quite make it.  It seems I am too Arab-looking to let go without a pat-down at airports, but not Araby enough to be passed up as a lost cause by street-preachers.  You can't win.

"Do you know about Jesus Christ?" he called out to me.

"Je-whoosy-whatsy?" I said, not breaking my stride. 

"Jesus Christ," he repeated.  "Your personal lord and savior?"

"My personal what?" I said, stopping and looking at him screwy.  "Did I win an iphone?  What is this?"

Before I go on I'd like to commend the gentleman for not being the least bit incredulous, and taking my questions at face value.  Sincerity is almost certainly a precondition to salvation, and if it is, I'm sure he's going to Heaven.  I'd go so far as to say he'll have the last laugh, but everyone knows there's no laughing up there.  To borrow from Milan Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting...

Things deprived suddenly of their supposed meaning, of the place assigned to them in the so-called order of things, make us laugh. In origin, laughter is thus of the devil’s domain. It has something malicious about it (things suddenly turning out different from what they pretended to be), but to some extent also a beneficent relief (things are less weighty than they appeared to be, letting us live more freely, no longer oppressing us with their austere seriousness).

But you don't have to believe Kundera, who is, after all, not a theologian.  The question of whether God and his angels have a sense of humor is as old as God himself, despite the fact that, as the great Reinhold Niebuhr points out in his essay "Humor and Faith", there is only one instance in the Bible when laughter is attributed to God (Psalm 2:4) — and where it is, alas, coupled with derision (news-flash!: he may not be laughing with us, guys).

Niebuhr is often quoted as saying "humor is a prelude to faith; and laughter is the beginning of prayer." But the second half of the famous quote is: "Laughter is swallowed up in prayer and humor is fulfilled by faith."

"Laughter," he says, " is our reaction to immediate incongruities and those which do not affect us essentially."  Indeed, "the ultimate incongruities of life... are too profound to be resolved  or dealt with by laughter.  If laughter seeks to deal with the ultimate issues of life it turns into..." LOLcats?  No. According to Niebuhr: "It turns into bitter humor." 

Laughter is not merely a vestibule to faith but also a 'no-man's land' between faith and despair.  We laugh cheerfully at the incongruities on the surface of life; but if we have no other resource but humor to deal with those which reach below the surface, our laughter becomes an expression of our sense of the meaninglessness of life.

In other words, you can laugh out in the lobby, but once you're inside, zip it.

Of course, in Hell everyone's a comedian.  It's like an open mic night at Chuckle's Comedy Club that NEVER ENDS.  Payback time for earthly ironists and their retarded hill-billy cousins, the sarcasticists (fear not, there is help for you). 

Still, here on earth, while circumstances sometimes require a straight face, there's, mercifully, a time for laughter, too.  And a time for taking the piss.  I mean, don't come up to me, say something like "do you have a minute to save the children?"  and expect me to answer you seriously.  Because here's what you'll get: "No, today's my day to rescue kittens from trees.  Sorry." 

Well, "have you heard of Jesus?"  Is right up there.

So I'm like: "Cheez-its?  Mmm!  Love 'em!"

"Jesus," he patiently repeats. "Jesus Christ."

"You sure you're saying it right?  Is it Spanish?  They pronounce the 'j' like an 'h' you know."

"No, it's Jesus," he says, enunciating: "Gee-zuss."

"Does he play for the Sox?"

"Does who play for the Sox?" 

I roll my eyes.

"This Gee-zuss."

"I'm talking about Jesus Christ, the Son of God."

"Didn't he date Madonna at one point?"

Protestants and evangelicals: not into Madonna, at all.  I could see his eyes narrow — he was suddenly suspicious.  Was I a Catholic?  For evangelicals: worse than Arabs, Jews, and Satanists put together.  That was my cue to exit, stage left.

I passed back by on my way home in the drizzle, and noticed they'd moved in under the big top, where a somber preacher in a cheap suit was waving a floppy Bible at a sparse joyless gathering of five or six.  Either they were seeking shelter from the rain, or among the few who hadn't heard of Jesus yet, or maybe just pronounced the "j" like an "h" and thought they were going to get a free sample of Cheez-its.