Fr. Jim Martin Laughs with Stephen Colbert

Very easily Father Martin could have had many Rick Perry moments talking about religion on a wild and wickedly irreverent show like the Colbert Report.  Yet despite the extreme hazard of engaging with Colbert, Fr. Martin  manages to sanely convey to a large secular audience the themes of his new book that religion is not all about darkness, doom and damnation.  Father Martin very successfully pulls off a very risky assignment by getting serious messages across while being the staight man in a comic interaction.  Colbert of course does the  jokes on the Colbert show.   The exchange worked both as comedy and evagelization. - something that is very hard to do.  

And the publisher of his new book must love all the free publicity.

Very nice.Colbert is hit and miss.His irony is sometimes a little one-dimensional but he often makes me laugh.
The overall theme though is absolutely theological dynamite.If we are miserable then we have to give an account for our misery.
St Ignatius had a sense of humour and loved it when Ribineira would imitate him with his limp etc.
Those aspects of the great Saint are often missing from his bio.Pope Benedict also likes to hear the jokes that are told about him.
The joke about him telling the Romans congregated in St Peter's that when they go home they were to give their children a slap and tell them "that is from the Pope" is a wonderful parody of the great words of Pope Roncalli.
Humour is philosophy.It is a look at reality in a new way .That is why Chesterton is such a powerful writer because he is capable of laughing at life.Nietzsche is the same.The greatest philsopher since Plato is funnier than Groucho Marx.
Chesterton said about Tolstoy and his attack on Shakespeare that it stems from moralism."The puritan has enough strength to tense up but not, like the catholic, enough to relax".
The question is is this humour to be limited to religion?Many catholics feeled obliged to tell corny jokes ,corny catholic jokes.This is a sure sign  that the culture has taken over from the faith.The self-reference involved in catholics telling catholic jokes makes me woozy.
St Josemaria spoke of the credulity of catholics when they believed that a certain saint had been known as a child to reject his mother's milk as a form of mortification.This is humour that informs and makes laugh.I suppose all humour informs.