Biblical Humor and Performance

“So often books about humor end up being humorless attempts to overexplain the joke—especially when written by biblical scholars! This volume is nothing like that. The essays in Peter Perry’s collection deftly pair right-sized analysis with keen insights into how humor functions in biblical texts and their performance. The result is as perceptive as it is playful. With this volume, biblical performance criticism has taken an important step forward.”


—Travis West, author of Biblical Hebrew: An Interactive Approach





“The contributors introduce us to humor’s rhetoric, ancient and modern, theoretical and practical. They locate probable humor in multiple strands of the biblical traditions so that we see where it impacted audiences and the likely shape of that impact. As someone who believes that communities worth engaging always have a healthy sense of humor, I found this a fascinating expansion of our understanding of biblical communication events.”


—Phil Ruge-Jones, co-editor of The Bible in Ancient and Modern Media