NP St Augustine the stand-up?

[jbor]

Article by Guy Rundle on comedy:    

    Few philosophers are as funny as St Augustine. Seminary students obliged
    to wade through the thousand or so pages of The City of God will dispute
    this, but the fifth-century bishop of Hippo was responsible for the best
    joke in the history of reflection on the nature of existence. Three
    quarters of the way into his Confessions a record of a life largely
    devoted to strengthening the role of guilt in Christian belief, he gets
    onto his earlier days as a fornicator and winebibber, the Robert Downey
    jnr of the early church fathers. He was in torment, he tells us, unable
    to continue his life and unwilling to change it, and "I cried out to the
    Lord, 'Lord, give me chastity and constancy but not yet'."

    It's his only joke, but it's a bloody good one, a little bit of Woody
    Allen direct from the fifth century, and a sudden flash of liveliness in
    the arid record of theological debate that leads up to it. Even the
    timing, as rendered by the punctuation, gets it right, the slight pause
    and then the punch line a microsecond before you've had time to think of
    it yourself. [ ... ]

    St Augustine's gag is a good one, but it's just about the only one in
    the Christian heritage. There are no jokes in the Bible, it has often
    been observed, although some people find the Book of Job pretty funny.

    Comedians, mostly.

Continues at:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/0106/09/text/spectrum5.html

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