What is ‘humour’ and how do we know if something is humorous or not? This paper examines various types of humour in the Bible (including sarcasm, satire, and parody) and attempts to extrapolate from them a list of ‘markers’ which can be used as a guide for determining if the writer was deliberately being humorous. Rather than being an exhaustive analysis of biblical humour, this paper serves as an introduction to the day’s discussions, and focusses on the interaction between humour and trauma.

Dr Stephen Cook’s PhD thesis (University of Sydney) analysed satire as a specific form of humour in the book of Jonah. Since then Stephen has been exploring possible satire elsewhere in the Bible, especially in Samuel-Kings, Job and the Song of Songs.

Within the Western philosophical tradition, humour has often been treated with a certain disdain. Aristotle, for example, associated humour with mockery, while Plato went so far as to caution that laughter in general has been known to provoke a violent reaction. This disparagement of humour persists in the writings of mediaeval Christian philosophers, some of whom treat it as evidence of a trivial mind, and unsuited for people of culture.

Within the rabbinic tradition, we observe a kind of compartmentalisation. While humour intended for mockery is (at least, depending on the subject of the mockery) forbidden, there are other types of humour, and other functions that it might have. This differentiation of humour on the basis of its purpose reflects a similar differentiation in how humour is rhetorically conveyed, and is helpful for appreciating the use of humour in Jewish literature over the ages.

Nonetheless, a propensity to assume that humour is either trivial or malicious has contributed to difficulties in identifying it in otherwise “serious” texts – and this is a difficulty that continues to persist, despite the development of 20th century theories of humour that allow for a more nuanced understanding of its function and purpose. Nowhere perhaps is this more evident than in writings that convey a traumatic content.

This paper will use some of the materials from the “Oyneg Shabbes” (the secret archive of the Warsaw Ghetto) as a case study. It will consider a few passages that testify to the use of humour and will seek to map them against the three primary theories of humour in use today: Superiority Theory, Incongruity Theory and Relief Theory. It will also seek to demonstrate that the same rhetorical elements, when used in explicitly non-humorous passages, have the opposite effect of heightening tension, rather than dispelling it, and of emphasising trauma, rather than providing relief.

Dr Simon Holloway serves as Manager of Community and Corporate Programs at the Melbourne Holocaust Museum. He holds a PhD in Classical Hebrew and Biblical Studies and is an Adjunct Lecturer at Melbourne University, where he teaches Early Rabbinic Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible./

“When Jacob Sacher’s Jewish school was implicated in the Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse, he was forced to reflect on his ultra-orthodox upbringing."

So began the description in the Melbourne Comedy Festival guide for my 2025 comedy show "Promising Young Mensch". This show sought to use traditional Jewish humour as a way to question the Jewish community’s response to child sexual abuse in the community. It was also an opportunity to explore victim narratives, and how generational trauma can be used as a basis for justifying the perpetration of ongoing harms.

This paper will discuss the novel blend of traditional and practice-based research methods that went into the creation of this show. The project primarily used practice-based research, inviting artistic practices into the research methodology itself to create the non-traditional research output of a comedy show. However it also used research-based practice, which sees traditional research as a tool to improve the artistic output.

Jacob Sacher is an award winning comedian and graduate student at the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation. His most recent special, Promising Young Mensch, explored his upbringing in the ultra-orthodox Chabad community, and was nominated for Best Comedy at the Melbourne Fringe Festival. His research explores the Yiddish comedy archetype of the Schlemiel, and investigates how it found its way into mainstream 21st century comedy. Jacob is a board member of the Australian Comedy Studies Collective, and a member of the organising committee for the upcoming Australian Humour Studies Network 2027 conference to be held in Melbourne.

Ancient flood narratives confront the limits of human mortality in the face of overwhelming natural and divine forces. Yet in the Mesopotamian tradition, mortality is accompanied by another human limitation: the limits of human knowledge. This paper examines the relationship between humour, tragedy, and wisdom in the Flood account of the Epic of Gilgamesh, with comparison to Genesis 6–9. It argues that humour in the Mesopotamian Flood tradition arises from gaps between knowledge and ignorance, and that these moments contribute to a broader reflection on wisdom, mortality, and the human condition.

Louise M. Pryke is an Assyriologist and author specialising in the literature and cultural history of ancient Mesopotamia. She is a Research Associate at the University of Sydney and is the author of books on Gilgamesh, Ishtar, and ancient myth.

This paper reads the divine-human exchange of Jonah 4 through the lens of faleaitu (lit. “house of demons/spirits”), the Samoan tradition of comic performance whose name signals both its theatrical licence and its serious social function. In faleaitu, comedians besides their routine comedy performances, also engage in mockery, parody, and even physically lampooning senior figures present, from chiefs to orators, and sometimes even clergy, within a ceremonially sanctioned space where such transgression is not disrespect but a means of communal release. Building on recent trauma-critical readings of Jonah that identify the book’s comedic excess as bound up with memories of Assyrian imperial violence (L. Juliana Claassens, Jione Havea, Chesung Justin Ryu), this paper proposes faleaitu as an Indigenous Samoan hermeneutic that sharpens, rather than just illustrates, that reading. The exchange beneath the qiqayon plant, from its overnight growth and destruction, the merciless worm, the scorching east wind, to Jonah's theatrical wish to die twice over, is reread as a faleaitu routine articulating a divine send-up of the prophet's grief that neither dismisses nor denies it, but stages and exaggerates it until it becomes bearable. This paper argues that perhaps this comic register offered the book’s post-exilic audience, themselves living in the long shadow of Assyrian and subsequently Babylonian conquest, a means of holding imperial trauma at a survivable distance without denying its reality. faleaitu thus supplies what trauma-critical biblical scholarship has begun to notice in Jonah with an indigenous theoretical name: humour not as evasion, but as a mechanism of communal endurance.

Brian Fiu Kolia is a second-generation Australian Samoan who is married to a Samoan woman who grew up in Aotearoa, and father to a son who has learnt to adapt to different contexts at such a young age. He serves as a Hebrew Bible lecturer at Malua Theological College and is an ordained minister. As a Pasifika reader, he is interested in what makes the biblical text weird, ambiguous, and chaotically subversive against empire/s, while also recognising that the same text is riddled with colonial and oppressive predilections.

My argument is that the narrator employs satire, in the form of irony, to undermine the credibility of Elihu. For example, although he claims humility and deference for his elders, Elihu then subjects his audience to a pompous, verbose exercise in self-promotion. His description of himself as “bottled-up wine” ready to burst (32:19) is designed to conjure up images of an over inflated buffoon flatulent with words. Irony is also at play in Elihu’s claim to possess “perfect knowledge” (36:4) as a self-designated prophet. He then proceeds, however, to condemn those who are wise in their own eyes (37:24), confidently claiming that God will have no regard for them. These are Elihu’s final words before Yahweh bursts onto the scene in a whirlwind, addressing Job but completely ignoring Elihu in a wonderful act of irony. And then finally, Yahweh subtly undermines Elihu’s message. Elihu confidently asserts that “the clouds pour down their moisture and abundant showers fall on humankind” (36:28). In response, Yahweh asks, “Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain...to water a land where no one lives, an uninhabited desert…?” (38:26), undermining Elihu’s neat anthropocentrism.

Until recently I have been serving as a pastor at South-West Evangelical Church, Kingsgrove, Sydney. Prior to that, my wife Julie and I were missionaries with CMS in East Asia and Taiwan. I recently completed an MTh and am now (perhaps foolishly) embarking on the journey towards a PhD. I am still trying to tie down a topic but it will be in the area of an ecotheological reading of Job 38-42. I am particularly interested in how Job came to see God with his eyes (Job 42:5) and the application of his experience to that of every believer who wrestles with the reality of apparently gratuitous suffering.

I enjoy drinking too much coffee, trying to run without expiring, and watching K-Dramas on Netflix.

This paper builds on the argument that trauma and humour are deeply related by examining that claim through the lens of posttraumatic growth (PTG). I will do this in a focussed exegesis of Isaiah that suggests Isaiah 1–39 functions as the presentation of the assumptive world (Zion theology), whilst 40–55 speaks from within its shattering, considering the rupture of exile and 56–66 addresses unresolved difficulties for a post-return community where return does not restore the former world intact. This paper uses the PTG model developed by Calhoun and Tedeschi as a map across Isaiah to test whether humour functions within that process. Moving beyond narrow definitions that restrict humour to satire, irony or ridicule (which are well attested in Isaiah), it adopts a broader account of humour as a mode of transcendence, wellbeing and meaning-making in the aftermath of catastrophe.

[This is part 2 of last year’s FBS paper “Laughing until it hurts: Hebrew Bible prophets, survival literature and post traumatic growth”), where part 1 provided the theoretical foundation, this paper will focus on the exegesis further by applying the PTG model to Isaiah].

Angela Sawyer is Head of Biblical Studies and Associate Academic Dean at ACOM (part of Australian University College of Divinity). She is an Honorary Research Associate at Eva Burrows College, UD, and adjunct faculty at Eastern University, USA. Angela’s interdisciplinary research focuses on Isaiah and prophetic literature, Daughter Zion, trauma hermeneutics, and pedagogical innovation in theological education. She is based in Melbourne, Australia.

Daniel 1 is set in the Babylonian court during the Exile, thus recalling that tragic event. An allusion to personal trauma is made in that Daniel and friends are under the control of an appointee of the chief of the eunuchs. Nevertheless, Daniel’s request to be allowed for ten days (v. 12) to eat vegetables and drink water rather than the king’s provisions is approved. The “ten days” is mentioned twice more in connection with the diet of Daniel and friends. Later in the chapter, Daniel and friends are found to be “ten times” better in wisdom and understanding than the other wise men in the kingdom. It will be argued that the repeated use of the number ten is both satirical and humorous, while also strengthening the underlying them of the chapter.

Anne Gardner M.A., B.D. (hons),. Ph.D. (Edin) focusses on Hebrew and Aramaic texts. Her numerous publications range from Genesis to the DSS with Daniel and Isaiah 56–66 featuring prominently. From 2008 to 2020 she was the Old Testament Editor of the Australian Biblical Review and in 2012 she was awarded the Krister Stendahl Medal “In recognition of outstanding research, writing and publishing in the field of Biblical Studies.” Currently Anne teaches at Yarra Theological Union, University of Divinity in Melbourne.

This interdisciplinary study places cultural trauma theory in conversation with literary spatial theory and psychogeography to explore Jeremiah’s Covenant Sermon (11:1-13) as a landscape of cultural trauma. Psychogeography seeks to analyse the affective dimensions of urban life; thus, given the centrality of the urban world of Jerusalem in Jeremiah’s landscape, prophecy itself may be understood as a psychogeographical practice that pierces the illusions of city life to lay bare the secret passions, desires, and anxieties that make up urban experience. Applied to Jeremiah’s Covenant Sermon, a psychogeographical perspective illuminates the text’s mapping of a distinctive Judahite identity between the utopian dream of ‘a land oozing milk and honey’ and the dystopian nightmare of covenant infidelity. Charting a politics of fear in literary space, the Sermon thus contributes to the consolidation of the borders of a Judahite identity in the aftermath of invasion and exile.

This paper is drawn from one chapter of my on-going PhD thesis on landscapes of cultural trauma in selected prose texts from the book of Jeremiah.

Josh Axtens is a PhD candidate studying at Charles Sturt University in Canberra. His ongoing research explores the book of Jeremiah at the intersection of literary spatial theory and cultural trauma studies.

Pharaoh’s secretive and underhanded command to the two midwives in Exodus 1:16 is, without doubt, distressing. Curiously, no hint of satire exists as Pharaoh commands and then as the midwives preserve rather than destroy life. However, the midwives’ justification and portrayal of the Hebrew women in response to Pharaoh is satirical, exposing Pharaoh's folly. This paper explores how satire and trauma converge within Exodus 1:15–22 and how this convergence functions at both the literary and rhetorical levels of the book.

Katherine Davis is Research Fellow at Sydney Missionary & Bible College (Australian University of Theology) and is in the finishing stages of the Exodus volume for the ZECOT series.

This paper explores representations of the biblical stories of the sacrifice of Isaac and the three youths in the fiery furnace as they appear in Roman catacombs, through the lenses of trauma and childhood. Although these scenes are commonly interpreted as symbols of salvation and divine protection, this study argues that their significance is heightened by their focus on youthful figures confronted with extreme violence. Early Christian catacomb art frequently depicted biblical narratives in which individuals faced imminent death but were ultimately rescued by God, creating a visual language of peace and hope. The presentation shows how these images functioned for families and groups living with the ubiquitous experience of death, including the loss of children. Situated among tombs and funerary inscriptions, the paintings invited viewers to confront the realities of death while simultaneously affirming the possibility of divine intervention and life after death.

Attention is given to Isaac as a silent child figure. In Genesis 22, Isaac speaks only briefly before his near-sacrifice and remains silent thereafter. Read through trauma theory, this silence can be understood as a narrative marker of experiences that resist articulation. Situated within funerary contexts marked by grief, mortality, and the frequent loss of children, these images offered early Christian communities a visual language for negotiating anxiety and grief. The paper argues that endangered youthful male bodies became powerful symbols through which trauma could be remembered, transformed, and reimagined in light of resurrection and divine protection.

The presentation will be followed by a discussion that invites participants to contribute their expertise to the questions:

• How do the representations of these biblical stories in funerary spaces overlap with, and differ from how they may have been understood in their original context?
• How does the catacomb context change (or not change) the biblical representations of the youths and Isaac?

Janine Luttick is a senior lecturer in biblical studies in the Faculty of Theology and Philosophy at Australian Catholic University. She has published in the areas of the gospel of Mark and contemporary biblical hermeneutics. Her current research focuses on the depictions of children and childhood in the New Testament and Roman catacombs, connecting her study with scholarship on embodiment, childhood and family studies in early Christianity. Janine is currently preparing a contribution to journal article for a special issue on Families and Flourishing in Early Christianity.

Jesus-style comedy has important pastoral applications. In this paper I reflect on the way I have applied my own research about comedy in the New Testament to pastoral practice.

In “A Wicked Sense of Humour” Theology Today, I looked at sayings of Jesus which use humour. I argued that Jesus’ teaching should be understood in context of lower socio-economic classes with “rough” humour. I also claimed that his humour in that context was a form of resistance against oppressive and dominant theological messages.

In “Ephesians” in Queer Bible Commentary I made some similar suggestions about the use of humour in a prison epistle. I suggested that even dark and sardonic comedy (or gallows-humour) can be spiritually helpful to people and communities in hopeless situations.

I have often explored the usefulness of these ideas in my own pastoral practices, such as discipleship, preaching, and worship leading.

Recurring themes have included laughter as a means of:

• spiritual transformation
• provoking creativity and divergent thinking
• building social connection and solidarity
• taking ourselves less seriously
• participation in the joy of God.

In this presentation I will reflect on pastoral experiences, especially a funeral service in which Jesus’ humour and the image of disco lights were used to celebrate one particularly glamorous life. I will explore the connections between the biblical exegeses and such pastoral practices.

Karl is the pastor of Crave Metropolitan Community Church, and a university chaplain, working as the national director of the Australian Student Christian Movement.