When depicted on a show like Good Omens, heaven is the shiny smooth shell of perfection. Sterile. Corporate. All sheen without any fun, without aesthetic pleasure. Always smug. Often scolding.
Viewers are to believe that these heavens are perfectly composed, perfectly efficient—and perfectly controlled. The effect is heavens that feel, at the least, uncanny. Perhaps even sinister and vindictive.
Even with a more positive portrayal like on The Good Place, heaven is—at best—innocuous, bureaucratic, and oblivious to the complexity and actual concerns of humanity. Behind the idealized exterior, heaven has a certain emptiness. Its inhabitants are still going through the motions, but it’s not clear if anything inside is really driving them.
Why do so many creators seem to suspect that heaven is boring? I wonder if it’s because we can’t seem to conceive of a perfection that’s not, in some sense, totalitarian—all smoothed out by God’s all-encompassing will.
Hell in fiction, meanwhile, is terrible, but at least it seems interesting precisely because it’s not perfect. In several of my college English lit courses, William Blake’s pronouncement in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that John Milton “was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it” was presented as both true and obvious. A rebellious, earth-bound Lucifer is simply a more compelling character than a distant, perfect God the Father. Hell is more complex than heaven. At least the Devil’s party is a party.
I’m a writer and also a believer. To be specific: I believe in heaven, art, humor, the agency of humanity, and the persistence of individual being.
None of this is normally a problem, or rather, these (and other important) elements have been fertile ground for exploration in both my writing and daily and religious life. But lately, I’ve been thinking about them all together as a set and have discovered that I’m unsure how they ultimately fit together. If we’re talking about a heaven filled with perfect beings working in line with God’s will, what is comedy about? Do perfect people crack jokes?
The possibility of heavenly laughter is, for me, an important question. As with all theological and aesthetic concepts, so much depends on how you define the nature of God, evil, agency, etc., and I don’t know that any of us stuck here in mortality can truly, fully understand such concepts. But in Latter-day Saint thought, life equips us to try. Per the example of Joseph Smith, I find that cramming as much humanity and embodiment as possible into the equation makes sense. I don’t necessarily expect a heaven that is perfectly frictionless. Here, instead, are a few thoughts on forms perfection might take in heaven, and why they don’t negate individuality and, thus, the possibility for humor.
A Perfect Recall
The scriptures tell us that when humanity stands in front of the judgment bar of God every individual will recall everything they thought, said, and did in mortal life.
Is this a momentary thing only required for the process of judgment or will this perfect recall persist into heaven?
It seems to me that heaven is more of a heaven if it persists. If God grants agency to individuals and has set up a system whereby they each can have individual experiences and draw upon that individuality to progress, grow, and contribute to the continued work of community and creation, then surely it’s much more effective and interesting if beings who become perfected in the afterlife have vivid, immediate (but not intrusive) access to those experiences? All that experience was hard won, after all, and is part of who we are.
If that’s the case, then I suspect that the denizens of heaven will not be able to resist drawing upon those memories, that vast well of experience, in the service of humor. The ability to recall every detail of all the imperfect things we said and did back when we didn’t know any better (or knew better but hadn’t quite overcome our weaknesses), provides the opportunity to embellish the stories we'll tell each other in heaven—an embellishment that will be embroidery rather than exaggeration as we select the best details from our perfect recall to dramatize the situation.
And this doesn’t mean that heaven is a bunch of perfect beings sitting around laughing about how imperfect and stupid they all were. There may be a little bit of that: mortals are good at doing stupid things and sometimes the result is quite funny.
But my understanding of heaven is that it is filled with beings who are full of charity, the pure love of Christ. And it seems to me that one can be made aware of the disjuncture between what one expects (in a phrase, a story, an action, a gesture) and what actually occurs and find that amusing while still feeling warmly towards current and past selves.
A Perfect Language
How do you tell a joke in the language of heaven?
Jokes require disjunctures and slippages of meaning—the ability to surprise. They benefit from precision and economy, a certain fluency combined with a multiplicity of meaning.
Most importantly, humor arises out of an individual using meaning and narrative to express something that the audience hasn’t experienced in quite that same way before.
What a pleasure it must be to use humor in heaven where we’ll all have a better command of language.
While I don’t know whether talk from early LDS leaders about the Adamic language being the language of heaven is true doctrine or an offshoot of the nineteenth-century obsession with perfect languages, I personally believe that the language of heaven either contains within it all possible meanings that have or ever will be expressed in human history or is reserved for discussions where a certain precision is necessary. Indeed, the reverse Babel that is needed is not the reversion to some unified, authoritarian language, but instead is some sort of universal understanding of all languages and dialects. To me, that both honors and opens up opportunities to play with human experience.
Imagine a heaven where each individual eventually has access to every language that has existed in human history. What wordplay could happen, what jokes could be told and with what exquisite gradation of meaning if the person telling the joke is able to select any word from any language that has ever existed?
That sounds perfect to me.
A Perfect Sociality
The Doctrine & Covenants claims “that same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there, only it will be coupled with eternal glory” (D&C 130:2).
Sitting around after the Thanksgiving table had been cleared hearing about the childhood shenanigans of various cousins or reminiscing at a class reunion about how terrible the Junior Prom decorations were is a naturally occurring byproduct of human sociality. If social relations in heaven are as they exist in mortality but are among beings who are perfect, then I bet telling humorous anecdotes and jokes will still be where every gathering ends up.
Add in perfect recall and a perfect language (or languages) to all the time eternity affords individuals in perfect health and freed from pressing material concerns, and you have a recipe for a whole lot of sociality—and where there’s sociality, there’s humor.
I suppose one could argue that everyone will eventually get tired of reminiscing (except, of course, the great uncle retelling for the twentieth time the story of that one time he took your dad fishing), but if your vision of heaven is one where progress continues, then the individuals who exist in heaven will continue to gain experience and thus have new history to draw on for their stories.
Indeed, in a heaven where the work of learning and creation continues and does so by council rather than diktat, then there will also continue to be disagreement and experimentation and those are states that inevitably lead to humor.
A Perfect Progression
My primary argument for humor among perfect beings is my belief that heaven is not a static existence. This belief is likely why I’ve long been fascinated with literary works that deal with or end in stasis, from The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov and Kafka’s short story “A Country Doctor,” to Steve Peck’s A Short Stay in Hell and Mihai Eminescu’s epic poem Luceafărul.
I don’t know how to think through this as a philosopher or theologian, but for me, perfection, and thus heaven, is not some sort of stasis. At the end of Bulgakov’s novel, when the master and Margarita arrive at the cozy cottage that is their eternal reward, it’s presented as a long sleep, a form of damnation.
Stasis means everything is compound in one, but that’s not what I understand heaven to be. Heaven remains a dynamic state because even if there is a guiding plan, the perfect individuals who operate within it retain their individuality. They learn, grow, interact, create.
I also don’t think this is simply a matter of there being opposition in all things: a weeping God as the opposite of a laughing God. Humor and grief are both more complicated than that. Indeed, they are often intertwined. Does all that complexity just go away in heaven or is it deepened and better understood?
On earth, deeper insight makes—and motivates—better art. Art that stretches wide as eternity and reaches into the depths would be a path and product of the spiritual kind of progression we anticipate in the eternities. And art that stretches to match the range of reality necessarily has humor in it—even Kafka (especially Kafka). For me, art is the primary proof that such a thing as eternal progression is desirable and even possible. I can’t imagine any definition of progress that doesn’t include the creation and consumption of art.
Humor & Perfection
My contention that humor exists in heaven hinges on a vision of heaven and definition of perfection that doesn’t erase difference, personal history, and personality. Perfection is what is perfect for that individual at that time and place. Perfect as a mode rather than a state. A perfection that is perfect enough to be malleable when it interacts with other perfections.
It goes both ways: the very existence of humor affirms for me the individuality of being and that individuality of experience matters and is persistent into eternity. Because what’s more terrifying, but also hilarious, than the belief that this existence (and the one before it and the one that comes after) actually, ultimately matters?
Maybe the joke is actually a bad one.
Perhaps mortality is a model of hell rather than heaven. It certainly seems like it at times. Perhaps we’re all of the Devil’s party even if we may not know it.
I don’t think so, though. The problem with the stasis of hell is that the joke is only ever funny the first time (if even that). Afterwards, it becomes the same joke told over and over again.
And for me, every aspect of our existence and experience mattering is also comforting (even if it is terrifying at times): that there’s this plan where God loves his children and wants what’s best for them, which is that they grow and learn and become able to return to his heaven and interact with him in a way that’s similar to the relationship between a parent and a child.
And when we do arrive there, we’re all connected together, hanging out in heaven, getting to know ourselves and each other better, helping our Heavenly Parents with further acts of creation, meeting together in councils and socially, telling stories, cracking jokes—the full, rich, beautiful, human sound of laughter ringing into the eternities.
William Morris writes, edits, and writes about Mormon literature. His most recent work is The Darkest Abyss: Strange Mormon Stories, which was published by BCC Press. His work can be found at motleyvision.org.
Art by Brian Kershisnik.