Here’s my take: Humor belongs in church. It especially belongs in church when it helps people connect. In church, it should never make someone feel like a target. This means that, when it comes to humor in church, the question isn’t simply whether a joke is clean or whether it gets a laugh. It’s what that laugh does to the room. Good humor can lower defenses, restore attention, build trust, and help people recognize something true about themselves. Bad humor can get the exact same laugh while quietly hurting and even dividing the people listening.
Why Humor in Church Makes Some Leaders Nervous
Long before I became a stand-up comedian, I was already using humor in front of people. I’ve spent much of my adult life teaching, preaching, speaking, and standing in front of classrooms full of students who didn’t always share my enthusiasm for Greek verbs. Somewhere along the way, I learned that a room could be drifting away from me, then one little joke could suddenly bring everybody back. People would laugh, look up, and, for a few moments anyway, we’d all be together again.
I used to think of those jokes as little breaks from the serious stuff. I’d teach something important, make a joke, let everybody laugh, then get back to business. Stand-up comedy eventually made me realize I had it backwards. The joke wasn’t necessarily interrupting the communication because, sometimes, the joke was actually helping the communication happen.
Of course, that’s exactly why some church leaders get nervous about humor. Churches aren’t comedy clubs, and pastors are responsible for much more than whether people had a good time on Sunday morning. They’re dealing with faith, grief, marriages, families, suffering, sin, hope, death, and all kinds of deeply personal things, so it makes sense that they’re protective of the room.
The problem comes when we assume that protecting the room means removing humor from it. I don’t think it does. In fact, after spending years in ministry, biblical scholarship, teaching, and now stand-up comedy, I’ve become convinced that the better question isn’t whether humor belongs in church. The better question is what happens to the room when everybody laughs.
What Humor Actually Does to a Room
One of the things stand-up has taught me is that laughter isn’t just a response to something funny. It’s also a social event. When a joke works, a bunch of people who may not know one another suddenly do the exact same thing at the exact same moment. They recognize something together, react together, and, for a few seconds, become a room instead of a collection of individuals.
That’s incredibly useful for anyone trying to communicate. A well-placed laugh can lower defenses, restore attention, release tension, and make the person speaking feel more human. I’ve seen audiences physically change after a good laugh, with people leaning forward, relaxing their shoulders, and becoming more willing to go wherever the speaker takes them next.But here’s where things get complicated. A joke that divides people can produce the exact same physical response. People still laugh, but now the laughter might communicate that one group belongs inside the circle while somebody else belongs outside it.
That’s why I don’t think “Did they laugh?” is a sufficient way to evaluate humor in church. As a comedian, I obviously want the laugh, but as someone who’s spent years thinking about communication and faith, I also care about what the laugh accomplished. Every laugh rearranges the room a little bit, and the person holding the microphone should probably care about how it got rearranged.
Does the Bible Use Humor?
As a Bible scholar, I’m always a little hesitant when people start claiming that Jesus was basically a stand-up comedian. I don’t think we need to turn the Sermon on the Mount into a Netflix special to recognize that biblical writers understood exaggeration, irony, satire, wordplay, absurdity, and other rhetorical devices that overlap with comedy. The Bible isn’t a joke book, but it certainly isn’t humorless either.
Think about some of Jesus’ images. There’s a person walking around with a plank sticking out of his eye while trying to remove a speck from somebody else’s. There are religious leaders carefully straining a tiny gnat from a drink and then somehow swallowing an entire camel. There’s the famous image of a camel attempting to squeeze through the eye of a needle.
Those images are ridiculous, and that’s part of why they work. Jesus could’ve simply said, “Hypocrisy is bad,” but the plank and speck make the point visible. He could’ve said, “You’re obsessing over small matters while missing enormous ones,” but swallowing a camel is much harder to forget. That’s one of humor’s great strengths. It can make truth memorable because it allows us to see something differently. The humor doesn’t necessarily diminish the serious point because, sometimes, it’s precisely what allows the serious point to get through.
Reverence Doesn’t Require Humorlessness
I think this is where churches sometimes get themselves into trouble. We rightly want to treat sacred things as sacred, but then we accidentally begin treating seriousness and reverence as synonyms. They’re not. Something can be deeply meaningful without everyone having to look like they just received terrible news.
Families understand this instinctively. The closer people become, the more shared jokes they tend to develop because intimacy creates a language of its own. Married couples tease one another, siblings laugh about family quirks, and longtime friends can say things to one another that would sound strange coming from an outsider. The humor doesn’t necessarily signal contempt because, often, it signals affection.
Church humor can work the same way. There’s a difference between laughing about the strange things Christians sometimes do because I love the church and mocking Christians because I think they’re idiots. The subject matter might even overlap, but the posture underneath the joke changes everything. That’s why I think affection versus contempt is a better category than simply asking whether something sacred can ever be funny. Humor can actually arise from affection for something. When contempt becomes the engine, though, the room can usually feel it.
The ROOM Test for Using Humor in Church
The more I’ve thought about this, the more I think there are four questions pastors, speakers, and even comedians can ask before using humor in a faith-based setting. Conveniently, they spell ROOM, which seems appropriate because the room is exactly what I’m trying to protect. This isn’t a formula guaranteeing that every joke will work, but it gives me a better way of thinking about what I’m trying to accomplish.
R stands for Relationship. Does the joke strengthen my relationship with the people listening, or does it create distance between us? Self-deprecating humor can work beautifully here because I’m often inviting people to recognize themselves in my own ridiculous behavior. Instead of saying, “Look how stupid those people are,” I’m saying, “Apparently, I’m a mess too.”
O stands for Other. Who becomes “the other” when this joke lands? Every joke creates an invisible circle, and I want to know who’s standing inside it when everybody laughs. If the basic premise is, “Can you believe people like that?” I need to think carefully about who “that” includes and whether someone sitting in the room just discovered that they’re the punchline.
O also stands for Objective. Why do I want this laugh in the first place? Sometimes I want to release tension, sometimes I want to regain attention, and sometimes I’m using absurdity to help people see an idea differently. Knowing the objective helps me determine whether the joke is actually serving the moment or whether I’m just chasing a laugh because getting one feels good.
M stands for Meaning. What survives after the laughter stops? If everyone remembers my killer punchline but completely misses the point I was trying to communicate, the joke may have worked better than the message. Good humor doesn’t have to carry the entire meaning, but it shouldn’t accidentally bury it either.
Humor That Unites vs. Humor That Divides
One of the simplest ways I’ve learned to think about humor is whether we’re laughing with people or merely laughing at them. That’s not an absolute rule because comedy is more complicated than a slogan, but it’s a useful starting point. The best church humor I’ve encountered tends to reveal something about our shared humanity rather than pretending the speaker has somehow escaped it. That’s why I love making myself part of the joke. I’m a husband, dad, professor, former pastor, Bible scholar, middle-aged guy, and comedian, which means life provides me with a nearly unlimited supply of evidence that I don’t have everything figured out. When I joke about those experiences, I’m usually not asking the audience to admire me but to recognize themselves somewhere in my mess.
That’s also one reason humor can build trust so quickly. If I’m willing to expose some of my own absurdity, people don’t have to work quite as hard to protect theirs. The laughter becomes a way of saying, “Yeah, I’ve been there too.” Divisive humor works differently. It strengthens one group by making another group smaller, and sometimes it gets an enormous laugh because tribal laughter can feel really good in the moment. The problem is the residue it leaves after everybody goes home, especially if the people being joked about were sitting in the room.
When Pastors Should Use Their Own Humor
Churches don’t need to hire a comedian every time they want people to laugh. In fact, I think a pastor’s own natural humor can be incredibly effective because the congregation already knows the person telling the story. There’s relational capital there that a visiting comedian doesn’t have. The key word, though, is natural. Some people are naturally funny storytellers, while others sound like they’re reading jokes printed on popsicle sticks. Trying to become “the funny pastor” when that isn’t really part of someone’s personality can create exactly the awkwardness they’re trying to avoid.
Instead, I’d use humor where it naturally arises from the story, the observation, or the teaching. A funny thing happened with the kids that illustrates the point, so tell it. Something absurd happened during the week that everybody in the room can recognize, so use it. The humor doesn’t need to turn the sermon into stand-up. It just needs to serve the communication. That’s a very different goal from trying to prove to the congregation that the pastor is funny.
When It Makes Sense to Hire a Comedian
There are other situations where the church isn’t simply using humor within something else because comedy is actually part of the event. I’ve performed at church comedy nights, private events, retreats, conferences, and other faith-based gatherings where the goal is intentionally to give people an evening where they can relax and laugh together. That’s a different job, and it requires a different skill set.
Holding a room for thirty, forty-five, or sixty minutes with comedy is very different from telling a funny story during a sermon. A professional comedian has spent hundreds or thousands of hours writing material, testing jokes, reading audiences, adjusting timing, dealing with unexpected interruptions, and figuring out what to do when something doesn’t work. That’s the craft you’re actually hiring.
But churches have an additional consideration because a comedian who works clean isn’t automatically a good fit for a church. I’ve written elsewhere about the difference between clean comedy and Christian comedy because those categories overlap without being identical. A comedian can avoid profanity and explicit material while still approaching faith, marriage, sexuality, politics, or the audience itself in ways that don’t fit the event.
That’s why I’d never recommend booking someone based on a two-minute highlight reel alone. Watch longer sets, ask about previous faith-based events, talk about the specific audience, and pay attention to the comedian’s posture toward the room. You’re not merely hiring someone who can get laughs because you’re trusting someone with the microphone in a community you care about.
Can Comedy Be Used for Church Outreach?
There’s something fascinating about the invitation, “Come to church with me Sunday.” For some people, that’s a very big ask. Maybe they’ve never attended church, maybe they had a terrible experience years ago, or maybe they’re simply suspicious about what’s going to happen once they walk through the doors. Now change the invitation slightly: “Our church is having a comedy show Friday night. Wanna come?” Same building, many of the same people, completely different invitation. Comedy can lower the perceived cost of walking into an unfamiliar faith community because the person knows exactly why they’re going there: they’re going to laugh.
That doesn’t mean disguising an evangelistic ambush as a comedy show. If we’re advertising comedy, I think we should actually give people comedy. People can tell when they’ve been baited into something else, and destroying trust isn’t much of an outreach strategy. But a genuinely good evening can change someone’s relationship to the space. They walked into a church, met some friendly people, laughed for an hour, and discovered that whatever caricature they carried into the building didn’t entirely match reality. Sometimes creating that kind of positive first experience is enough.
How to Choose a Comedian Who Understands a Faith-Based Room
I’ve performed comedy in clubs, churches, private events, outdoor spaces, breweries, community venues, and plenty of other environments, and one lesson keeps showing up: the room matters. The same joke can feel completely different depending on who’s listening, why they’re there, what they expect, and what kind of relationship they have with the person holding the microphone. Faith-based events amplify that reality because audiences can include everybody from pastors and seminary professors to teenagers, grandparents, visitors, skeptics, and people who haven’t attended church in years. So, I’d look beyond whether a comedian labels themselves “clean.”
I’d want to know whether they’ve actually performed for faith-based audiences, whether they understand the culture from the inside, whether they’ll discuss the event beforehand, and whether I can watch enough of their material to understand what I’m buying. I’d also want to know whether they understand that serving the room doesn’t mean becoming bland. Safe comedy isn’t automatically good comedy. Churches deserve more than someone standing onstage telling harmless jokes nobody remembers ten minutes later.
The goal should still be excellent stand-up, with real setups, punchlines, misdirection, callbacks, observations, stories, and everything else that makes comedy work. The difference is that a good church comedian understands the boundaries without constantly bumping into them. Nobody should have to spend the entire show wondering whether the next joke is going to create a meeting for the pastor on Monday morning. When the fit is right, everyone can relax, including the leadership.
Frequently Asked Questions About Humor in Church
Is humor appropriate in church?
Yes, but appropriateness depends on what the humor is doing and where it’s being used. Humor can restore attention, release tension, build connection, and illuminate truth without diminishing the seriousness of faith. The better question isn’t simply whether something is funny, but what happens to the people in the room because everyone laughed.
Did Jesus use humor?
I wouldn’t describe Jesus as a stand-up comedian, but the Gospels contain clear examples of exaggeration, absurd imagery, irony, and other rhetorical techniques that overlap with humor. That said, I do think “parables” are essentially jokes. Images such as swallowing a camel or attempting to remove a speck while having a plank in your own eye work partly because they’re intentionally exaggerated and memorable. Recognizing those features doesn’t require turning the Bible into a comedy routine.
Is it okay for pastors to tell jokes during sermons?
It can be, especially when the humor arises naturally from the pastor’s personality, experience, or teaching. A joke can help regain attention or make an idea memorable, but it shouldn’t become a substitute for substance. If the congregation remembers the funny story and completely forgets why it was told, the humor may have overtaken the message.
What kind of humor should pastors avoid?
I’d be especially cautious about humor built primarily around contempt, humiliation, or making someone in the congregation feel like an outsider. I’d also avoid using the pulpit to settle scores disguised as jokes. A laugh isn’t worth much if it creates distrust between the speaker and the people they’re supposed to serve.
Can churches host comedy shows?
Absolutely. Comedy can work well for church gatherings, retreats, fundraisers, conferences, couples’ events, volunteer appreciation nights, and outreach events when the comedian and material fit the audience. The key is treating the comedy as an actual craft rather than assuming “clean” automatically means “appropriate” or “funny.”
What’s the difference between clean comedy and Christian comedy?
Clean comedy generally describes material that avoids profanity, explicit sexual content, and other subjects that make it inappropriate for broad audiences. Christian comedy usually describes comedy created specifically from within or for a Christian context, which may include jokes about church life, faith, Scripture, or Christian culture. A comedian can be clean without doing Christian comedy, and a Christian comedian can perform material that isn’t specifically about Christianity.
The Question Isn’t Whether the Joke Gets a Laugh
I’ve spent a strange amount of my adult life standing in front of church people. I’ve been a pastor, Bible scholar, professor, speaker, and now a stand-up comedian, so I’ve experienced that room from several different angles. The roles have changed, but one thing hasn’t: I’m still fascinated by what happens between the person speaking and the people listening. Comedy has made me think about that relationship more carefully than ever. Onstage, I get immediate feedback about whether something connected, but getting the laugh is only part of what interests me. I want to know why it worked, what it communicated, what it revealed, and what happened between all of us when the room laughed together.
That’s why, when it comes to using humor in church, I wouldn’t begin with, “Can I get away with this?” I’d begin with the ROOM: relationship, other, objective, and meaning. If the humor strengthens the relationship, avoids unnecessarily turning someone into the other, accomplishes a worthwhile objective, and serves the larger meaning, we’re probably moving in the right direction. The goal isn’t to discover how much comedy a church can tolerate before somebody complains. It’s to recognize that laughter can be one of the ways human beings connect, listen, learn, and remember together. Reverence doesn’t require humorlessness, and humor doesn’t require irreverence.
Bringing Comedy to Your Church Event
If you’re planning a comedy night, fundraiser, retreat, conference, volunteer event, or another faith-based gathering, these are exactly the kinds of rooms I love performing for. My background as a former pastor, Bible scholar, professor, and clean stand-up comedian means I understand both sides of the microphone. I understand why church leaders are protective of their people, but I also know how much fun a faith-based room can be when everybody realizes they’re free to relax and laugh.
You shouldn’t have to choose between comedy that’s genuinely funny and comedy you can trust in the room. That’s the space I’ve tried to build my own stand-up around, with material about marriage, parenting, church, getting older, family, and all the other absurd things that happen when we’re trying to be reasonably functional human beings. If you’re considering comedy for an upcoming church or faith-based event, you can watch my material and contact me through my booking page HERE.
