Humor Us! : Preaching and the Power of the Comic Spirit

Homiletics textbooks often discourage the use of humor in preaching, regarding it as trivializing or distracting. The result is that many preachers have failed to understand humor’s positive power, demoting it to the opening joke to get a guaranteed guffaw to warm up the crowd. Humor Us!, the second volume in the "Preaching and…" series, is a collaborative effort by homiletician Alyce M. McKenzie and humor scholar Owen Hanley Lynch that promotes humor, a force capable of great good, to its rightful place in the pulpit. Establishing humor as a divine gift, Humor Us! opens to preachers the world of humor studies with its positive portrayal of humor’s usefulness to speak truth to power, unite people in their common humanity, and strengthen them to cope and survive in tough times.

Humor Us! helps preachers understand how humor works and shows them, in very practical and specific ways, how preachers can put it to work in their sermons. It combines the wealth of knowledge of two highly regarded scholars-practitioners to show how humor can become a potent tool for sharing the good news in sermons. McKenzie and Lynch prove that humor, when applied thoughtfully, can foster compassion and a sense of common humanity, help challenge an unjust status quo, and invite listeners into a shared experience of the presence of God.

Alyce McKenzie is Le Van Professor of Preaching and Worship and Director of the Center for Preaching Excellence at Perkins School of Theology. A sought-after preacher and workshop leader, she is the author of several books for both preachers and lay audiences, including Novel Preaching: Tips from Top Writers on Crafting Creative Sermons and Making a Scene in the Pulpit: Vivid Preaching for Visual Listeners.

Owen Hanley Lynch is an Associate Professor in Corporate Communication and Public Affairs in the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University. An accomplished and popular professor, he is the author of numerous scholarly articles and is also CoFounder and Executive Director of Restorative Farms, a nonprofit farm system to address lack of healthy food access and economic opportunities in South Dallas.