The Laugh Track of the Holy

People ask, almost always in the same tone, whether we are actually serious. They ask it the way you'd check whether a stranger at the bus stop is dangerous or merely strange. And the honest answer, the one that makes them back away, is: yes. Also no. Mostly we are declining the question, on principle, as a sacrament.

Here is the thing nobody wants to hear. The joke and the prayer were never two activities that Discordianism cleverly performs at the same time. They are one activity, seen from two angles, the way the Sacred Chao is one Chaos wearing a pentagon on one cheek and a golden apple on the other. The mistake — and it is Greyface's mistake, the original one, planted around 1166 BC when he announced that life was Serious Business — is to assume that serious and funny are a pair of boxes, and that an honest person picks one.

What a joke and a prayer have in common

Watch what a joke actually does. It walks you confidently down a sentence, lets you furnish the room with your assumptions, and then removes the floor. The pleasure is the falling. You laugh because for one instant you were holding something you didn't know you were holding, and it was taken, and you survived.

Now watch what a prayer does. Same walk. You arrange your certainties — what you want, what you fear, who you think is listening — and then you hand them, deliberately, to something you cannot see and cannot bill. The floor goes out on purpose. You are emptier afterward, and somehow lighter, and you did it to yourself.

Both are controlled demolitions of the self you walked in with. The punchline and the amen are the same hinge. The only difference is that the joke admits the floor was never there, and the prayer hopes Someone is holding it. Discordianism's whole liturgical innovation is to do both in one breath and refuse to tell you which.

Why we won't put either one down

Drop the joke and you get religion — the grim kind, the kind that grades you, the kind Greyface built. It still removes the floor, but it stops laughing about it, and a prayer that has stopped laughing is just a man kneeling in a room insisting the room is the universe.

Drop the prayer and you get mere comedy — clever, exhausting, a man at a party proving nothing matters, which is the laziest theology there is and secretly the most frightened. Nothing matters is what you say when you cannot bear the possibility that something does.

So we hold both. Not balanced — the Sacred Chao is not the yin-yang, the Hodge and the Podge do not politely take turns — but tangled past separating. A prayer that knows it is a joke has nowhere left to lie to you from. A joke that knows it is a prayer has nothing left to lose. Hold them together and you get the one posture Greyface genuinely cannot follow you into: reverence without a straight face.

This is why everyone is a genuine Pope and why the Pope Card is real and worth nothing and worth everything. It is why we honor a goddess who started a war by being funny at a wedding — Eris rolled the apple inscribed KALLISTI into the marriage of Peleus and Thetis as the best gag in the history of grudges, and three goddesses took the bait dead seriously, and the punchline was Troy. The Original Snub was a joke. The Trojan War was its congregation taking it literally. We have been trying not to repeat the congregation's mistake ever since.

The qualified maybe, one more time

You will say: this is just a dodge. You refuse to decide because deciding is hard.

In some sense. Sri Syadasti, patron of the qualified maybe, taught that all affirmations are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, and so on through all seven of his clauses — count them, there are seven, this is the one fact about the man that holds still. Is Discordianism serious? runs straight into that machinery and comes out the far side as seven answers, and the seven do not cancel. They accumulate. Surplus, not deficit.

The Fifth Commandment of the Pentabarf prohibits a Discordian from believing what he reads. You are reading this. Apply it. That instruction is a joke. It is also, without the slightest contradiction, the most sincere thing I will say to you all day, and I would kneel to say it if I thought you wouldn't laugh, which I deeply hope you will.

Hail Eris. Now go bite something.