The world can be seen as ugly, unsymmetrical, unjust, not making sense, awful, painful, etc. God can be seen as funny, inefficient, helpless, doddering, confused, weak, and what else? This aspect of God is the accenting of the imperfect in reality. And nothing can be more imperfect than reality, because nothing is more unfinished, wavering, finite. The finite, as to the infinite, is as imperfect to perfect; and since reality can be described as infinitely finite, it is also infinitely imperfect. If God or reality can work hard, and they do, to make cancer, rats, bedbugs, bad smells, injustice, ugliness, unbearable pain—they surely are on the imperfect side; and I’m sure God and reality, if they were in the position—and they can be seen as in that position—of expressing themselves on the subject, would say, “I, or we, are as imperfect as anything can be, because we are that from which all imperfection comes; but since we have to be everything pretty unlimitedly, exhaustively, comprehensively—well, we are exhaustively, unlimitedly, comprehensively—and we prefer to say—infinitely imperfect. What else do you expect?”

And, really, what else is there to expect? We can imagine infinite mistakes made in the world; if infinite mistakes couldn’t be made, the world would be limited: and that’s what the world likes least.

Religion, to me, is essentially humor; for religion is a way of actually, factually, loving the real even though the real is seen as ugly, too. And, as I have said, when the ugly is seen as beautiful, and still seen first as ugly, there is humor.

Now a religion which denies the ugly and imperfect and misshapen and odorous and intolerable and cheap and disgusting and repulsively physiological, in nature or the world or existence or the universe, is a religion which, strictly speaking, pampers God, pets him, smooths him over for “religious consumption.” Such a religion is not wholly religion, for it does not take God, reality, wholly as he is or they are. It just won’t do.

God, in all his ugliness and beauty, cheapness and might, ridiculousness and grandeur, littleness and infinity, must be recognized and considered. Well, when we look at the trivial or mean and make it orderly or beautiful, and still see it as trivial or mean, we are being humorous. Doing the same to God, we are truly, profoundly religious.

The purpose of religion is to present the infinite in a finite, that is, a “lesser” or “meaner” form. A church, for example, is not God; nor is a cathedral, or a prayer, or a book, or a chant. But it stands for God. We hear the lesser thing, we feel the thing beyond, and see the lesser thing predominantly. The humor in religion is so tremendous it is unconscious. Religion, completely seen, goes towards the humorous; the humorous goes towards religion.

For example, suppose one saw a rotting dog in a bad smelling ditch. To see this “ugly” thing wholly, courageously, and yet to feel the grandeur and beauty and tremendousness and space and infinity and goodness of reality; and in feeling these last, still to see before us the rotting dog, is like humor. Certainly the person is most religious who is aware most precisely of the most ugliness, and yet can see God as God, and nothing less. Persons can be easily religious just by being among lawns and chants and diapasons and well written liturgies and statements about infinity; but that is not complete religion: it’s too easy, too soft, too pampering, too evasive. And then we can start with the rotting dog or the bad smell, and go to infinity, and so forget the rotting dog and the bad smell. But to have infinity seen, felt by us, without neglecting the rotting dog, would also be humor and religion in the most courageous sense.

The statement, therefore: “A rotting dog accompanied by a bad smell was a definite part of transcendental infinity, without which the infinity would be incomplete,” is humor and it is religion.

However, in humor, as an ordinary showing of life, these “utternesses” are not plainly in play. Still, all humor is the ugly or unsymmetrical put into order, and yet seen as ugly.

Suppose we take the “cynical” statement (a maxim of La Rochefoucauld): “Gratitude is a lively sense of favors to come.”

The main thing in the statement as a thing told, is that gratitude is spurious, or often spurious. This is an ugly thing to see. But the ugly thing is given form in terms of English style. It is neatly said. So a thing of ugly import is also beautiful. We see the beauty while having the ugliness before us.

A caricature has the same principle. There is something untoward, disproportionate, excessive, unsymmetrical, in a caricature. But the disproportion itself is dealt with proportionately. The ugly itself is dealt with beautifully, or with form. Still, the ugly has the foreground of attention. So the caricature is humorous.