Does God have a sense of humour? Comics, critics and authors decide

I was a little late for Tuesday's Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival debate on the clash between jokes and religious belief, but arrived to hear the distinguished professor Timothy Garton Ash talking about the ridiculous ease with which people take offence these days. He declared that “we have to educate ourselves to have thicker skins, and humour is essential to lubricate those thicker skins.” My own skin, of medium thickness, started to prickle. Use humour to ‘lubricate’? Only in Oxford…

As a debate, this one suffered a little, I felt, from the fact that most of the panellists seemed to agree with each other and even when they disagreed they were super-polite. The only panel member with religious faith was a pleasant looking young man called Osama - no name in the programme, alas - who seems to do a lot of community and inter-faith out-reach work. He said that he dealt with offensive humour by ignoring it. So, alone among all the panellists, he had not seen the controversial Danish cartoons. This did not inhibit him from discussing them with animation however, which I found a little odd. The other panellists could have made more out of this, but good manners – and in Pullman’s case, a terrible cold - held them back.

The cartoonist Martin Rowson announced from the start that religion is an ideology and that if it’s okay for him to be vile and nasty about the ideology behind the Liberal Democrats, then it’s okay for him to be vile and nasty about religions. He tempered this by saying that he didn’t like to pick on those with less power than him because that’s bullying: so he’s happier being rude about Christians, who apparently do have power, than about Muslims, who don’t.

Philip Pullman was put on the spot by a woman in the audience who had heard him introduce extracts from the film The Golden Compass last year at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival. She felt discussion of the controversial anti-religion aspect of the story had been deliberately damped down by the film’s producer, who was worried about the commercial implications of any row. Pullman, who really did look terribly unwell, said: “I don’t think I bear any responsibility for the film” but conceded that she had a point: “You are probably right, yes.” He told a grim story which, though not strictly relevant to the discussion, alerted the audience to the malice that can lie below the surface of even a place as calm and beautiful as Oxford. Last year, a local mosque had received a letter and drawings insulting Islam and the prophet, signed Philip Pullman. It reached the police who quizzed him for about 2 minutes before dismissing him as a suspect, but the incident left him understandably rattled. “Someone was trying to get me into trouble.” No wonder that Pullman’s own thoughts on religion were expressed with great care last night. He is, he stressed, formed by his Christian upbringing. It is precisely because of this that he feels enabled to criticise Christianity, rather than, say Islam.

The audience was exceptional. After some jokey chatter from the panellists and from its chairman Sarfraz Manzoor, about the Nazis, a very old man stood and announced that he had, as a child, escaped from Nazi Germany. With reference to Garton Ash’s call for thicker skins all round, he observed that a liberal democracy is not the best society in which to develop a thick skin. These are most well-developed, he said drily, under a tyranny.

Listen to our podcast from the event here .

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