Lighten up, you Anglicans: it’s Lent tomorrow.

The Church of England, embattled on several fronts by women priests and gay bishops, has decided that the 40-day period of fasting until Easter is altogether too sombre, despite its origins in Christ’s spell of deprivation in the wilderness.

From today a “Love Life, Live Lent” campaign is being launched, accompanied by a website inviting communicants to share Lenten jokes. The jokes, by the way, should be clean. The website will also have a text-messaging service, which will send subscribers daily suggestions on how to spread generosity and neighbourliness, with the exhortation to make someone laugh.

A comedy club called The Laughing Sole will also be launched in Birmingham during the Lenten season, aimed at providing an alternative to the coarse humour of regular comedy venues and encouraging audiences to reflect on the deeper themes of life.

Helen Tomblin, founder of the club, which will open next Tuesday, said yesterday: “If you cut out the swearing and crude material you actually get a higher standard of comedy.”

Ms Tomblin may not know much about what makes people laugh, but she added: “Humour breaks down barriers, relaxes people, builds community and often prompts conversations about life, meaning, morals and maybe even God.”

Justifying the Lent Lite approach, a spokesman for the Church of England said: “Traditionally Lent has been seen as a sombre time of sackcloth and ashes. What we are suggesting is that people share jokes, which is a way of kickstarting a very positive take on the season.”

In a spirit of ecumenicism, The Times is happy to prime the pump of Lenten jokes, given that there are none on the website yet.

A pub regular always bought his pints of beer in threes, explaining that two of them were for his brothers who had emigrated after making a pact that they would always have a drink for each other. When, one late March day, he came in and ordered only two, he explained that he himself had given up drinking for Lent, but his brothers hadn’t.

No? Well, there was the new bride who flung herself at her husband’s body on the night of their early April wedding. “I can’t do that,” he protested. “It’s Lent.” His shocked bride demanded to know to whom, and for how long.

Oh, did they say they only wanted clean jokes?

Ashen? Hardly

— In the Skyros Goat Festival in Greece celebrants dress in shaggy black capes, their faces covered by the skin of a miscarried kid

— The British preLenten pancake race is thought to date to 1445 and a woman in Olney who heard the shriving bell and ran to the church in her apron, clutching her frying pan

— In the Middle Ages, meat and dairy products were proscribed, although in Germany beavers’ tails could be eaten because they were classified as fish

Source: Times Database, Olney Town Council