Easter Laughter and Frivolous Protests

Religious bunnies from the 14th century Gorleston Psalter.

When I was in primary school, the Christian Easter celebration seemed depressing in contrast with the new life of spring. Although the Christian message of Easter is all about life and hope, my school, like most modern Christian institutions, focused on Christ’s suffering and death more than on Christ’s rebirth or even Christ’s teachings. Unsurprisingly, the kids were more interested in the Easter eggs and bunnies than in the gloomy school assembly or church trip.

Easter hasn’t always been divided between serious Christian church services and fun eggs and bunnies with more pagan vibes. In 1965, Russian writer Mikhail Bakhtin wrote a book about François Rabelais, a 16th century French satirist whose work was about the liberating power of humour. Rabelais And His World is as much about how medieval and Renaissance people had fun as it is about Rabelais himself. In the first chapter, Rabelais writes:

Let us first of all recall the risus paschalis. During the Easter season laughter and jokes were permitted even in church. The priest could tell amusing stories and jokes from the pulpit. Following the days of lenten sadness he could incite his congregation’s gay laughter as a joyous regeneration. This is why it was called “Easter laughter.” The jokes and stories concerned especially material bodily life, and were of a carnival type. Permission to laugh was granted simultaneously with the permission to eat meat and to resume sexual intercourse (forbidden during Lent). The tradition of risus paschalis was still alive in the sixteenth century, at the time of Rabelais. (Pages 78-79)

Easter laughter was a real thing, maybe dating back to the 9th century, but a controversial one. Many of the historical accounts we’ve got of it were about people disapproving of it or trying to ban it. In 1518, Johannes Oekolampadius, a Swiss preacher, wrote to a fellow priest, Wolfgang Capito, about how disrespectful he found it. He mentioned priests shouting “cuckoo”, pretending to be a cow giving birth, and dressing a regular bloke up as a monk. Capito didn’t have a problem with it, writing back that it was better than people dozing off during the service. Despite the controversy, it was recognised enough that Andreas Strobl, a Bavarian priest, published an official book of forty comic sermons for Easter, including jokes about long-nosed lying devils, and Mary Magdalene being told off by a gardener for stepping on the herbs in front of Jesus’s tomb. Eventually, Pope Benedict XIV banned Easter laughter entirely in the 18th century, but churches in Germany and Austria were still practicing it up until the early 1900s.

It probably lasted so long because it fulfilled an essential social function. Bakhtin believed that carnivals and other “carnivalesque” seasonal events provide a second life outside of everyday restrictions they “were the second life of the people, who for a time entered the utopian realm of community, freedom, equality, and abundance” (page 9). And because everyday restrictions (like not laughing in church) are temporarily suspended, so is everyday hierarchy. Carnivals often occur at turning points on the calendar – Easter occurs some time around the beginning of spring, and another seasonal tuning point, Christmas, also involved church sanctioned “Christmas laughter”. This gives them a natural, season-based legitimacy that challenges manmade social norms, as they involve an in-between time period that can’t be classified as one thing or another. People can temporarily break the rules (eating vast quantities of chocolate eggs, for example), and relate to each other as equals. So instead of just being silly, these festivals provide an important outlet for playfulness, a period of relaxation, and a way of connecting with your community.

In my PhD research on bands that play samba-fusion percussion music at protests, I’ve found that people intentionally use creativity and humour as a way to communicate political messages. However, they’re also (not always intentionally) tapping in to the cultural history of the carnivalesque. In the same way that Easter laughter allowed people to have fun in church and explore religion with humour, carnivalesque protests make a space where people feel freer to challenge the rules of everyday life, criticise authority figures, and connect with other people as equals. Things like costumes and drums are symbols that set the stage and allow people to feel that social norms are temporarily different.

Morris dancers at an Extinction Rebellion protest in Windsor, August 2024.

This raises a question though – doesn’t it mean that people going to marches and rallies are could be just playing at protest for a short time without making any meaningful change? It’s even sometimes argued that protests are harmful to a cause. Carnivals are an opportunity to let off steam so we can go back to our usual lives refreshed. Might people attend a march or a rally, go home satisfied that they’d made their voice heard, and then do nothing else to support a cause because they’d had that outlet for their feelings?

First, evidence suggests that protests can work, especially if they’re big, nonviolent, and the cause is already popular. Second, political battles aren’t won by individuals or individual actions, they’re won by communities working together. Performance-based acts of protest that are about making a public statement can be part of that if they’ve got a clear purpose. That could be to get people talking about an issue, to demonstrate that people care about an issue, to educate by sharing information, and so on. I think that the community-creating function of carnivals and festivals can apply to protests too, and is often overlooked by activist communities. Most people in the bands that I’m researching are involved in politics outside of protests – they volunteer for charities, mutual aid networks and local political groups, they do nonviolent direct action, they take part in boycotts and try to live ethical lifestyles, and they support each other. Most of them felt empowered to become politically active after going on a march.

Marches and rallies won’t necessarily solve a problem alone, but do help bring people together and keep them together as part of a wider ecosystem of activism.