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Good morning. Humour is a serious subject, but it took my mother’s terminal diagnosis with cancer for me to see how it might possess what theologians describe as the divine capacity for turning chaos into order. A few weeks before he died, the Victorian poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote to his great friend Robert Bridges. Dearest Bridges, –I am ill to-day, but no matter for that as my spirits are good. And I want you too to ‘buck up’, as we used to say at school, about those jokes over which you write in so dungeonous a spirit. “Goodness knows”, he implores, “the joke that gave most offence was harmless enough and even kind. You I treated to the same sort of irony as I do myself.” Hopkins is impatient with Bridges for being overly sensitive, but he soon concedes that when it comes to jokes, “it makes all the difference in the world whose hand administers.” Gallows humour may be funny when it comes from the person actually facing the gallows. From the hangman, it is cruel. Yet Hopkins’s first response is worth remembering too: sometimes, joking at someone else’s expense can actually be kind. I have been reflecting on this paradox recently while looking after my mother, as she battles the disease that will soon kill her. She has always had a keen wit, but it has sharpened through her suffering. Witnessing her playfulness with everyone, from the hospice nurses to the priest administering the last rites, I have been struck by the power of humour to redeem what it refuses to be solemn about. Making jokes can surely be a form of distraction, a way of not dealing with something. But it may also be a way of confronting difficulties head on, and so overmastering them – turning tragedy into comedy. “Solemnity flows out of men naturally,” Chesterton observed, “but laughter is a leap.” The message of the Gospels is certainly to be joyful. “Gloom is no Christian temper”, John Henry Newman once wrote – though the Book of Job reminds us that it is of course easier to be light-hearted when life is going well. It follows that joking should not be reserved for the good times; and clearly, for many people these are very hard times. Still, jokes should not necessarily be reserved only for the people who are having those hard times. As Hopkins suggests, and as my own mother’s courageous example has shown me close up, laughter can dignify what it seems to demean. Humour may be a kind of compassionate complicity in the suffering of others.