Between Reverence and Ridicule: Aquinas, Scandal, and the Moral Shape of Comedy
The Church has always laughed—though you wouldn’t always know it from looking at Her.
From medieval feast days that bordered on theatrical chaos to the playful humiliations of St. Philip Neri, Catholic history is not a sterile gallery of solemn faces. There is incense, yes—but there is also wine. There is fasting, and there is feasting. There is the Cross—and there is Easter morning laughter.
But the modern comedy landscape does not simply entertain—it forces a question the Church cannot ignore:
Where is the line between humor that lifts the soul and humor that scandalizes it?
Two contemporary comedians—unintentionally—map that terrain:
Pete Holmes — the gentle mystic
Shane Gillis — the court jester with a blowtorch
And long before Netflix specials and podcast clips, Thomas Aquinas gave us the vocabulary to evaluate them.
Aquinas and the Virtue of Eutrapelia
In the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas teaches something many Christians forget:
Humor is not optional. It is a virtue.
He calls it eutrapelia—well-tempered playfulness.
For Aquinas, humor becomes virtuous when it:
restores balance to the soul
refreshes the weary mind
builds communion
avoids cruelty
avoids irreverence toward holy things
He warns against two distortions:
Deficiency — rigidity, harshness, joylessness
Excess — frivolity, vulgarity, contempt
Too little humor makes a person brittle.
Too much humor makes a person shallow.
The virtuous person laughs well.
And for Thomas Aquinas, failing to laugh well is not trivial—it is a defect in virtue.
Pete Holmes: Humor as Wonder and Communion
Pete Holmes often feels like a modern embodiment of eutrapelia.
His comedy is rooted in curiosity rather than cynicism. He laughs at human frailty, but not at human dignity. Even when he turns to religion—especially in specials like Nice Try, The Devil—his instinct is not to tear down belief, but to explore it.
Consider his recurring bit imagining God as overly literal or awkwardly present. The humor comes from exaggerating human attempts to describe the divine. The joke is not that God is absurd, but that our language about Him is limited.
Similarly, in his playful “Jesus voice” routines, Holmes mimics a therapeutic, hyper-gentle Christ—not to mock Christ Himself, but to expose how modern sensibilities reshape Him into something more comfortable.
In both cases:
The target is human misunderstanding
The sacred remains intact
The audience is invited to reflect, not deride
Holmes’ humor:
opens people up
softens defenses
makes vulnerability safe
treats spiritual longing with respect
There is something almost pastoral in his tone. He does not weaponize irony; he uses delight. His comedy disarms rather than destabilizes.
From a Thomistic perspective, this is eutrapelia at work: humor that refreshes, restores, and builds communion without wounding reverence.
His comedy disarms without degrading—and that is precisely why it endures.
Shane Gillis: Humor as Shock and Exposure
On the other side stands Shane Gillis.
Gillis operates like a medieval jester who discovered gasoline.
His comedy thrives on tension. In his Netflix special Beautiful Dogs, he leans into exaggerated historical impressions—drawing on grotesque figures and morally charged moments—not to praise them, but to expose modern absurdities and the performative nature of public outrage.
He:
heightens discomfort
punctures pretension
reveals hypocrisy
refuses to flatter his audience—and that refusal is part of his appeal
There is real value here. The jester has always had a place in the court precisely because he can say what others cannot.
But this is also where the moral tension emerges.
Gillis’ humor can drift into areas where:
taboo becomes the primary tool rather than the instrument
repetition dulls moral sensitivity
audiences are trained to laugh at vulnerability rather than recognize it
Consider his use of impressions involving disability or social marginalization. Defenders argue that he “equalizes everyone” by making all human weakness fair game. Critics argue that such humor risks degrading dignity.
A Thomistic lens cuts through both defenses:
The question is not whether something is “allowed.”
The question is whether the laughter forms virtue or vice.
Holmes laughs with.
Gillis sometimes laughs at.
And that difference matters.
The Scandal Line: A Thomistic Clarification
In modern discourse, “scandal” is often reduced to offense.
But in Catholic theology, scandal has a far more precise meaning.
For Thomas Aquinas, scandal is not about hurt feelings. It is about moral formation. It occurs when a person’s words or actions become a stumbling block, leading another into sin.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it succinctly:
“Scandal is an attitude or behavior which leads another to do evil.” (CCC 2284)
This distinction is crucial for evaluating humor.
A joke may be:
edgy without being sinful
uncomfortable without being immoral
But it becomes scandalous when it does one of the following:
normalizes irreverence toward what is sacred
trains the audience to laugh at human dignity
cultivates contempt rather than clarity
weakens the moral imagination over time
In other words, scandal is not about the line crossed in the joke—
it is about the direction the joke moves the soul.
And most souls are not moved in a moment—but formed over time.
A Thomistic Diagnostic: What Is This Forming in Us?
Aquinas distinguishes between giving scandal (leading others into sin) and taking scandal (taking offense where none is intended).
This allows for a more disciplined evaluation of comedy.
The real question is not:
“Did the joke go too far?”
The real question is:
“What does repeated exposure to this kind of humor make us become?”
Applied here:
Holmes
does not train contempt
does not habituate irreverence
leaves the audience more open, not more cynical
Gillis
can expose hypocrisy and humble pride
but can also habituate irreverence
can blur moral boundaries through repetition
risks forming audiences toward coarseness rather than clarity
The issue is not merely the content of the joke,
but the trajectory of the laughter.
We Are What We Consume
The moral stakes of humor become clearer when we remember a deeply biblical principle:
We are what we consume.
This is obvious in the material sense. The body is shaped by what it is fed. But Scripture and tradition extend this truth far beyond food. The soul, too, is formed by its diet.
As Christ says, “man shall not live by bread alone” (cf. Matthew 4:4). We live by what we take in—intellectually, imaginatively, spiritually.
And in the modern world, much of what we “eat” is not bread, but content.
We binge.
We scroll.
We laugh.
But we rarely ask what that steady diet is doing to us.
This is where the theology of scandal becomes intensely practical.
Because humor is not just something we hear—it is something we practice internally. Every laugh is a kind of assent—not a full agreement, but a small participation.
Over time, those small assents accumulate.
If we consistently consume humor that treats the sacred as trivial, we begin to lose our sense of reverence.
If we laugh at the degradation of others, we become less capable of seeing their dignity.
If our humor is soaked in cynicism, we slowly lose the capacity for wonder.
This is not immediate. It is gradual. Almost imperceptible.
But it is real.
The tradition would recognize this as a form of habituation—the same mechanism by which virtues are formed, now working in reverse.
Which means the question is not simply:
“Is this joke sinful?”
But rather:
“What kind of person will I become if this is what I consistently find funny?”
This reframes the comparison between Holmes and Gillis.
It is not merely about which comedian is “better,” but about which kind of humor we are training ourselves to love.
One cultivates receptivity, humility, and wonder.
The other, when uncritically consumed, can cultivate hardness, irreverence, or detachment.
And because most people do not engage comedy critically, the danger is not in a single joke—but in a steady diet.
The soul, like the body, adapts to what it is fed.
Why the Church Needs Humor—But Not Unformed Humor
It would be a mistake to canonize one comedian and condemn the other. The Church does not need fragility. It also does not need brutality.
Holmes gives the Church:
joy
wonder
gentleness
a bridge to transcendence
Gillis gives the Church:
cultural honesty
resistance to sentimentality
a reminder that Christians must not be thin-skinned
a test case for discernment
Together, they reveal something essential:
Humor can sanctify.
Humor can scandalize.
And discernment is not optional.
The Church must not fear laughter.
But she must guard reverence.
Holy Laughter Is a Discipline
Laughter is not morally neutral. It is formative.
We become what we find funny.
For Thomas Aquinas, the vice opposed to eutrapelia is not merely bad taste—it is the corruption of the soul through disordered laughter.
If our humor trains us to see the sacred as trivial, we drift toward irreverence.
If it trains us to see others as objects, we drift toward cruelty.
If it trains us to dismiss truth, we drift toward cynicism.
This is the true scandal line.
Not the moment of offense—
but the slow formation of contempt.
Holmes shows how humor can lift the soul.
Gillis shows how it can wound—or, at its best, expose and cauterize.
And the task of the Church is not to ban humor, but to form it—so that even our laughter becomes an instrument of charity rather than a rehearsal for sin.
Because in the end, holy laughter is not naive.
It is disciplined. It is ordered. And like all virtue, it must be learned.
