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About This Passage
This paragraph is one of Lewis's most daring strokes: he lets a devil confess that the deepest human joy is a mystery even to Hell. Screwtape can classify and exploit most laughter, but the joy of friends reunited eludes him entirely — it resembles Music and something that 'occurs in Heaven,' 'quite opaque' to the powers of darkness. Copying it trains a writer to build toward an admission of mystery, and to use an enemy's blindness as evidence of a higher reality.
I divide the causes of human laughter into Joy, Fun, the Joke Proper, and Flippancy. You will see the first among friends and lovers reunited on the eve of a holiday. Among adults some pretext in the ...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Reconstruct the argument of Screwtape's eleventh letter in sequence, ascending from the laughter the devils cannot use to the laughter they prize most. How can you tell that flippancy, not the cruder Joke, is the letter's true climax?
Discussion Questions
- Screwtape confesses that the 'real cause' of joyful laughter 'we do not know,' that it resembles 'Music' and what 'occurs in Heaven,' and that it is 'quite opaque to us.' Is Joy a threat to Hell chiefly because of its moral effects or because it belongs to an order the devils cannot even perceive — and which does Lewis make primary? Use Screwtape's words to Wormwood to defend your reading.
- Screwtape names the 'real use' of the Joke as 'a means of destroying shame,' letting cowardice and cruelty be 'passed off' as funny. Why does Lewis treat the dismantling of shame as a more fundamental conquest than the commission of any particular sin? Use Screwtape's words to Wormwood to develop your answer.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Impossible to see through or understand; impenetrable.
Item 2
People wholly absorbed in worldly concerns.
Item 3
Light, frivolous matter of no real substance.
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Critical Thinking
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