The four-hour [Union Theological Seminary] session, “Humor in Ministry,” was a kind of seminar in how to do stand-up for God.
The workshop’s leader, the Rev. Susan Sparks, pastor of the Madison Avenue Baptist Church on East 31st Street, moonlights as a nightclub comedian. Her adjunct for the day was another stand-up comic with whom she sometimes works, Rabbi Bob A. Alper, who bills himself as “the only practicing rabbi in the world doing stand-up comedy intentionally.”
Ms. Sparks and Rabbi Alper, invited as part of the seminary’s “field-based” program to teach some of the intangibles of ministry not covered in the divinity curriculum, surveyed the arc of potentially humorous situations ”” including weddings, funerals and long, hot summer days when even the sermonizer can lose the thread of a sermon.
They discussed the often-overlooked humor in some passages of the Bible, including Jesus’ use of irony and exaggeration, and the ribaldry in the Book of Esther.