“Now it’s my turn to disagree,” I said. “This notion that nobody can explain humour, or even talk sensibly about it, is one of humour’s greatest cover-ups. I’ve been thinking a great deal about the Devil lately, and I have been wondering if humour isn’t one of the most brilliant inventions of the Devil. What have you just been saying about it? It diminishes the horrors of the past, and it veils the horrors of the present, and therefore it prevents us from seeing straight, and perhaps from learning things we ought to know. Who profits from that? Not mankind, certainly. Only the Devil could devise such a subtle agency and persuade mankind to value it.”

“No, no, no, Ramsay,” said Liesl. “You are in one of your theological moods. I’ve watched you for days, and you have been moping as you do only when you are grinding one of your home-made theological axes. Humour is quite as often the pointer to truth as it is a cloud over truth. Have you never heard the Jewish legend—it’s in the Talmud, isn’t it?—that at the time of Creation the Creator displayed his masterwork, Man, to the Heavenly Host, and only the Devil was so tactless as to make a joke about it. And that was why he was thrown out of Heaven, with all the angels who had been unable to suppress their laughter. So they set up Hell as a kind of jokers’ club, and thereby complicated the universe in a way that must often embarrass God.”

“No,” I said; “I’ve never heard that and as legends are my speciality I don’t believe it. Talmud my foot! I suspect you made that legend up here and now.”

Liesl laughed loud and long, and pushed the brandy bottle toward me. “You are almost as clever as I am, and I love you, Dunstan Ramsay,” she said.

“New or old, it’s a very good legend,” said Ingestree. “Because that’s always one of the puzzles of religion—no humour. Not a scrap. What is the basis of our faith, when we have a faith? The Bible. The Bible contains precisely one joke, and that is a schoolmasterish pun attributed to Christ when he told Peter that he was the rock on which the Church was founded. Very probably a later interpolation by some Church Father who thought it was a real rib-binder. But monotheism leaves no room for jokes, and I’ve thought for a long time that is what is wrong with it. Monotheism is too po-faced for the sort of world we find ourselves in. What have we heard tonight? A great deal about how Happy Hannah tried to squeeze jokes out of the Bible in the hope of catching a few young people who were brimming with life. Frightful puns; the kind of bricks you make without straw. Whereas the Devil, when he is represented in literature, is full of excellent jokes, and we can’t resist him because he and his jokes make so much sense. To twist an old saying, if the Devil had not existed, we should have had to invent him. He is the only explanation of the appalling ambiguities of life. I give you the Devil!”