It is difficult to know how heaven reacts to the comedy that reaches its ears from Lebanon. Since it stopped communicating directly with its servants on planet Earth around 2,500 years ago, it has chosen strange ways to express its anger or its approval.

Heaven’s punishments and rewards are limited to manipulating the elements of nature: a deadly earthquake here, refreshing rain there, car accidents, fires, and from time to time a mysterious rainbow appears. Those who believe in the metaphysical can no longer interpret its intentions after the update that linked it to LGBTQ+ identities, so they avert their eyes, postpone looking to the sky to make their wishes, and wait for it to pass.

With this prolonged silence from heaven and all that lies beyond it, its direct employees on Earth always volunteer to read its moods, concluding that the comedian has offended heaven and broken its heart by daring to joke with it, or about it.

Although these employees appointed themselves to their positions and never received a job offer in the usual human sense, they fight fiercely to defend their employer, who has been absent for centuries. So much so that one might think, God forbid, that they are currying favor with Him, making Him say what He does not wish to say, attributing to Him positions we do not actually know whether He holds, and perhaps even dragging Him into confrontations with the wrong people.

People like Shaden Faqih, Nour Hajjar, and most recently Mario Mubarak (and before them colleagues Joy Slim and Charbel El-Khoury, the duo Hussein Qaouq and Mohammad Al-Dayekh, and others whose names escape me) have not been suspected of raping children, like the serial rapist priest Mansour Labaki. They have not deprived divorced mothers of seeing their children, nor have they prevented Lebanese mothers from granting their nationality to their husbands and children. They have not incited violence against women and children, nor promoted gratuitous violence and hatred more broadly, nor have they helped push the country to the brink of civil war each time it finds itself, once again cursedly, standing on that brink along the fault line between Ain el-Remmaneh and Chiyah.
These people also did not threaten anyone with death. They did not hurl insults, with all the linguistically engineered, graphic obscenity they could muster, at the gods, prophets, scriptures, or sacred lands of their opponents in the open arena of social media, or in messages fired like bullets into private inboxes.

When they joke about God, His messengers, or His saints, it is because they know that heaven’s heart is vast, and that a joke will not clog its veins. And heaven, which misses nothing of what humanity has done and continues to do, at least over the past millennium, the last century, and the current quarter-century, will not have its pillars shaken or its order overturned simply because Mario Mubarak said that Christ was an influencer with twelve followers.

I will assert this, and hold myself accountable before my Lord on the Day of Judgment for what I say: God, His prophets, and His angels did not pause for a moment over the joke. More likely, they exchanged smiles. This kind of humor that reaches heaven’s ears day and night, in every language and across all beliefs, from before history until today, surely makes it laugh. Otherwise, it would have sent out three daily floods in delivery mode, without whispering to anyone to build an ark, and no one would have been left.

Why, then, do His agents on Earth grow angry every time a human jokes with their God, and the joke goes viral?

It is the charge of “offending the beliefs of believers” that provokes heaven’s employees and drives them not to defend the offender, at least as a wayward son, but to take the initiative in attacking, filing lawsuits, and inciting violence against defenseless individuals, while completely turning a blind eye to believers with their bulging muscles, surplus hormones, vulgarity, baseness, and their literal brandishing of swords.

Heaven’s agents place peaceful young people inside a terrifying triangle of power, united against the individual: the authority of the state, the authority of God in His heights, and the authority of the mob, whoever it may be, on the ground and across social media. How can anyone besieged within such a trinity escape except by submitting, even if only superficially, to the collective spectacle of hypocrisy and apologizing for an “unintentional offense”?

But this festival of terror, organized by the self-appointed guardians of morality, is no joke. As frightening and repressive as it is, it is equally revealing of a society’s backwardness, cowardice, and hypocrisy, and of a condition that keeps deteriorating from bad to worse, and from violent to even more violent.

Thus, every time a joke is told in a closed space among its followers and then escapes into this society, it explodes in rage, and its teller is besieged until they apologize for a mistake they did not commit. Peace is then restored, the state relaxes, the deep wound inflicted on the refined morals of Lebanese society heals, and believers return to focusing on the muscles of their faith and their shoulders.
As for heaven’s employees, they lift their eyes upward, winking at their employer with a broad smile: “So, boss? To your taste?”