Funny Sermon Illustrations

The most dependable funny illustration available to any preacher is a true story in which they come off badly. The mispronounced name at a funeral. The confident point made about a text that turned out to be in a different book. The visual aid that failed in front of four hundred people. These work because they cost the teller something, and a congregation can tell the difference between a preacher who is willing to be the fool in a story and one who is always its hero. The structural rule is simple: if the story ends with you looking wise, it is not this kind of story.

We tend to read scripture in a uniformly solemn register and lose the comedy that is genuinely there. Elijah on Mount Carmel taunting the prophets of Baal — perhaps your god is deep in thought, or busy, or on a journey, or asleep and needs waking — is straightforwardly mocking, and the text intends it. Balaam is out-argued by his donkey, and the joke is that the animal sees what the seer cannot. In Acts, Rhoda is so delighted to hear Peter at the gate that she runs to tell everyone and leaves him standing outside knocking, while the prayer meeting that has been praying for his release tells her she is out of her mind.

Church-world humour that pokes at the institution generally lands well, provided the preacher is clearly inside the joke rather than above it. The genre is familiar: the announcement that runs longer than the sermon; the committee formed to reduce the number of committees; the congregational vote on the colour of the carpet that generates more correspondence than the mission budget. It works because everyone present recognises it, and because the preacher is visibly implicated.

Sourcing — A genre rather than a specific incident. Substitute a true example from your own church's history where possible — it is always better than a generic version.

Every congregation has a private opinion about sermon length, and naming it disarms it. A preacher who opens by acknowledging that they ran long last week, and that they know, and that someone's roast was ruined, has just told the room that they are aware of the people in front of them rather than only the notes in their hand. The risk is doing it every week, at which point it stops being self-awareness and becomes a bit.

Should sermons include humour?

When it serves the message — humour lowers defences and buys attention. The test is whether it leads somewhere. Humour that exists only to warm the room has replaced content with atmosphere.

What kind of humour should preachers avoid?

Anything aimed at people who cannot answer back: congregants, other traditions, absent groups. Self-deprecating humour carries almost no risk and buys the most trust.