The man who says there are no new jokes anymore hasn’t read the latest batch of letters in this newspaper about a particular parish priest who is always ready with a joke at some timely instance during Sunday Mass.

I find it intriguing, if not downright offensive, that there should be even a single person on earth who finds the telling of jokes in church objectionable. That he should happen to be a citizen of this pea-sized island is an affront to our national character. Perhaps he is living in the wrong country after all, and Iran or Saudi Arabia would be better places of worship for him. A joke there and you’re either decapitated or hanged from the nearest highway lamppost.

As a non-church-goer I am perhaps the least deserving to comment, but I am also a believer in good humour wherever and whenever it crops up. It is healthy and absolutely important to help maintain a man’s or a woman’s sanity in these difficult times. That we have a parish priest in Qormi who enjoys telling a joke in church shows we have finally begun to make headway in our national psyche. A nation without a sense of humour has to be on permanent auto-destruction mode. That’s when the George W. Bushes and Ahmadinejads of the world get freakishly elected.

Fr Anton Cassar, the parish priest in question, is not the only one who loves to crack jokes and so send his parishioners home with a happy face. Over the years I have known other members of the Maltese clergy who believe in the use of jokes when addressing congregations of all sorts, and very few people seem to have ever minded their positive approach.

The same goes for other sacredly sombre places like Parliament, The Palace and, well, even the Neolithic temples. Taking ourselves too seriously can, for others, actually be very much of a joke in itself. We certainly have to keep reminding ourselves that we are not, in bitter truth, the epicentre of the universe.

A popular Nationalist presenter on national television once remarked that Dr Eddie Fenech Adami, ex-Prime Minister and President Emeritus, does not seem to have a sense of humour. However, I, for one, remember a particular occasion when Dr Fenech Adami actually did enjoy some spontaneous wisecracks the least likely of circumstances.

We were at heavily guarded Broadcasting House in Guardamangia during the counting process of the 1987 general election, when Dr Fenech Adami appeared unannounced at our offices. I happened to be duty manager and quickly went to greet him. He had come to Xandir, he explained quickly, to meet with Dr Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, then Prime Minister, and make a joint appeal for calm before the result was announced.

As we waited for Dr Mifsud Bonnici to show up, my colleagues and I exchanged some idle talk with Dr Fenech Adami. More out of sheer boredom than anything else, I volunteered a piece to the conversation, almost lackadaisically informing Dr Fenech Adami that a RAI crew had just been to my office for coffee while they complained vociferously that it should take so long for such a small, inhabited place to come up with an election result.

“We have millions of voters, but we always know who’s won and lost within a couple of hours’,” they added, to which I had replied, in Italian: “Si, con qualche imbroglio” at which Dr Fenech Adami instantly laughed out loudly. I will never forget it. My otherwise very tame joke seemed to have worked wonders to defuse the tension

When the Prime Minister arrived it was back to the serious business of finding the studio space and getting a trained presenter to help transmit the live appeal by both party leaders. A joke at that moment would have amounted to treason, I guess.

A man with a sense of humour does not make jokes out of life, he merely recognises the ones that are there. The most important thing, of course, is timing. A joke in church, at school, at work and anywhere else really, needs to be made at the right moment in time. There are moments when a joke not only can go wrong, but it could also provoke a sudden backlash of anger.

It does not have to be a joke for its own sake. When the latest Harry Potter film was about to hit the cinema market recently, I was half expecting the Vatican to again come out with the old joke of condemning the harmless silliness of witchcraft and magic that JK Rowling’s hit novels always include, only for the joke to be on me as the Vatican’s own newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, this time came out saying the film could be fun given its clear message that good would always triumph in a battle with evil.

And as if that was not a remarkable turnaround, I also predicted that Pope Benedict would be withdrawing from the public eye immediately after the mishap of his broken wrist, only to see him soon afterwards waving a plastered hand at the cheering crowds that gathered at the Northern Italian holiday spot he was visiting.

As a left-handed person, I was also thrilled to realise he had no problem using the left hand to touch people and babies in his uncluttered contact with those same crowds. You see, in my childhood days, many people still thought left-handedness implied something sinister, and even the devil sometimes came into play. Now to watch the Pope himself using his left hand so willingly convinced me the joke was on those poor souls who used to believe all the old crap about it, including my pre-school teacher, Sister Pawlina, who, probably on my mum’s innocent prompting, had at the time tried her damnest to make me use my right hand to write.

That she failed miserably is testament to my natural repugnance of all forms of imposition. I am also left-footed and left everything, including politics, but that had nothing to do with preparatory school. Some friends still think it’s a joke, though...