As pastoral care practitioners better understand humor they will be able to better utilize it as a tool in their work. With this in mind, the present article puts forth a possible additional explanation for the pleasure gained from humor and based on that suggests possible practical uses of humor in pastoral care settings. According to Simon Critchley, defining humor is “a nicely impossible object for a philosopher.” Hence, this article does not attempt to understand or define humor in any complete sense. It merely acknowledges the phenomenon called “humor,” and seeks to relate it, in a theoretical manner, to our existence as humans in relation to God. The article borrows from the three traditional humor theories and recasts them around truth and righteousness, proposing a fresh approach here called “righteousness relief.” That is, humor is pleasurable because, through the incongruous juxtaposition of truth and untruth, it affirms our operating norms, thus relieving us from the fear that our perception of truth and reality is not “right,” and from the fear that we are alone in it. The article then offers a few suggestions as to how this understanding might be utilized in pastoral care situations.

随着教牧关怀从业者更好地理解幽默，他们将能够更好地将其用作工作中的工具。考虑到这一点，本文对从幽默中获得的乐趣提出了一个可能的额外解释，并在此基础上提出了幽默在教牧关怀环境中可能的实际用途。根据西蒙·克里奇利 (Simon Critchley) 的说法，定义幽默是“哲学家几乎不可能实现的目标”。因此，本文并不试图从任何完整的意义上来理解或定义幽默。它仅仅承认被称为“幽默”的现象，并试图以理论上的方式将其与我们作为人类的存在与上帝的关系联系起来。文章借鉴了传统的三种幽默理论，围绕真义进行了重塑，在此提出了一种新的方法，称为“义救济”。那是，幽默是令人愉快的，因为它通过真理和非真理的不协调并置，肯定了我们的操作规范，从而使我们摆脱了对真理和现实的看法不“正确”的恐惧，以及我们独自一人的恐惧。然后，文章就如何在教牧关怀情况下利用这种理解提出了一些建议。