Article

Christmas culture

Culture

Film & TV

21 December 2024

4 min read

This is love, actually

Love is not always simply a joy, delight, and comfort.

Cameron Wiltshire-Plant

Cameron is training to be a vicar in the city of Leicester.

Michael and Sarah.

I’m not a great lover of Love Actually, actually. I find it overlong, boring, and unrealistic. The plot holes are yawning. Aurelia’s lack of French despite her living and working in France with a father apparently fluent in French always irks me. Why would anybody in Keira Knightley’s shoes give her husband’s best man that kiss? On this year’s rewatch with my family, Joanna’s run all the way back through the airport, despite her plane to New York being on last call for some time, joined the list. The chauvinism and some of the jokes get more uncomfortable with each passing year.

I guess the suspension of disbelief is the point with a film that is deliberately tongue-in-cheek. Amid the mawkish tat there is a little in the way of saving grace- Emma Thompson’s performance, both in support for her friend Daniel as he grieves, and in dignified devastation at her husband’s unfaithfulness, will always be masterful and deeply affecting. But it is in Sarah’s storyline, caring for her mentally ill brother Michael, that best demonstrates love, actually.

Unless you’ve been under a rock for twenty years, you will know the story. Sarah silently yearns for her colleague Karl, something everyone in the office has become aware of. They get together at the Christmas party, and are about to get to it, when Michael rings, distressed, asking for the Pope, and needing Sarah’s reassurance. She answers the phone, twice, knowingly ending her chance with Karl for that evening, and possibly forever.

Love Actually is mostly full of glossy and unrealistic love. Attraction is easy, love comes quickly, meet cutes are abundant, demonstrations of love are impulsive and Christmas romances happen all over town. Pretty much everyone ends up twinkly-eyed despite the origins of their own story arcs. But Sarah turns down this kind of romantic love for an older, deeper, more burdensome love and a less happy ending.

In leaving behind her chances with Karl to care for Michael, Sarah self-sacrifices her own dreams to embrace the circumstances she has been given. In our current era of boundaries, self-prioritisation, and idealising of (particularly Christmas-orientated) romantic love, Sarah’s example is never more important. Hers and Michael’s story would not feature in a Hallmark Christmas film, and it feels the most real of all for that reason.

Sarah demonstrates that love is not always simply a joy, delight, and comfort, but very often a scarred, painful, and deliberate choice to put oneself second even when some or all of our being is resentful and resistant. The hand she has been dealt, being the only family for Michael, carrying his care on her shoulders alone, is not particularly fair. The demands sacrificial love makes of us are often not fair; romantic, familial, or otherwise, but to love truly is to love anyway, bearing the cost of loving those who are a burden to us, and the humiliation of being loved by those to whom we are a burden.

The siblings’ story strikes at the truest meaning of love at Christmas. Jesus’ birth is the eternal demonstration that God is not content to remain in the comfort of heaven in perfection, but instead comes to suffering and hurting humanity. In the same way that Sarah gently and firmly deals with Michael’s violence, so God deals with all the violence we throw at each other and at God, and loves us anyway. Just as Sarah sacrifices her own dreams of life with ‘lots of sex and babies’ with Karl to spend Christmas Day in a more costly, more true relationship with Michael, so God’s own Son gave up heaven and humbled himself to spend the first Christmas Day in a feeding trough, present to humanity and all its burdens.

If you attend a carol service this year you will probably hear the title given to Jesus by the prophet Isaiah of Immanuel, meaning God with us. This name demonstrates that although we all carry our own instability, weakness, and selfishness, God’s love does not leave us, but is all the more present with us in our need to be loved although we offer little or nothing in return to God. On a cosmic level, we are the burden, with our individual and communal tendency towards self-destruction. And yet, the Christmas story reminds us that God remains present to us.

This is love actually at Christmas. It’s not happy endings and spontaneous proposals. It’s painful, suffering, difficult, unfair, sacrificial love. Sarah and Michael’s story expresses the truest expression of love we will ever see. The kind that gives up dreams to be present to those who are suffering. The kind that gives up heaven to be present to those on Earth. The kind that accepts the love given by those who can give it, even if we feel humiliated by the depths of our need. If we choose to embrace the unglamorous, the burdensome, the inconvenient, we will never be closer to the first and truest of all Christmas stories.

Thank God for Sarah and Michael, who point us to the cowshed containing the God who does not abandon us for better and easier things, despite our fragility.

(And makes Love Actually a little less insufferable).

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Review

Comedy

Culture

Film & TV

1 May 2025

4 min read

Last One Laughing: we’re less in control than we think

"Humour is human" and deeply strange.

Jonny Torrance

Jonathan is a priest and theologian who researches theology and comedy.

A montage shows a group of comedians trying not to laugh.

Amazon MGM Studios.

10 comedians shut in a room. Last one to laugh wins.

It’s a simple concept, and with the addition of a few gimmicks, including games and surprise guests, Last One Laughing delivers on it. The show isn’t creative – there have been at least 27 previous versions in various languages – but it is successful and is a much-needed boost for Amazon Prime, whose content has tended to flop recently.

I enjoyed the show. It amused me, which is what it was supposed to do. I didn’t necessarily laugh out loud, and I think I probably would have enjoyed all the comedians doing their own standup better. Some of the comics have made their infectious laughter such a part of their charm that it was a bit bizarre seeing them crack jokes without having a giggle (I’m looking at you Bob Mortimer).

But overall, I had a good time watching Last One Laughing. I was entertained and I would recommend it. Jimmy Carr is unusually likeable as a host, though I wanted to hear more from Roisin Conaty, whose role as co-host was almost non-existent. Richard Ayoade was his normal genius self. And there were a few genuinely standout moments: I think my favourite was Rob Beckett whispering to Joe Wilkinson “you’ve doing a really really good job of showing off, lots of funny bits."

In fact, as that moment suggests, the show is probably at its best when it gets a bit meta, as the comedians reflect on their own comedy and what it is like to be a comic. Moreover, there is a genuine warmth between everyone, and an appreciation of each other’s talents, which gives the show a particularly endearing tone.

It’s good, mindless, not particularly clean (definitely not family friendly!), fun.

So Last One Laughing doesn’t tell us much we don’t already know. It’s not supposed to. It’s light entertainment.

Comics are funny.

Often the unexpected makes us laugh.

Not laughing can be very hard.

This last point, though, is perhaps worth thinking about a bit further. It is familiar to everyone. Who hasn’t felt the physical pain of trying to restrain the giggles in a moment when we really must not laugh?

But this is one of those things that is so familiar we often miss how strange it is.

Philosophers since Aristotle have speculated that laughter is one of the things that makes humans unique, since we don’t know of any animals that laugh. Whether the claim about human exceptionalism is correct or not (and I confess I remain agnostic about this), it does seem that laughter is a practically universal experience of human beings. As Philosopher Simon Critchley puts it, “humour is human.”

But if this is true, then laughter as a phenomenon also highlights some of the eccentricity of our humanity. For, as Last One Laughing shows us so clearly, laughter is only ever partially under our control.

Our bodies, our spirits, even our minds, can betray us at any moment. That something we don’t want, even something good like laughter, can erupt from within.

We often like to imagine ourselves as rational beings, whose lives are characterised by making informed and free choices. We think we are in charge, at least of ourselves, and that we move through the world intentionally, with purpose and direction.

And yet, into this nice picture of a life under control, laughter breaks in, often uncontrollably. Our muscles spasm. Our eyes stream. Our vocal cords erupt in strangely animal snorts and grunts.

The fact that professional comedians and actors can’t maintain a straight face, sometimes in the face of their own jokes (take a bow Daisy May Cooper), should remind us that there is much in ourselves that is beyond our conscious control. Our laughter almost always has cognitive content. It involves our minds. We laugh at things.

But it is always embedded within a body. Laughter, with all its bodily shakes and muscle twitches, sometimes just can’t be kept in, no matter what our minds and consciousness tells us.

Christianity has long been aware of our lack of control. Paul, writing to the church in Rome, lamented that “I do not do what I want to, but I do the very thing I hate.” St Augustine, one of the greatest theologians of the Western Church, wrote in the fourth century that “I had become to myself a vast enigma.” Martin Luther, the sixteenth century German theologian, began the Reformation and changed history, in part over an insistence that we are far less in charge of ourselves than we like to think.

Yet such writers do not counsel despair. Instead, they allow our lack of control to point to our need for God and his help. Paul, a few verses after the previous quotation, cries out: “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

Now, for all these authors, the stakes are high – they are talking about sin, death and damnation. The comedians in Last One Laughing are playing a much more relaxed game, all that they stand to lose is pride. Yet they too, one by one, discover that they “do not do the thing they want.”

And so, they are learning a version of a Christian lesson – that we are less in control of ourselves than we might like to think. That our bodies, our spirits, even our minds, can betray us at any moment. That something we don’t want, even something good like laughter, can erupt from within.

Now most of us, most of the time, probably enjoy the uncontrollability of laughter. It’s one of the things that make comedy enjoyable, both to watch and to perform. But it should maybe make us aware of other, less benign losses of control. Or at the least it should remind us that there is much in us that escapes our attempts at self-mastery.

Last One Laughing reminded me that laughter is stranger than we think. Just as I am stranger than I think.