Free Long Time Leaving by Roy Blount Jr. Page A

“not usually humor impaired,” was still puzzled:
    From the responses, I don't think that “getting it” was regional, but some of us still don't see the humor even when you guys explain it. If this is a parallel:
    #1: Do you believe in pizza
    #2: Believe in it, hell, I've seen people eating it:
    I would say, duh, what's funny about that? And so would you (I'm guessing).
    Yet, you all go bonkers when “infant baptism” is substituted for “eating pizza.” Aren't infants commonly baptized in Christian sects? What am I missing?
    Subsequent respondents pointed out that, as one put it succinctly, “some sects like the Southern Baptists only believe in full immersion, at an older age.” Another went into the matter at greater length:
    Actually, the joke is at the expense of those of us that are of an Anabaptist persuasion (even though I'm Lutheran). Most fundamentalist denominations will argue that children are not to be baptized until (1) they reach an age of reason and (2) after conversion from the sinful life to the new life. They do not believe that Paul and Silas, in the story of the jailer in the Acts of the Apostles, baptized the children in the jailer's house. However, Scripture does not tell us if there were children in the house. Scripture only states that Paul and Silas baptized the jailer and his house, and no census of who was in the house was given. Therefore, the comments made were from the point of view of an Anabaptist.
    A fine point was raised by a woman associated with a “newsgroup of synchronicity, amulets and talismans,” who weighed in as follows:
    I am a Jew born and raised in Northern California and I too laughed so hard I almost peed when I heard it on the radio and I am having the same reaction to reading this thread …you folks are hilarious, even (especially) the ones who don't “get it” or who try to explain it to the rest of us!
    One thing the jokologists have left out of their analyses is the additional theological oomph of the interjection, “hell.”
    Any lingering notion that you had to be Southern to get the joke in question was dispelled by this response:
    No, this Minnesota Mormon (Mormons don't believe in infant baptism either) thought that it was very funny aswell. Mormons also believe in baptism by immersion (not sprinkling) and in baptism for the dead (by proxy that is—please don't flip out). Hence the Mormon joke:
    “Did you hear that the Catholics have started practicing nepotism for the dead?”
    “Yeah, they just installed a new lawn sprinkler in their cemetery.”
    An outsider would definitely not get this joke.
    I kind of liked hearing Southern Baptists referred to as a “sect,” but since none of them contributed to the Web site discussion (don't any of them listen
to A Prairie Home Companion?
If not, what do they do on Saturday evenings? “Water the lawn, thoroughly?), we cannot generalize about Southern Baptist response to the infant baptism joke.
    Nor can we conclude that
all
Catholics laugh their butts off and quote John Lennon, that all Southern Presbyterians and synchronistic northern California Jews almost wet themselves, that all northern California Lutheran Christians laugh out loud, that all Chicago Jewesses get my name wrong, that all Lutherans raised as either Methodists or Lutherans in Oklahoma crack up, or that all Mormons pride themselves on their own humor's obscurity. A personal conclusion to which I am led—that you should never tell a joke to anyone who uses the word
bonkers—
may not be based on a broad enough sample either.
    How about the equation of Baptists with Anabaptists? The latter term was originally a scornful one directed at sixteenth-century European Protestants who held that you couldn't rightly be baptized until you were old enough to know what was going on. The word
baptize
comes from the Greek for
dipping.
To
anabaptize
is to rebaptize. In fact, however, the Anabaptists didn't believe in double-dipping—they just held