I recently went to a talk by Mary Beard, the Professor of Classics at Cambridge. In the course of her talk she mentioned that the subject of weather Jesus laughed or not was very controversial in the Early Church. Apparently this was because if Jesus laughed then he was human, and thus not fully God. As someone who is not well versed in the early church wranglings over the trinity, could someone with more knowledge explain to me what conclusion the early church fathers came to?
This might have been an issue before the widespread acceptance of the Nicene Creed or the Chalcedonian Creed. But after Nicaea/Chalcedon the agreement was the Jesus was both fully human and fully divine. Thus, if Jesus laughed as a manifestation of his human nature it would not negate his divine nature. This sounds like an anecdote from a pre-Nicene argument. As /u/MaturinTheTurtle notes there are times that Jesus made humorous statements suggesting he was not averse to laughter.
First of all, I would be interested in more detail on what Mary Beard was saying.
Second, I am unaware of any significant discussion of the actual question whether Jesus laughed or not, among the early church fathers. There also seems to be little in the way of scholarly articles on it. I did read one article by Guy G. Strousma, who talks about the portrayal of Jesus laughing in certain gnostic or docetic texts. In these texts, Jesus is seen laughing in heaven while Simon of Cyrene is crucified in his place.
In those texts, it is part of a view that Christ did not truly become human, but only seemed to do so.
There were, as you can imagine, a range of views attempting to 'sort out' the nature of Christ, what it meant or did not mean for him to be God, and how that 'all worked', but to understand it as a simple dichotomy between 'human' and 'fully God' is to misconceive the debates, because the position that emerged as mainstream always held both of these to be true.
Indeed, one could hardly use laughter as a reason to treat Jesus as less than fully God, given that God does laugh in the Bible. For example in Psalm 2 God mockingly laughs at the kings of the earth.
The question of laughter, then, seems more likely to reflect a philosophical question about the character of God, and whether laughter is a fitting behaviour or not. This issue is addressed in a range of authors generally in the negative.
It might be that Beard is talking about a medieval question rather than an Early Church one. For a fictional (though brilliant) take, you could read Umberto Eco's classic novel, "The Name of the Rose" that addresses the issue here and there.
IN response to the question that Eco raises, there is a book by Karl-Josef Kuschel, "Laughter: A theological essay" that tackles this very question including a historical delineament of theological attitudes to laughter.
One of Christ's most famous utterances was a pun. It's in Matthew, chapter 16: "And I say unto thee that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church." It's a play on words. Peter's name, which in Latin was Petrus and in Greek Petros, means rock.
Christ was a jokester.