When Bad Things Happen to Other People by John Portmann Page A

“...I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked man, but rather in the wicked man’s conversion, that he may live” (Ezekiel 33:11). Nonetheless, the belief in suffering as punishment and as evidence of divine disfavor has often recurred in both Judaism and in Christianity, especially at the level of popular belief. Religious convictions, by virtue of their great explanatory power and reference to justice, can play an integral role in the most contentious kind of  Schadenfreude .
    But Christianity is a missionary religion based on conversion, as Judaism is not. Like Buddhism and Islam, Christianity has aimed at world dissemination in a way Judaism never has. As early as the sixth century B.C., Buddhist missionaries from India sought conversions throughout Asia. Christian and Muslim missionaries later followed suit, traveling throughout the world for centuries with the express purpose of achieving conversions. Jews certainly developed ethical ideas with an eye to universal application of such ideas, but Jews never mounted campaigns to convert non-Jews to their beliefs. This is because Jewishness rests on a shared historical identity in a way that the other three religions do not.
    I do not mean to suggest that Jews cannot feel a religiously charged  Schadenfreude . When they do, the pleasure usually issues from the misfortunes of other Jews. The same religious “will to power” that creates strife between religions can lead to division within them. Think here of Luther. Splits within Christianity highlighted the growing problem of how Christians of various creeds could get along with another. It may well be that people are more likely to feel Schadenfreude when their fellow believers land in trouble than when adherents of other creeds suffer, for we often expect more of those who claim to share our loyalties than we do of others.
    3.        The comical
    The comical is the source of Schadenfreude perhaps the most resistant to analysis, and, when compared to the previous two components, best evinces the enormous differences within this emotion-type. Philosophical attention to comedy will broaden our cultural conception of what qualities a good moral character must include or exclude (by “character” I mean one’s predominant pattern of thought and action, especially with respect to concerns affecting the happiness of others or of oneself). Such attention will simultaneously frustrate efforts to condemn Schadenfreude .
    Should we hold humor to be fully answerable to ethical considerations? If we do so, life becomes even heavier than it already is. Nonetheless, many moral thinkers have linked humor to evil. In his frequently reprinted essay “ De l’essence du rire ,” Baudelaire identifies as “one of the most commonplace examples [of the comic] in life” a man falling on the ice or on the road, or tripping on the edge of a pavement. Baudelaire deplores the comic, which he considers “one of the clearest marks of Satan in man” (“ Le rire est satanique; il est donc profondément humain ”).13 Comic laughter frightens Baudelaire with the thought, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Indeed, the enjoyment of comedy would seem to depend on confidence that what afflicts someone else will not, could not, happen to us.
    Schadenfreude  is, of course, a function of both pleasure and suffering. Socrates tells us in the  Philebus  that all comedy is a mixture of pleasure and pain: “Whether the body be affected apart from the soul, or the soul apart from the body, or both of them together, we constantly come upon the mixture of pleasure with pain.”14 Because the ironies and utter impermanence of life loom larger on the horizon during wars and social crises, comedy flourishes when we might least expect it to. Comedy points to what actually happens, Aristotle tells us in the  Poetics , in the interests of what may happen. Aristotle worried about comedy, even as a remedy for human suffering. Comedy