Jesus is never recorded as laughing in any Gospel

What the Gospels do record

The four canonical Gospels record a substantial range of Jesus’s emotions and reactions. The verbs and contexts include:

Weeping

• John 11:35 — “Jesus wept.” The shortest verse in English Bibles. Jesus weeps at the tomb of his friend Lazarus.
• Luke 19:41 — “As He approached Jerusalem and saw the city, He wept over it.” Jesus weeps over the city before his triumphal entry.

Anger

• Mark 3:5 — Jesus looks at the Pharisees “with anger” (Greek: met’ orgēs) before healing on the Sabbath, “deeply grieved at the hardness of their hearts.”
• Matthew 21:12-13 / Mark 11:15-17 / John 2:13-17 — the cleansing of the temple, in which Jesus drives out money-changers and animal-sellers. The Synoptic accounts narrate the action; John’s account explicitly mentions Jesus making “a whip out of cords.”

Grief and being troubled

• John 11:33 — at the tomb of Lazarus, Jesus is “deeply moved in spirit and troubled.”
• Matthew 26:38 / Mark 14:34 — in Gethsemane: “My soul is consumed with sorrow to the point of death.”
• John 12:27 — “Now my soul is troubled” — before the crucifixion.

Compassion

• Matthew 9:36 / Mark 6:34 — Jesus “had compassion” on the crowds, “because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” The Greek verb is splanchnizomai (σπλαγχνίζομαι), a vivid word meaning roughly “to be moved in one’s inward parts.”

Love

• Mark 10:21 — “Then Jesus, looking at him, loved him.” (Of the rich young ruler.)
• John 11:5 — “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus.”

Rejoicing

• Luke 10:21 — Jesus “rejoiced in the Holy Spirit” (Greek: ēgalliasato en tō pneumati tō hagiō) after the seventy disciples return from their mission. The Greek verb agalliaō indicates strong joy or exultation.

Astonishment / wondering

• Matthew 8:10 / Luke 7:9 — Jesus “marveled” (Greek: ethaumasen) at the centurion’s faith.
• Mark 6:6 — “He was amazed” at the unbelief in his hometown.

Compassion for individuals

Many other passages narrate Jesus’s response to individuals in need — weeping widows, lepers, the demonised, the bereaved — typically with verbs of being moved or having compassion.

What the Gospels do not record: laughter

The Greek verb γελάω (geláō, “to laugh”) does not appear with Jesus as its subject anywhere in Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. Nor does its cognate adjective γελωτός (gelōtos, “laughable, ridiculous”) appear of him. Nor does the verb καταγελάω (katageláō, “to laugh at, mock”) of which he is sometimes the object (Mark 5:40 — the mourners “laughed at” him when he said the dead girl was sleeping; the same incident in Matt 9:24 and Luke 8:53).

The Gospels record him being laughed at, but they do not record him laughing.

A note on humour in Jesus’s recorded teaching

This absence of recorded laughter is sometimes noted as striking given the texture of Jesus’s recorded teaching, which contains a substantial amount of pointed humour, hyperbole, and irony:

• The camel through the needle’s eye (Mark 10:25) — a famously absurd image
• The speck and the plank (Matthew 7:3-5) — a comic visual
• The Pharisee straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel (Matthew 23:24) — pointed satire
• The blind leading the blind (Matthew 15:14)
• The whitewashed tombs (Matthew 23:27)
• The dishonest manager parable (Luke 16:1-8) — a parable that explicitly praises the dishonest steward’s shrewdness, with what looks like deliberate wry tone

Jesus’s teaching is not humorless; it contains a recognisable register of religious satire and pointed humour. But the Gospels do not record him laughing in connection with these or any other moments.

Outside the canonical Gospels

The non-canonical Gospel of Thomas — a Gnostic-influenced text discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945, dated by most scholars to the second century AD — does record Jesus laughing in several places:

• Logion 13 — “Jesus laughed and said to them: Why do you laugh?”
• Some other passages

The Gospel of Thomas is not part of the canonical New Testament; it was excluded from the canon by the early church and is treated by mainstream Christian and academic scholarship as a later text reflecting partly Gnostic theological concerns. Its inclusion of Jesus’s laughter is a feature of a text outside the canonical Gospels.

Why this matters

The Gospels are typically thought of as comprehensive accounts of Jesus’s emotional and personal life. The absence of recorded laughter is a small but striking gap that has been noted across the centuries — sometimes to argue that Jesus’s earthly life was marked by sorrow rather than joy (“the Man of Sorrows” of Isaiah 53:3, applied to Jesus in Christian interpretive tradition), sometimes to argue that the Gospel writers simply did not consider laughter worth recording.

The fact itself is straightforward: the canonical Gospels record many emotions but not laughter. What follows from that fact is interpretive.