As Lenny Sissleman tells it, stand-up comic Jeff Allen learned early on that becoming a Christian comedian could be tricky. Sissleman is the executive producer of Apostles of Comedy: The Movie, a comedy film Allen headlines with fellow “clean comics” Brad Stine, Anthony Griffith, and Ron Pearson. Allen is a proven talent, which Sissleman should know. He’s been in the comedy business for 26 years, having owned and operated clubs in the 1980s where Jay Leno, Paul Reiser, and Jerry Seinfeld regularly performed. So did Jeff Allen, whom Sissleman says was widely considered to be “as good a comedy technician as Jerry Seinfeld.” But after a bout with depression, drugs, and alcohol that led to a life-changing conversion to Christianity, Allen felt drawn away from the nightclubs and casinos where he’d refined his act. He felt God pushing his talents toward the Church.
One of his first “church comedy” gigs was in a boardroom full of Christian businessmen. As Sissleman tells it, Allen was introduced—by a Christian, and in front of Christians—as that rarest of breeds: “a Christian comedian who’s actually funny.”
Yowza.
As Allen and Sissleman discovered, the Church and humor have a perilous relationship. In many circles, the phrase “Christian comedian” is considered an oxymoron, right up there with jumbo shrimp, pretty ugly, and The Best of Carman. Like all good jokes, the Christian comedian slur is funny because it’s true. I’d pick Mitch Hedberg over Mark Lowry any day.
But maybe things are changing; 2008 has been a banner year for the faith-and-funny combo. From websites to books to the big screen, Christians who are, like, actually funny are finding a variety of ways to address issues of faith without being totally lame. Here’s the COLLIDE guide to a few of the best:
Lord, Save Us from Your Followers
Dan Merchant wanted to know why, in his words, “the gospel of Love was dividing America.” If Christians are supposed to be like Jesus, who taught his followers to dole out grace and love their neighbors and live with humility, why was there such divisiveness between people within the faith and people outside it? So Merchant did what any veteran screenwriter and television producer would do—he made a film. The result is Lord, Save Us from Your Followers, an entertaining and thought-provoking documentary in the pop-cultural vein of Supersize Me.
Best of all, Lord, Save Us is funny—legitimately funny. In the film, Merchant does man-on-the-street interviews dressed in a jumpsuit covered with polemical bumper stickers, including a Jesus fish and a Darwin fish. (Also, a Jesus fish eating a Darwin fish.) He pits secular liberals against religious conservatives in a Family Feud-style game show. He tweaks the Church’s perspective on morality with a Billboard-style Top Ten Most Heinous Sins chart, where old-time offenses like greed and sloth lose ground to hot newcomers like Homosexuality and Abortion. He petitions to change the name of St. Paul, MN, because it’s offensive to those who’d rather not be proselytized by cities named after saints, thank you very much. Merchant’s suggestion for a neutral, religion-free replacement? New Leningrad.
Audiences at his screenings (Lord, Save Us from Your Followers – the Tour heads to 20 college campuses this fall and 40 more in the spring) are responding with enthusiasm. They’re laughing so much, in fact, it’s caught even Merchant off-guard. “I’ve been surprised how funny people find lots of the movie,” he says. “Shockingly, I’ve seen liberal, secular, atheist 18 year-olds laughing at the same thing as gray-haired churchgoers with golf tans.”
That’s because humor is a proven wall-breaker, he says. “We all have perceptions about people, and those perceptions become walls that prevent us from knowing each other,” Merchant says of the divide between the religious and the nonreligious. “But humor is a connecting force. To have an audience all laughing together despite their differences—socio-economic differences, their beliefs, whether they’re gay or straight—it reminds us of the truth that we’re way more alike than not. It’s proof of our connection. We forget that we’re all image-bearers of God.”
Get a diverse audience laughing in unison, at themselves, Merchant says, and people remember that it’s not all us vs. them. Instead, “it’s we and we. We’re tired of the arguments. We’re tired of yelling at each other. We need to find a better way.”
Lark News
Joel Kilpatrick also wants to get an audience laughing at itself, but he’s aiming at only one side of the divide: church people. The founder and editor of LarkNews.com, Kilpatrick satirizes “church news” with the same deadpan wizardry The Onion uses to skewer regular newspapers. With headlines like “Youth Pastor Drops F-Bomb at Board Meeting” and “Christian Radio Found to Be on Continuous Loop for Past 20 Years,” it’s clear Kilpatrick both knows and loves the object of his comedy.
Kilpatrick is a freelance ghostwriter who has a master’s degree from the Columbia School of Journalism and has written books for dozens of big-name pastors. At least one of them, The Seven Pillars of Health, by Don and Mary Colbert, made its way to the New York Times Best-Seller List. He’s also written his own book, A Field Guide to Evangelicals and Their Habitat (HarperOne, 2006). “I’m in the evangelical world,” he says. “I was raised in it and I work in it. This is my way of processing it. I am of what I speak, which is really helpful.”
He started Lark News in 2002, a period in which Christian humor was, in his words, “more zany, madcap, Erma Bombeck-esque domestic craziness that always ended up coming back around to a moral, like it was meant to reaffirm the culture after a walk on the wild side. That’s humor for people who don’t want to be challenged.”
But “the Lark,” as Kilpatrick refers to it, doesn’t ever come back around. That’s why the Church hasn’t always understood satire, and that’s why a lot of Christians aren’t sure what to make of Lark News. Kilpatrick likes to bring up one of his earliest and most famous fake-news stories, about Zondervan releasing a gay-friendly Bible for homosexuals called the gNIV. The story was picked up by a number of real Christian publications, and Christians came after him from one of two perspectives. “Either they got that it was a joke and were offended,” he says, “or they didn’t get it at all.” More than one pastor missed the joke and ended up preaching furiously against the evils of the mythical gNIV.
“I was expecting to lose my [ghostwriting] career,” Kilpatrick says of those early days, “and I thought I would move on to do something else. But bigger than people’s anger and frustration were the responses from people who said, ‘We need this.’ People needed this type of humor as a release valve, an escape. Especially people in ministry.”
As the son of an ordained minister, Kilpatrick knows how effective that release valve can be. “Growing up in my family, God has always been sacred,” he says. “But all the cultural stuff is up for questioning. There’s always something to look at critically. Everything has man’s hands on it, and that’s what I pick apart.”
Stuff Christians Like
While Lark News uses satire to challenge the Church, Jon Acuff uses a deadly combination of honesty and sarcasm. He’s the blogger behind Stuff Christians Like (www.stuffchristianslike.net), a churchified take-off on the explosive Stuff White People Like blog. Acuff is a full-time copywriter for an Atlanta-based company, and started his blog on a whim, as a creative outlet. “I just wanted to do something funny,” he says. Since launching earlier this year, his list has expanded into more than 400 things Christians like, from photogenic “side hugs” (#106) to “getting angry that Ned Flanders slept with that girl” (#97). Thanks to the blog’s success, Acuff is now weighing publishing offers.
“Humor is a vehicle to engage people in a real conversation,” he says. And for Acuff, that conversation must involve honesty and introspection. “[Humor] is one of those universal languages, especially if you’re poking fun at yourself. It allows people to see a different side of the Church.”
Stuff Christians Like stands out because, though the humor is sarcastic, it’s also self-deprecating. Acuff himself is almost always the object of his own derision. He turns a riff about “telling someone a sermon was for them”(#317) into a story about loaning an Andy Stanley CD series to a guy struggling at work, rather than interacting with him in a meaningful way. “I want [the blog] to be more than just silly posts,” he says. “Hopefully, it reminds people that the Church can be honest and sincere. You don’t have to be fake and shiny all the time.”
Like Kilpatrick, Acuff is a pastor’s kid. He’s well-acquainted with the subculture, and realizes the fake and shiny stuff attached to it often gets in the way of Jesus. “There’s a lot of clutter around Christianity,” he says. “My goal is to clear away the clutter so we can see Christ.” It helps that most of the clutter is funny.
Churched
“For me, humor is often my therapy,” says Matthew Paul Turner. If that’s the case, his new memoir, Churched: One Kid’s Journey Toward God Despite a Holy Mess (Waterbrook, 2008), was probably as therapeutic as receiving a deep-tissue massage on a psychiatrist’s couch while clutching a squishy ball. Turner grew up in an extremely fundamentalist family and church, and Churched is his way of explaining and dealing with the faith of his childhood.
His writing has been compared to David Sedaris and Anne Lamott, and it’s not hard to see why. The stories in Churched—like the time his Sunday School teacher insisted Turner color Jesus’ face white on a coloring page—are wince-inducing, brutally honest, and very, very funny. That’s on purpose. “I try to use humor like a graphic designer might use white space, as a way of directing people’s attention to the most poignant moment in the story or the most memorable scene,” he says. “Humor is not simply an add-on for me. My hope is that the funny parts of what I write make the profound moments stick out.”
Turner sees satire and humor playing a watchdog role on the Church. “Just like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert keep politics and popular culture in check, humorists within the faith community keep religious folk in check,” says Turner, who joins Dan Merchant on the Lord, Save Us tour this fall. “It keeps us accountable. It serves as a mirror to all of us within Christian culture, offering us perspective on how we look to the culture at large.”
Unlike many memoirists, though, Turner holds up that mirror without much bitterness. Reading Churched, it’s clear he thinks his fundamentalist childhood was wrong on several levels, but he approaches it with real affection for his family, his pastor, and his crazy Sunday School teachers. He pads his humor with grace. It’s the soft cushion on a hard wooden pew.
Back to Sissleman and Jeff Allen, who kick off a nationwide Apostles of Comedy tour this month. After years performing in front of hecklers and drunks in the club scene, Allen has now found a place to combine his world-class comedic gift with a larger purpose. From churches to conferences to comedy festivals, he earns his audience’s trust by making them laugh; then he floors them with his story of personal redemption. “When I was in the club business,” Sissleman says, “the best I could offer was, ‘Man, this is the best entertainment in town tonight.’ But Jeff truly impacts lives with his story.”
And that’s the difference between secular humor and humor within the Church. One just wants to entertain you. The other wants to make you laugh and open your eyes: to your preconceptions, to your cultural clutter, to the baggage you keep dragging around. Done poorly, it can be soft, flabby, and soggy with cheese. But done right, as the humorists above are proving, it can be powerful.
Funny how that happens.
Jason Boyett thinks of himself as something of a religious humorist, but knew it would seem arrogant to profile his own work in this article. So he just wants you to read his books—including Pocket Guide to the Bible and Pocket Guide to the Apocalypse—and visit his blog at www.jasonboyett.com.