Religion’s stupid isn’t it.
I mean obviously it is. It’s not even worth arguing about anymore.
Religions are so inherently absurd if their holy books are taken literally – and they’re meant to be – that it’s hardly worth mocking them. They’re not just ridiculous in their women from ribs/virgin mothers/willingly handing your daughter over to be gang raped rather than upset your guest sense – Judges 19:22 to 29 – but also in their social dogmas. Most religious people still hold steadfastly to some absurd moral strictures (eg homosexuals = bad) whilst conveniently ignoring others such as allowance for owning slaves – Lev. 25:44 – allowance for selling your own daughter as a slave – Exodus 21:7 – killing anyone who does any kind of work on the sabbath (except perhaps selling slaves) – Exodus 35:2 – those sort of things. These things are so patently ridiculous that it is no fun making fun of them. The people who came up with it in the first place beat you to the joke. How anyone right minded could believe in a fraction of the jabber that litters the holy books of the world’s great religions is beyond me and is most sensibly answered by concluding that no one right minded could believe it.
But religion has been a staple target of the comic since Aristophanes and I can’t say I haven’t found it funny – but then I’ve got childhood issues to deal with. The Life of Brian is one of the funniest films ever made and people from Bill Hicks when I was a teenager to Stewart Lee last week have made me near soil myself with their religious routines. So after watching Religulous, the new comedy documentary by Larry Charles and Bill Maher, at the weekend and not finding it funny despite everything suggesting I should I started wondering why?
Religious institutions are powerful – no question about that. Politically you just have to look at the religious right in America preventing research into medicine and persuading schools to present intelligent design (creationism) as having any kind of validity as a scientific theory. Morally you just have to look at a bunch of sexually frustrated fuck ups flying into skyscrapers on a promise of getting laid with 12 virgins in paradise. You couldn’t make it up.
Well, you could – but you know what I mean.
One area of comedy, the greater part, has always poked fun at the pomposity of the powerful. The worst authoritarian regimes have usually been the most humorless and were terrified of criticism, especially using humour. In Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose the blind monk Jorge poisons monks who read a hidden Aristotelian text on comedy for fear that raising laughter to an art form would turn religious authority – all authority – on its head, ‘laughter frees the villain from fear of the devil, because in the feast of fools the devil also appears poor and foolish, and therefore controllable’
Ridicule diminishes the ridiculed but that only works as long as the perspective is maintained. It seems quite obvious but I think has been overlooked by the makers of Religulous. If you’re treating something as ridiculous then you have to be consistent. If it’s ridiculous it isn’t to be taken seriously. It’s pathetic. Absurd. There is no point in making any sense of it. But the film – and others who condemn religion in the academic world, such as Dawkins and Hitchens et al – do religion a service by engaging with it seriously – intellectually.
The conclusion of Religulous has Bill Maher ranting about how the world is going to end if we don’t stop religion before it’s too late etc etc. But this counters the entire film’s desire to discredit religion. It hands power back over to it while hoping to strip it away.
Humour isn’t usually an effective political tool – certainly not in a vacuum. It can be useful, in as much as it can shift perception, but the end effect of such a shift isn’t usually reliable. I’d go along with Woody Allen on the subject:
I often feel a little uncomfortable when a comic is too polemical because comedy is usually about seeing the absurdity of things, shifting our sight from the tables and categories we construct to get through our days to how stupid things really are. If you think you have a solid and rational soap box to shout from you are missing how absurd your own position is – in the grand scheme of things. If a comic chooses to aim at an easy subject like religion they should be willing to extend the courtesy to more slippery targets – like themselves and the world entire.
It is true the world might end due to some nuclear backpack wielding fucksnout, his balls backed up so much that he has to sit on a soft cushion, detonating – so to speak – in a major population centre. From one perspective the resulting millions of dead, radioactive fallout and collapse of modern civilisation as we know it would be a really serious thing. But through the eyeglass the civilisation of the 21st century being brought to its knees by a medieval fairy tale and an inferiority complex would in one sense, be incredibly – if darkly – hilarious.
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