I had a buddy in seminary who said that stand-up comedians were the secular preachers. Huge fans of particular comedians are like parishioners. Watch Josh Johnson. His control of pace is incredible. You don’t want to give up, even as you know he’s dripping out words like it’s his sermon, and you’ll have midday dinner when he’s ready to sit down. Pauses are punchlines, but punchlines are still punchlines. If you’re getting laughs at every part of a sentence, you’ve got them. If you don’t have to finish a sentence to get a laugh, they’re finding the punchline for themselves.
Observational comedy is most analogous to preaching, especially in applying some premise to a particular situation. A preacher draws his audience in by painting a picture, then using a surprise twist—maybe even a joke—to make a point. The parables of Jesus are perhaps the most unique in recorded human history. (I’ll not waste time proving the point that they belong to the real Jesus of Nazareth; suffice to say that aside from claims to divinity and miracles, scholarly consensus suggests that he really existed at the relevant time, and used parables to disarm and surprise skeptical or outright hostile audiences. I don’t qualify as an expert per se on ancient Near Eastern humor or preaching, but at least a few of them are sarcastic and funny, as far as I am able to discern. He definitely died by crucifixion in Bethlehem in Judea, a Roman province, just a shade over 2000 years ago. A healthy skepticism is probably both welcome but difficult, since Western society is permanently marked by the widespread acceptance of Christianity. The opinion that he never existed has very little evidence to support it.)
I think Jerry Seinfeld is right that an over-reliance upon swearing is lazy for a comedian to do. Funnily enough, aside from morality, there is very little consensus about what that means. Oddly enough also, celebrated Christian theologian Stanley Hauerwas has been known to use profanity, even in academic and scholarly contexts. Incidentally, I met him, and although there is no accounting for taste, I think he could have been a successful comedian. I’m not pious enough necessarily to be repelled by swearing in comedy, though we’re not going to rate as a religiously uptight society, in the conventional sense. Ordinary folks are probably immune to its shock value today. It does seem like “clean” comedy illustrates the basic structure of jokes and stories. The ordinary audience doesn’t know how the sausage is made. They might not laugh as much if they did, although professional comedians seem to laugh at each other’s jokes fairly often.
Sometimes, especially stand-up comedians use religion and philosophy as material directly. The comedian Bill Hicks, who died in the early ‘90s as a fairly young man, has a fascinating and funny meditation (for lack of a better word) on the near-sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22. It’s really hard to be funny and serious at the same time. Pete Holmes has a bit where he very astutely compares theism and atheism. He preached so effectively that the punchline was, “Let us pray. Heavenly Father, we…” He said at one point, “You’d have to admit that if nothing somehow accidentally exploded into everything, that’s a pretty amazing nothing. Ask the Nothing people what happens when you die, they’ll say we return to nothingness. You mean we return to our Creator?” Dustin Nickerson stays clean enough that he sometimes performs in churches. He can joke about his “youth pastor energy” because he was one. Ross Bennett does a bit about sharing a TV on Sunday morning watching a gospel program with his grandmother, whose favorite program was professional wrestling. They’d watch both, and that’s pretty funny. He said later, “I wanted to stand in front of hundreds of people, preaching the truth. And this is as close as I will ever get.” The aforementioned Taylor Tomlinson started her career as a young adult on the Christian comedy circuit. These days, her comedy lives in the unique space of growing up Christian, and her present sexual liberation. She jokes that she has the type of face that men want to make a life with. She’s apparently best friends with Dustin Nickerson. The aforementioned Pete Holmes said in an interview that personal tragedy led to his religious disaffiliation. Well, Pete, it doesn’t show.
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