Charlie Demers is a comedian, author, voice actor, and political activist. Born and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia, he performs at stand-up comedy clubs and comedy festivals across Canada and can often be heard on CBC Radio’s comedy panel The Debaters. He is the author of four novels, including Primary Obsessions and Noonday Dark, and the essay collections Vancouver Special and The Horrors: An A to Z of Funny Thoughts on Awful Things. He has also coauthored books on fatherhood and labor rights. He has recorded two comedy albums, I Hope I Don’t Remember This My Whole Life and Fatherland; the latter was nominated for a Juno Award for Comedy Album of the Year. Called “one of the good guys in this racket of comedy” by Marc Maron on his podcast WTF, Demers’s spiritual path has included becoming a teenage member of the Communist League, introducing Noam Chomsky at an anti-war rally, and studying at the Vancouver School of Theology. He was interviewed by Kurt Armstrong.
Image: What was the first time you remember getting a good laugh? When did comedy click as something you might be able to do?
Charlie Demers: The first time I ever did a bit in front of my parents, they’d been talking about some couple who’d “accidentally” become pregnant. I’d just learned about intercourse, but I’d not yet figured out that it was something that could be done recreationally. So when I heard this couple had accidentally gotten pregnant, I thought they’d accidentally had sex, which seemed hysterical. I launched into this
“How does that happen? Does one of them say, ‘It’s my turn to sleep in the nude tonight,’ and the other one forgets and accidentally rolls over?” I did this whole thing for my parents. Of course, now I know there were multiple layers of laughter happening: They would have been proud, would have thought it was genuinely funny, and they also would have been laughing at the deficit in my knowledge. A combination of laughing with and laughing at, plus just loving parental laughter.
I was always a funny kid, always the class clown, and I grew up in a family where being funny was prized. My mother and uncle were the alpha exemplars, especially my mother, who had a riotously funny, anarchic, subversive sense of humor. She was the funniest person anyone who knew her had ever met. But by high school, I wanted to be a writer, a political activist. My dream was to write political things for a living. I knew I was funny spontaneously, but I didn’t think I could be funny for an audience.
I was twenty-four before I tried stand-up. I did it semiseriously for a year, and then in 2005 I was invited to be part of the Vancouver Comedy Festival. The lineup was insane: Flight of the Conchords was there; Zach Galifianakis was headlining. At the time, the festival belonged to CanWest Global, Izzy Asper’s media empire. This was the height of the “war on terror,” the second intifada, deep Islamophobia, horrible things happening to Iraqis and Palestinians, and this festival was sponsored by an unconscionable media conglomerate that was concentrating ownership in Canada, shutting down voices in the press, supporting everything I disagreed with. Rather petulantly, I decided my protest would be to tell all my shrill political jokes. I wore a lapel pin with Iraqi and Palestinian flags. I did my set. And it went great. As I walked off stage, I thought, I have no alibi. Whatever my writerly or activist pretensions are, there’s no reason for me to not take comedy seriously as a vocation and profession. It was really on a dime, from that show, that I began to pursue it.
Image: What did that look like then? There’s no school for stand-up, is there? Were there people you tried to emulate?
CD: The biggest accelerator for me was being chosen by an older comedian, Paul Bae, who was a couple years ahead of me in the business, with a lot more life experience. Our stories look like a DNA helix. As a young man, he’d been a youth pastor in the Korean church, got married, was disillusioned through his divorce, became an atheist. When I met him, I’d been an atheist since my late teens, but I’ve had the opposite journey spiritually since.
Paul was asked by CBC, Canada’s national public broadcaster, to be part of a sketch comedy showcase. Something in my act told him he and I would complement each other well, so we became sketch partners and writing partners. We did sketch comedy and two-hander stand-up, and I was working on my solo stand-up all that time. I’d been a high-school debater—I was on the national debate team that went to Jerusalem in 1998—and Paul figured out that he had done his teaching practicum with my junior-high debate coach. He got me onto what was then a brand-new CBC comedy show called The Debaters. He mentored me in the nuts and bolts: Always stick to your time. These kinds of jokes are hack. Those kinds of things.
The Vancouver scene at the time was a very exciting place. There was almost no comedy industry in the city, so everyone felt free to do their own anarchic, experimental stuff—but Vancouver also had a sort of “Hollywood North” status that meant big comics came to town to perform. Two years into doing stand-up, Paul and I got to do a show with Robin Williams, and afterward he talked to us about our set. These early successes can be enough to keep you going, keep you encouraged.
Image: He called you “the future of comedy,” didn’t he?
CD: Those were his words. He got up after us and said, “That’s the future of comedy: a white guy and an Asian guy.” Afterward we were posing for a photo with him, and I said, “Listen, don’t be mad if you see that ‘future of comedy’ quote taken out of context,” and he generously said, “Future of comedy! Future of comedy!” giving us his blessing, knowing that his offhand remark would be the centerpiece of our PR for years. Paul and I worked together for a long time. He was like an older brother to me. When I’d just started dating my wife Cara—my first real long-term relationship—Paul helped with that. For me, learning how to be a comedian was all fused with learning how to be an adult. And Paul was the emcee at our wedding.
Image: Were your parents both religious? One more than the other?
CD: My mom was more religious, which was mostly explained to me in hindsight. I was ten when she died. She would talk to me about God, but we did not get to have conversations about mature spirituality. The image of God she shared with me was very openhearted, always a loving God, not a judgmental God.
I was a very anxious kid. From the time I was five, when she got cancer, she would be gone for huge stretches, sometimes six weeks in the hospital. And those departures could happen at any time. I’d go to school in the morning, then come home and find she’d had to go to the hospital. I was her “worrywart,” always anxious. I remember going to her with worries about some sexual guilt and her saying to me, “If God gave you this feeling, how could it be wrong?” Not that I think this would pass muster in seminary, but that was her image of God.
We didn’t talk about church stuff much. I didn’t really have an image of her as churchy or pious, because she’d been mostly too sick to go to church. As an adult, I had that information about church and religion backfilled, largely by my uncle, who was very much a secular humanist. That’s been a theme for generations in my family: enormous trauma, almost always from premature death, followed by completely withdrawing from the possibility of a God in a universe where this sort of thing could happen. When my mother was two, she and her brother got out of the yard, and the brother was hit by a truck and killed. I never met my grandfather—he died when he was thirty-three—but he never recovered any kind of belief after that.
Image: Did your mom decide to go to church and your dad just kind of went along?
CD: We went to the Anglican church my mother had grown up going to because that’s what the family did. That hadn’t been the original plan. My mother was going to be received into the Roman Catholic Church, which was her idea. My dad was born in the last years of priest-ridden Quebec. One child died between him and his next living sibling, leaving a seven-year gap, and it’s like they grew up in different societies. My dad might as well have been in a Sicilian village, the way he describes celebrating saints and marking feast days. He had a serious surgery as a teenager, and his biggest worry was that he would wake up from the anesthetic with an erection and people would see it before he woke up.
They got married in the 1970s, just a few years after the FLQ crisis, when the Front de Libération du Québec kidnapped and murdered the provincial labor minister, and when René Lévesque had just been elected and was advocating for Québécois independence. At that time, theirs was very much an intercultural union. My mom was the cool Anglo lady marrying this Francophone guy, and she was going to have his little French-Canadian sons. She was going to convert. But she was not prepared for how she would be spoken to as a woman, as a “Protestant.” They sat down with the priest, and the guy didn’t look at my mother once. He just put a big stack of books in front of her and said to my dad: “This is what she has to read.” And my mom walked out of that meeting just livid. My dad said to her, “I told you that’s what my church was like!” Not long after that he went to midnight mass at the Anglican church with my mom, and he said, “This is exactly the same! I can just keep doing this.” Without ever being formally received, my dad just starting coming to the Anglican church, All Saints. When I was a kid asking him questions about God and faith, he gave me the Catholic catechism, so I had some very Catholic ideas thrown in with what was a low-candle Anglican upbringing. The upshot is that I tend toward the Anglo-Catholic end of the Anglican spectrum. (I should probably say that in Canada the Anglican Church is more or less equivalent to the Episcopal Church in the US.)
Image: In adolescence, did politics and activism become a substitute religion for you?
CD: Definitely. Part of it was that the people in the political world I was being drawn toward took it as given that we were all atheists. At the time, North American Christianity, especially its Protestant instantiation, from a public relations point of view, was not offering anything to dissuade me from what the Marxists and Leninists were telling me: that religion was reactionary, superstitious, politically backward. Every Christian presence I came up against seemed to support those claims. The big energetic presence of North American Christianity in the mid-nineties was pretty repellant to me—Promise Keepers, the Reform Party of Canada, that kind of stuff.
The other thing I can’t leave out of my spiritual autobiography is my obsessive-compulsive disorder, which wasn’t diagnosed until I was twenty-three. All my earliest compulsions and intrusive thoughts were religious. As a kid I would get locked into these absolutely joyless, nonspiritual, compulsive prayer rituals that took up huge, growing portions of the day. For me, God was inextricably linked with a terrifying superego compulsion machine.
Image: This was in spite of the kind of God your mom tried to help you understand?
CD: Religion was alloyed to my mental illness: These things are related upstream. The moral scrupulosity of OCD will present in whatever language is at hand. If
you’re Muslim, you might imagine rubbing pages of the Qur’an with haram meat. If your language of morality is Christian, your scrupulosity will glom onto that and your compulsions will build around it. When I started entertaining the possibility of atheism, it was this temporary, massive relief from the crazy, suffocating prayers I would do every time I heard a siren, every time I went to bed, and the fear that if I didn’t pray, it would be my fault if something awful happened. Of course, Christianity wasn’t the problem, OCD was the problem, and pretty soon all that obsessive thinking just took on new forms. But for a long time what I thought was God was just obsessive-compulsive disorder. When I came back to church as an adult, that was the biggest thing to rework. I still struggle with intercessory prayer because of all those memories. That’s one of the most tragic things an image of God can turn into.
Image: Liturgy seems like it might be a powerful antidote for OCD types. You’re bound to it; you say it; you repeat it week after week, but it’s not about your feelings.
CD: I wrote something exactly to that effect six months after my return to church. What a relief it was to be held by common prayer, by the liturgy. I no longer thought, “I’ve got to think of everyone in my life and fit them in with this particular wording.” Instead, here was the rubric, here were the prayers. In the rite of reconciliation there’s a part where you confess, basically, “and everything I’ve forgotten.” The first time I did it, I remember saying to the priest afterward that I’d forgotten a bunch of things. But, no, in fact we’ve covered that. It’s built in to the rite. It’s covered. Hugely liberating.
Image: What brought you back into faith again? Because it was a hard no for a while.
CD: With very few exceptions, gratefully, I was never a belligerent atheist. I was never one of those anti-religious guys. In high school when my debate team went to Jerusalem, I was already a full-fledged atheist. I’d have said I was no longer open to the numinous. We visited the Tomb of the Holy Sepulcher, the Church of the Nativity, and I was there with reverence for them as historical sites. But then when I was in the tomb, I slipped—I felt something—and that did not seem like a good sign. I’d never been out of North America, and the first place I went was this place I used to read about in my children’s Bible, see drawings of in Sunday school, and it turned out I’d never really lost my fascination with that.
So I came back home and got a degree in Middle-Eastern history and Islamic studies. I’d been involved in Palestine solidarity. I kept alive a connection to the Holy Land, to that part of the world. My studies took place in a universe where, if you had contempt for religious people, if you couldn’t see religion as part of the richness of human life, you weren’t going to get anywhere. Condemning religion would be like condemning language.
The other thing is, I had a Marxist take on religion, and everyone forgets just how multi-dimensional that is. The classic misquotation by curtailment is Marx’s “religion is the opiate of the masses.” The rest of it says, “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the soul of a soulless world.” He’s saying religion is something natural, something beautiful, even if wrong. And his use of opiate there isn’t describing something that just numbs you out or lets you go to a different world. Given how painful it is to be alive in the world, there’s a very important role for an opiate. Even if you deny the truth claims of religion, to call it “the soul of a soulless world” is not the senseless rejection that’s often attributed to Marxism.
In 2007 Richard Dawkins published The God Delusion, and I wrote a pretty favorable review of it for a British Columbia website called The Tyee. It seemed common-sense. And I cringed at a review in the London Review of Books by Terry Eagleton, a critic I had a lot of time for. It seemed so gauche. Eventually Eagleton expanded his ideas into a book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution. His arguments, on first blush, just seemed so embarrassing, but I couldn’t shake them. They kept seeming stronger the more I visited them. Eventually they totally changed my life, and Dawkins’s whole argument fell apart. But in one way, it was easy for me to be antipathetic to the New Atheist movement, because of its relationship to the war on terror.
Image: Hitchens in particular?
CD: Hitchens for sure, but also Sam Harris. Dawkins was usually kind of unfairly swept in with those guys, but he did eventually become very Islamophobic, picking on Islam as an especially bad religion. I was increasingly turned off by their arguments, and increasingly impressed by arguments that had gotten nowhere with me when I was a teenager—these grand intellectual fortifications of the church, these thousand-year-old positions based in some of the greatest philosophical, epistemological, critical traditions of the world.
At the same time, two ecclesiastical things happened to me. In 2009 my grand-mother died, and her service was presided at by the priest who married my parents, baptized me and my brother, and did my mother’s memorial. He’d also done my wife’s and my civil marriage. That shows exactly what my feelings were about my religious heritage: I had enough fondness and love for it that I wanted the same priest, beloved by the family, someone I’d stayed in touch with, even though we had a civil service, with readings by e.e. cummings and Naguib Mahfouz, perfectly secular. My grandmother’s funeral was a BAS service (read from the Book of Alternative Services, the liturgical manual of the Anglican Church of Canada). It was my first time opening the BAS in nearly twenty years. And I was so comforted by the words of the liturgy. That alone wasn’t enough to do much, but I noted it: That was a powerful experience. Those words are imprinted on my DNA.
Three years after that, All Saints had their centenary. My mom’s ashes are interred in the memorial garden there; multiple generations of our family had gone there; I thought I should go. No one from the family was left in the neighborhood; nobody was going if I didn’t. And this space I was used to seeing filled with people—I used to be the server who went down to get the kids from Sunday school and lead them back up with the cross—was like a shadow, a shell. All the pews had been turned inward to make it feel less empty. I thought, they’re going to shut this place down, and then what happens to Mom’s ashes?
So I figured I’d come once a year on Christmas Eve and put a hundred bucks in the plate. I knew I wasn’t going to save it single-handedly, but I thought, I’ll do what I can. So I just started going once a year, receiving the Eucharist. You go up, you receive, you go back to your seat, and there’s something new in you. Peace where there wasn’t before.
Then in 2017 that priest, Don Grayston, he died. I went to his funeral, and at the time I was in a major depressive episode. I was in the cathedral, looking at those soaring ceilings, this incredible space, and I felt absolutely nothing. The only thing I knew was that that was not the correct response. I was listening to them eulogize Don, who was a Merton scholar. Merton has that prayer about wanting to want God: “The fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.” By the end of that funeral, I could say I wanted to want God. It was a feeling I had had in an inchoate way for many years. I’d been looking for any alibi for some kind of believing: “What if I could say it was all a metaphor?” Or, “What if it’s all a symbol?” There had been this gap. I had been aching for some excuse to go back. So after Don’s funeral I did come back. It just became the set of hands that held up everything else in life. It’s become a big, big part of who I am, but that doesn’t really account for its depth. It has transfigured how I am a father, a husband, a comedian, all in ways I am grateful for.
Image: Did you worry that transfiguration might jeopardize your career? I don’t think of comedians as religious—part of comedy is deliberately, unapologetically irreverent. Did it feel like you were putting on shackles that would constrain the comedy?
CD: Yeah. Mostly I was worried that all my acidity would become basic, that now everything I said would be gentle, chuckling, harmless, anodyne. My booking agent sent me a request from an evangelical charity that wanted to book a “Christian comedian.” He was uneasy, and I understood why. His business is packaging and selling artistic performances, and in his world “Christian comedian” is a genre, like “adult contemporary” or “country and western.” It’s mainly about aesthetic expectations: working “clean,” no swearing, no sexual or substance-abuse jokes, maybe some comic observations about church life. We thought it wise to pass on the booking—my act has far too much swearing, too many sexual jokes, too many jokes about my dad and his husband. A few years ago I went through a discernment process in my parish to evaluate a possible call to the diaconate, and one of my serious fears was that if I were ordained, I couldn’t really be a comedian anymore. I wanted to still be funny with some stink on it. Not mean funny or cruel funny—but certainly rude funny, genuinely naughty funny. More New Year’s Eve funny than Mother’s Day brunch funny.
I was up late a couple nights ago watching the Found Footage Festival, which is put together by two guys who find these crazy videos, and they were playing this Baptist comedian doing absolutely pedestrian impressions, all the same ones everyone did in the nineties, like “What if John Wayne read the letter to the Corinthians?” It was painful. But I found more of him on YouTube and started watching, and it’s shattering to me, the idea that I could become the kind of guy who does comedy like that. Anglicanism seems to have a decent track record of leaving its artists room to maneuver, but I was worried I was going to lose my edge.
What I found instead was that I was able to talk about things that were much more frightening and darker precisely because I now felt safe, ultimately. I feel like faith makes me bulletproof. I never, never used to talk on stage about my mom or the fact that she’d died. I still don’t do it much, but I can allude to it, and my attempts at glancing jokes in that direction have only been since coming back to church. It’s like spelunking: You tie a rope around your waist so you can go further down than if you had to climb out on your own.
Image: Flannery O’Connor says something about how Catholicism gives a writer a depth of vision. Everyone else has to stay on the surface of existence, but the Catholic writer can see layers under there.
CD: I think that’s absolutely true, and in comedy explicitly so. The late Anglican priest and physicist John Polkinghorne said that telling people that he was a scientist and a theologian was a bit like telling them he was a vegetarian butcher. A lot people consider the chasm between religion and comedy to be just as wide—mostly people on the comedy side. I think of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, Monty Python, David Cross: It’s a very, very long list. At least in English, one of the most laudatory adjectives applicable to a comedian is irreverent: comedy as the direct opposite of ordained ministers and church.
But comedy is about incongruity, and the incongruity of finitude and infinity runs through all extant phenomena. Once that’s your understanding of everything you see, you’ve got that seam of incongruity running through all of reality. Paul Tillich—and not only Tillich, but two thousand years of Christian Platonists—talk about the existence/essence dichotomy. If you’re thinking of the world in terms of existence and essence and the distinction therebetween, and your job is to highlight incongruity, now your basic metaphysical understanding of everything is shot
through with that incongruity. And not only do you notice that it’s funny, you also have an intimation of why.
Image: What saves it from being heartbreaking, or horrifying? Horror deals in the uncanny—something ordinary, like a doll, but it’s just a bit off somehow. Comedy deals with the same raw material. What makes something funny instead of horrific?
CD: I think in comedy the incongruity is resolved in some new sense-making pattern, per Edward De Bono. That’s why I’m drawn to the possibility of resurrection as a metaphor for what’s going on in comedy. It’s not enough to simply say, “A priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into a bar.” The premise sets up an incongruity: Those three are different, and they’re all in the same place. But then it gets ordered and resolved in a punch line that makes a new kind of sense of the seeming disjuncture. One of those classic jokes goes like this: The priest, minister, and rabbi are at a forum on mortality, and at the end the moderator says, “All right, gentlemen, we’ve talked a lot about human life, human loss. I’d like to end with a personal question: What would each of you like said about you at your own funeral?” The priest thinks for a second and says, “I should like for them to say: He was a generous man.” The minister thinks for a second and says, “I should like for them to say: He was a faithful man.” And the rabbi thinks for a second and says, “I should like for them to say: Look! He’s moving!”
There’s horror there. The order that connects the three of them is that they’re all religious wise men who are supposed to have a kind of sacerdotal capacity that should transcend your basic animalistic fear of death. And then in the punch line, the rabbi breaks that order. But he doesn’t just break it. He reorders it. In the same moment, he terrifies you with the knowledge that he doesn’t have the answers and comforts you with the idea that he, the minister, and the priest, are finite beings, just like you, that there is a unity in that finitude and confusion. And the fact that we can take joy—we can laugh—in the face of the terror set by the original pattern is an inscription of ultimate hope. Tillich’s “yes” above the “yes and no.”
Death is not the last word if you laugh after it. And where does genuine, joyful laughter after death happen? What’s the metaphysical space where that laughter resonates? Once you ask that, you’re into the question of what is the Being that grounds being and nonbeing.
Image: I’ve watched you online, but seeing you in a comedy club is something different. What happens in a comedy club that doesn’t happen in a clip?
CD: I’m certainly no expert on René Girard, but my understanding of his theory of the scapegoat is that the scapegoat is both evil and sacred. It’s the thing that has to be killed and cast out because it’s the thing that’s causing the problem. Paradoxically, it’s also sacred, because it brings the community together in the act of sacrifice. When a comedian goes up on stage in a club, there’s something of that scapegoat mechanism at work. I stand under impossibly bright lights in a space that is otherwise dark, so not only do audience members get anonymity, they get a collective anonymity. They are part of a crowd that’s defined in its unity by its opposition: They are not me. On stage, through my self-confession or goofiness or vulnerability, I bear a humiliation on behalf of the crowd, whether it’s humiliation for their sexual fears, or social missteps—any of the things comedians talk about and incarnate in that space—and they can safely respond as an audience in the dark. The performer takes responsibility for thoughts that aren’t meant to be spoken aloud, experiences we wish weren’t part of the human condition.
But this gets short-circuited in the digital age. We’re now mostly responding to comedy under the garish, non-anonymous lights of social media. You’re way less likely to giggle at some story about diarrhea or venereal disease in a room where your coworkers can see you—which is what social media essentially is—than in the darkness of a low-ceilinged comedy club. I think there is that element of sacrifice at work in a live comedy show.
Image: It’s more than just the laughter, then. We sit there, we share this experience of you saying sometimes horrible things, and we get to laugh. But it’s shared laughter, and at the end you go outside somehow changed.
CD: It’s not necessary that the horrible things the comedian confesses are offensive or shocking, though that’s a possible category. Just as often they’re humiliating or embarrassing, ordinary confusions and fears that you’re not supposed to admit to. It’s become a difficult circuit to complete in the new mode of consumption, which is not so much in clubs and live spaces.
Image: What’s it like performing again after Covid? Are audiences uncomfortable or strange? Is it awkward for you, awkward for them?
CD: Mostly it’s just wonderful. It feels necessary. If there is an especially Christian idea to hold on to in this particular post-pandemic, hyper-electronic moment, it is incarnation, that feeling of embodied humanity. I was giving a talk recently, and I’d just answered a question about laughter, what I thought laughter was physically. And afterward someone came up to me, a priest actually, and said: “Sacrament. Laughter is a sacrament. It’s an outward sign of an inward, spiritual reality.” Laughter is this strange thing that happens to your body because of a thing that happens inside your mind, your heart. All because of things one person has said to you, and it sends these paroxysms of involuntary physiological response throughout the room.
It’s such a beautiful thing to be around, to step offstage with your shirt drenched in sweat and your voice hurting because in some part of the set you had to yell. Comedy is so embodied. And after these past three years, that is extremely important. It’s something that can’t be re-created digitally. Comedy has been through so many technological means of distribution—a lot of them are really great. I learned at the foot of Caroline’s Comedy Hour and Evening at the Improv, live recordings, comedy albums, first on vinyl, then on TV, and now streaming. All these things can be good, but I’m far less enthusiastic about these bite-sized, ninety-second Instagram reels and TikTok clips. Sometimes all these media can get comedy across beautifully, but not one of them captures the magic of being in a dark, nicely sized live venue. Who can relate to that more than people who had to watch liturgy on their laptops for three years?
Image: What makes a good venue for comedy?
CD: A good comedy club is essentially the exact opposite of a Gothic cathedral. A cathedral is always trying to draw your attention upward with its soaring ceilings and columns. Forward and up. The perfect comedy club almost always involves a descent. You have to go downstairs to a basement room with the lowest possible ceilings that allow to the sounds of laughter to ricochet and reverberate.
These days most of us consume our comedy alone, with the lights up. We see a ninety-second stand-up clip on Instagram or watch the latest streaming special and then report to social media to tell everyone what we think. Or, in true mimetic Girardian form, we confirm that we think the same thing as everybody else. There is no resurrection possible, because on social media every day is Good Friday.
I’m convinced that comedy is ultimately revelatory. Comedy tells us not just about ourselves but about God and our relationship to God, and what it means to inhabit reality, and what kind of reality it is that we inhabit. In the comedy club, as I see it, the paradox is that the comedian is simultaneously less than the audience—more abject, deprecated, uncouth, undignified—and also more than them—applauded, attended to. Even with a heckler, the comedian is in charge. And the humiliation of the comedian is transfigured, resurrected, made whole and beautiful. I have found nearly all secular or materialist explanations of comedy wanting. The best these theories can offer is some accounting for the content or context or utility of humor, but not its phenomenology, not in any sufficient way at least. Not that bliss of finding something funny, never mind the sheer ecstasy of being funny. I mean ecstasy in its everyday sense, as superlative pleasure, but also the way Tillich describes it, as a state of being outside of oneself, that subjective pole of revelation. I’m trying to explain how it feels when I get to be funny, or when someone else makes me laugh. It feels like I’m in God’s hands.
Image: You’re in God’s hands, but you’re doing something for the audience, too. Are you stewarding something? Are you doing God’s work when you make people laugh, even if it’s a crass joke?
CD: Makoto Fujimura, drawing on N.T. Wright’s theology, has found a powerful metaphorical vehicle in the Japanese art of kintsugi. Kintsugi is that Japanese art form of “golden joinery,” which entails repairing broken pottery with gold lacquer, joining the parts that have been cracked with beauty and delicacy. Fujimura is a Christian artist born in the United States and educated in Japan, deeply versed in multiple traditions. The parallels with Christian eschatology, especially the kind that Wright articulates so well, the transformation and redemption of this world into a new creation, are very clear in kintsugi. What was broken becomes even more beautiful, even more whole, precisely where it was broken.
Comedy is like kintsugi, but the artist is also the one who does the breaking. The comedian introduces the incongruity, the tension or discomfort, and the pottery they break is reality, the logos itself. And the laughter is the gold that mends, that heals. Laughter makes something new.
Image: Stand-up comedy is entertaining, or it should be, but it’s not just entertain-ment. You’re not doing something fun for the audience members who got a babysitter for a night out. Comedy is working with deep levels of reality.
CD: Comedy is like throwing a stone through a window and by the breaking turning it to stained glass. There’s a Christomorphic shape to it. It’s a rehearsal of resurrection. There’s power there that gives the best comedians the courage to take up their own crosses, to sacrifice themselves—their privacy, their dignity—for the sake of the audience. Take Richard Pryor, still considered by most stand-up comedians to have been the greatest practitioner of the art form. Here’s a man who had endured childhood sexual abuse, the humiliations of American racism, the loss of self to the overwhelming power of addiction, eventually even literal envelopment by fire. And he would come out on stage night after night and share transformational monologues with his audience as though he were showing his wounds to Thomas—but making a beeping noise for anyone who tried to poke.
A few years ago, Hannah Gadsby’s Netflix special Nanette offered a kind of rebuke to the Richard Pryor model of trauma and comedy. Gadsby refused to offer up the pain they’d experienced as a nonconforming person in a strangling gender binary for audience pleasure anymore. They made the case that self-deprecation was mere humiliation. It was the most successful comedy special of the year, but its central thesis was that comedy was inadequate to human truth or experience.
And it tapped into and accelerated an undeniable current in our culture today—one that is viewed as humorless by its detractors and, by its defenders, as the long-overdue rebuttal to the braying, hyena-like laughter of a callous society that causes the pain and marginalization. And it’s still a live debate. But what if what’s missing isn’t a sense of humor, as one side insists, or a sense of justice and decency, as the other does? What if what is actually missing is a sense of the transcendent? If comedy rehearses the resurrection shape of reality, then what is broken will be transfigured.
Kurt Armstrong is a builder, Anglican lay minister, and writer. He is the author of a forthcoming book about construction, masculinity, fatherhood, and pastoring, Repair and Remain, and has written for Paste, Comment, Plough, The Globe and Mail, and Geez, among others.
Photo by Aleksandr Popov on Unsplash
