What subjects, if any, should be off limits for comedians? For Jimmy Carr, Ricky Gervais and particularly Dave Chappelle, the answer appears to be “nothing”. But for the rest of us (because, while I’m hardly in the their league, I am, for my sins, a comedian as well as a vicar) the golden rule is “Punch up, not down”. In other words, it’s OK to mock the powerful but laughing at any minority group, as old-school comics such as Bernard Manning used to do, is a form of bullying.
By that logic, God, the most powerful being in the universe, is a legitimate target for humour. Pope Francis himself said as much last week.
In an address to a gathering of comic luminaries (which included Whoopi Goldberg, Chris Rock and Gervais’s former writing partner Stephen Merchant), he said that laughing at God is not blasphemy. I wonder what he’d make of Jim Jefferies’ “God is drunk at a party” routine? “I think it would be really great, if you could all sing songs about me.”
Personally, I think it’s brilliant but I suspect that many of my parishioners would be appalled by it; even the ones who like Life of Brian.
Of course, that was famously denounced as blasphemous when it was released in the 70s, but the Pythons were always clear that their issues were with Christ’s followers, not the man himself. As Terry Jones said, we’ve spent 2,000 years killing each other because we couldn’t agree on what our leader said about peace and love.