My Take: What all those Jesus jokes tell us

How is it that a figure sacred to so many Americans has become the punch line of so many jokes? And why is it acceptable to poke fun at Jesus when other sacred figures are deemed off limits or there is hell to pay for mocking them?

The explanations are as numerous as the laughs.

Immigration shifts from the 1960s changed the ethnic and religious faces of the country so no tradition dominates today. The Christian right made such a moral spectacle of itself that it practically begged to be mocked. The emergence of “spiritual, but not religious” sensibilities left many Americans willing to denounce or laugh about traditional faith. The public rise of agnosticism, atheism, and secularism led to aggressive mockery as a form of persuasion.

If we pause to consider why we’re laughing, we find that the comic bits delve into some of our thorniest and unresolved problems. The jokes reveal much more about us than they do Jesus. They speak to how our society has changed, how it hasn’t, and what we’re obsessed with.

My Take: What all those Jesus jokes tell us / by Edward J. Blum / November 10th, 2012 / cnn.com

The A.V. Club Interview: D.L. Hughley

Sean O'Neal: Dave Chappelle said one of the reasons he walked away from his show was that he felt it was helping keep stereotypes alive. Do you ever worry that Socially Offensive Behavior—which also mines stereotypes for laughs—is helping propagate stereotypes?

D.L. Hughley: Stereotypes existed hundreds of years before me or Chappelle or BET, and the only way they ever go away is to shine a light on it. There's a distinct difference between observing a joke and becoming one. I think that the greatest people I've ever seen involved in this art form—from George Carlin to Pigmeat Markham to Redd Foxx to Dick Gregory to Lenny Bruce—have all done what we do now, which is take a look at the things around us. I love to push people's buttons and watch people deal with the shit they have in their head.

SO: And now you're being protested for that.

DLH: This isn't the first time this has happened to me, or to comedians. If you look at what happened to Lenny Bruce or George Carlin or Richard Pryor or Redd Foxx, they've all had this happen. This art form survived McCarthyism. It can survive somebody with a mouth and an e-mail page.

SO: Is the title of your new HBO special, Unapologetic, a direct challenge to those protestors?

DLH: Actually, we had the title before this ever even happened, but no, I don't think any person, regardless of what they say, should ever apologize unless they mean it. In the last few years, we've seen people say exactly what they mean, and then some publicist makes them apologize. And I think we pretend to be more offended than we really are. When Mel Gibson made an anti-Semitic remark, he had a number-one movie, and his Q rating went up. Michael Richards made his statement, and sales of Seinfeld went up 70 percent three weeks in a row. Isaiah Washington made an anti-gay slur. Grey's Anatomy has never been stronger. Don Imus, his numbers went through the roof.

The A.V. Club Interview: D.L. Hughley / by Sean O'Neal / 08/14/07

Eddie Murphy: The Rolling Stone Interview

Brian Hiatt: You've talked about doing stand-up again – what would it be like now?

Eddie Murphy: If I ever get back onstage, I'm going to have a really great show for you all – an hour and a half of stand-up and about 40 minutes of my shitty band. But I don't know. The way that used to come about, you'd be around the house, hanging out, say something funny and it'd be like, "I'm going to go to the club, try that out tonight." That still happens, but it's been a long time. I'm not that guy in the leather suit anymore. The hardest thing for comics nowadays is to find your fucking voice.

BH: People do love that guy in the leather suit – that's a good guy.

EM: Yeah, you know. He's a kid. No more leather suits. I'm still that person in terms of how I'm wired. Whatever muscle makes jokes pop out, that muscle still works, I just don't have a leather suit on anymore. One of the things that's really cool is whenever they talk about stand-up, they'll mention me with all of those guys, like, Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce, but I haven't done it since I was 27, so why fuck with it? But that's just weighing both sides. It comes up too much for me to not do it again. It's like, when it hits me, I'll do it, eventually.

BH: Why did you quit in the first place?

EM: It stopped being fun. In the beginning, it was fun, then I was controversial. Whenever I would do anything, there would be picketing, negative backlash. I thought I should just do movies. I don't have to deal with this shit. Big chunks of time went by and before you knew it, it had been a hundred years since I had done it.

BH: A young Eddie Murphy coming up now would never use the word "faggot" the way you did.

EM: A lot of the stuff you just don't do now. Nowadays, comics say something that's offensive and they have got to apologize to everybody. How do you even write an act and go into a club when everybody has their cameras, it's on YouTube, if you say something offensive, you've got to apologize to everyone? How do you come up with anything?

Eddie Murphy: The Rolling Stone Interview / by: Brian Hiatt / November 9, 2011

When It Comes To Comedians, Where Is The Line?

Chris Rock explained the problem to The New York Times last week: “When you’re workshopping [material], a lot of stuff is bumpy and awkward. Especially when you’re working on the edge, you’re going to offend… Just look at some of my material... ‘Niggas vs. Black People,’ probably took me six months to get that thing right. You know how racist that thing was a week in?”

Comedians like Rock take a sensitive subject and hammer on it until it changes shape, becomes funny. If you can find humor in racism, you make it manageable. Take the adage about getting over public speaking by imagining the audience naked; imagine a group of klansmen naked and what do you have? Whatever it is, it’s not particularly threatening.

Jim Norton, whose standup special, “Please Be Offended,” came out on June 30, put it this way: “We take these knots in society — like, you know how you get a knot in your neck — and our job as comedians is to take our knuckles and kind of work it out.” Jeffrey Ross, who made headlines just this week at Comedy Central’s “Roast of Roseanne” for telling an Aurora-related joke, suggests that allowing that process to happen serves a greater good. “I think it’s our job to go too far. That way we know as a society what too far is.”

When It Comes To Comedians, Where Is The Line? / By Carol Hartsell / 08/08/2012 / www.huffingtonpost.com

The A.V. Club Interview: Scott Adsit

David Wolinsky: It's certainly a polarizing show. William Salyers from the show posted on the Adult Swim message board saying you had a blow-up with your sister and family over Moral Orel. Is that true? What happened?

Scott Adsit: [Laughs.] I did, yeah. In the first season, we—I made the mistake of showing her and some of her friends the pastry-bag episode, where Orel impregnates a bunch of neighborhood women. And they're all very good Christians. Very not-hypocritical. They do religion right. 'Cause the show is not against religion: It's against mistreating religion or using it for your own ends and convenience and bending the lessons of religion to suit what you already believe. So my sister and her friends are Christians—not exclusively. But she's got a lot of Christian friends, and she's a devout person who goes to church every week. And she's also the coolest person I know. And she's raising her kids really, really well. So she's someone that makes it work and isn't hypocritical.

I showed her the thing, and they were all just kind of silent afterward, and they didn't know what to say. And I was kind of nodding with my eyebrows up, going, "Eh? Eh?" It was a happy party going on until then, and they all kind of shuffled out.

And later I went back to California and had a discussion with my sister on the phone about it, and she just did not like the idea that we were portraying Christians the way we were—as if all Christians were like that. And I was defending the show and saying "This is about hypocrites, it's not about not Christians." And she just did not feel that way at all. She was insulted, and I kept defending the show and that just led to a huge argument.

And usually my sister and I don't argue at all, and we get along just fantastically. So this was a very odd occurrence, and we hung up after the first argument without resolving it. And then we called again the next day to bury the hatchet, and it started up again. And we just were yelling at each other.

DW: So what you're saying is that Moral Orel is tearing families apart.

SA: [Laughs.] Well one, anyway. No one else is watching it.

So we had three conversations [when] we were yelling at each other. And I think at the end of the third one, I said "My family is more important than the show." And so I told her I'd quit, and I went in the next day and I quit. And [writer and creator] Dino [Stamatopoulos] and [executive producer] Nick [Weidenfeld] tried to convince me not to. And I said "This is family over the show, obviously. I mean, otherwise what are we learning from the show? The show's about how important family should be, and how it's mistreated." So I had to go. [Laughs.]

A few days later, my sister and I just decided she was proud that I was doing something, and that I was on the air, and all that. So she said, "Let's just not talk about it." So that's what we did. We stopped talking about it.

The A.V. Club Interview: Scott Adsit / By David Wolinsky / October 28, 2008

The A.V. Club Toronto Interview: Ari Shaffir

Phil Brown: Was your comedy always so dark?

Ari Shaffir: Well, at first I wasn’t anywhere near that line. For the first while, you’re just doing an impression of a stand up comic. So I would do like Monica Lewinsky jokes and stuff like that. It was so bad. But over time everyone realizes their potential, and you start talking about the things you want to talk about. I was so religious for a while that I started making fun of it. I don’t care about things like race or religion, so I started mocking how everyone else cares about them.

PB: Do you think that to be a comedian who deals with your type of subject matter, you should be upsetting some of the audience?

AS: No, I don’t want to upset anybody. There are a few types of people who do those sorts of jokes. There are the people who are like, “Hey, I’m about to shock you or say something so disgusting that you won’t believe it!” Or there’s another type like Jimmy Norton, or the type of humor I do, where we don’t mean to be offensive to anyone, that’s just the way we think. Like, I’ve had thoughts about murdering a girl who I got pregnant while she’s deciding whether or not to have an abortion. I know that’s bad to do or even think about, but nevertheless those thoughts are there, so I’m going to share them with you. I think having children would be just horrible, and the worst punishment in life, and people get angry with me when I say that. I’m not trying to get you upset, I’m just expressing how I feel about it. I prefer that kind of nasty humor where the comics just can’t help it.

The A.V. Club Toronto Interview: Ari Shaffir / by Phil Brown / March 21, 2012