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: 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