Comics walk thin line with religious humor

Christian joke: “Presbyterians feel guilty about things they haven’t even done.”
   
Jewish joke: “In the Bible, we’re the chosen people. In the locker room, we’re the last-chosen people.”
   
Muslim joke: “Our family has four women who wear veils. We all share the same bus pass.”
   
Many people might find these jokes offensive; religion-based humor is the touchiest. Anyone who ventures into it must walk an exceedingly fine line — especially in the middle of a conflict over terrorism that has religious overtones.
   
Just ask Roy Peterson, award-winning editorial cartoonist for Canada’s Southam News Service. He has just been hit by a petition signed by more than 300 angry Muslims.
   
Peterson’s contentious cartoon portrays terrorist Osama bin Laden pointing a video camera at himself and saying: “Yo, Allah! Smile, we’re on candid camera.” A voice from above replies, “We?”
   
Muslims complained the Peterson cartoon fails to be “unquestionably deferential” to the divine and “insults Islam and injures the feelings of Muslims,” dragging God down to the foible-ridden level of humans.
   
Peterson, however, said he aimed his cartoon solely at bin Laden, whom he considers a “zealot.” He purposely wanted to show there was no connection between terrorism and the deity.
   
“But in the game of editorial cartooning, you’re not going to please everyone,” Peterson said, noting he’s offended conservative Christians in the past.
   
Religious people used to laugh about their religions only among others of the same religion. But more are taking their humor into society. While Jewish comics have been in the entertainment industry for decades, Christian comics are now popping up all over, with some moving into secular venues.
   
Meanwhile, a female Muslim stand-up comic in England, probably the only one in the world, is making a splash in the West.
   
Do members of some religions have a stronger sense of humor than others? In Vancouver, Regent College professor John Stackhouse, who specializes in theology and culture, said Jews are the most open about religious humor, Muslims the least receptive to it and Christians somewhere in the middle.
   
Generalizing about the three major monotheistic religions, Stackhouse said Jews have a tradition of struggling in a close relationship with God — willing to argue, complain and make wisecracks with the Divine.
   
Christians are not quite there. However, Stackhouse said Christians, unlike Muslims and Jews, don’t object to visual representations of the Deity, believing God became human in the person of Jesus Christ. That also connects God to human vulnerability, which is often pretty funny.
   
The world’s 1 billion Muslims are not all humorless, Stackhouse said, although many are sensitive because they feel under attack by the West. Muslims see the divine as utterly transcendent, a being who cannot be portrayed in human terms — including chatting with bin Laden.
   
It’s not as though Christians don’t often get offended by satire, though.
   
Stackhouse, an evangelical Christian, remembers getting riled by a newspaper cartoon that showed Jesus hanging on the cross, remarking to those below: “Oh, Peter, I can see your house from up here.”
   
Christians hate seeing Jesus trivialized, Stackhouse said. “Christians don’t want to see anything that cuts too close to the heart of piety.”
   
Still, Stackhouse said, if Peterson’s cartoon had portrayed a sinful Christian talking to God, he would not have been offended. “It makes God look good. The joke’s on us.”
   
Stackhouse would tend to agree with American Christian comic Robert G. Lee, who says there are limits to religious humor. “They usually boil down to: ‘Laugh about religion, not at it,’” he said.
   
Given such humorous strains in religious tradition, Leland Klassen, a Winnipeg-based Christian comic, is frustrated when Christians get upset at someone taking a jab at how they practice their religion.
   
Such no-fun Christians don’t want outsiders to have any ammunition against them, said Klassen, who hosts a show on the religion network, NOWTV.
   
But he finds it sad that many evangelical Christians would probably have been angry if Roy Peterson had switched characters in his cartoon and portrayed George W. Bush, a Christian, trying to claim a reluctant God as his ally.
   
“I’d say it’s time to lighten up,” Klassen said. “(Humor) is a  way to laugh about life and show we’re not perfect.” (RNS)