November 16, 2005
What is clean Christian comedy?

Yes, you read that right — today’s rather uncharacteristic Scary-Crayon piece attempts to discover the nature of clean Christian comedy. Am I the only one who didn’t know this subgenre existed? And what’s with the Christian love for Star Wars? I find it especially interesting given that Jedi has become a competing religion. Oh, and there are no cursewords and some cute jokes in this piece (well, I think they’re cute…), so bring the kiddies! And if somehow one of the performers finds his/her way here, thanks for an intriguing show. Keep up the clean Christian work, I guess!

-posted by Wes | 12:04 am | Comments (7)
7 Comments »
  • jenny says:

    actually, i think the view of star wars as an overt biblical metaphor is pretty common. i’m not terribly familiar with the bible or star wars, so i can’t explain the connection in depth, but my stepmother actually went to seminary and is obsessed with star wars, and i am fairly certain she wrote one of her papers on the correlation between the two (strangely, she’s actually not a christian, but she wanted to go to seminary to study religion, and perhaps to give an outlet to her star wars theory).

  • I’ve found some people tend to see “biblical metaphor” in just about any popular movie / comic / TVshow. There are some who claim Superman and Goku to be metaphors for Jesus.

    NEAT IDEA: Wes, You should use your Caf?press store to publish your “Strangest X-Mas Story Ever Told” book. I’d much sooner buy that (which sounded rather good to me) than a T-shirt.

  • Wes says:

    Tetsu: Is it that you want a hard copy of the story or that you just want to read it? I couldn’t in good conscience ask that people pay money just to read the thing! But if I thought that people were actually interested in reading 50K words of, well, insanity, I’d be more than willing to post it on the site in multiple installments.

    If you want to help out in a monetary way, though, you could always donate! And hopefully soon I’ll have the Google things up here and there for folks to click and stuff. 🙂

  • I mainly just want to read it. If you post it as an article series I wouldn’t mind. But, I also thought it might make a cool item for your store. It’s your story to do what you want with, but I’d like to read it in some form or other.

  • Kim says:

    Wes,

    We are glad you came out and I enjoyed reading your very fair and articulate review about the idea and concept of “clean Christian comedy.” Feel free to come out again and we’d be happy to meet you!

    -Directors of SYNergy

    syn errrr g? lol

  • Brian says:

    Wes,
    My name is Brian, and I am one half of the comedy duo “Dave and Brian.” I applaud you for being open-minded enough to attend a clean christian comedy show. Even I have a hard time understanding “christian” entertainment, and I was one of the performers in the show you critiqued. I’m not so sure you understand where Dave and I are coming from though, so I thought I would enlighten your many readers. You seem to think that we are in the business of entertaining only christians. You also seem to think that our material wouldn’t fly in a “secular” venue. The truth is, some of us clean/christian entertainers actually prefer playing in front of secular audiences. Dave and I have peformed in several colleges and comedy clubs where the majority of the audience is not christian. We never change our material in any way to make it more acceptable in a particular venue. We have been well recieved in both secular and christian audiences. I think that you never intended to give any of the comedians you saw at synergy a chance, simply because it was advertised as “christian.” I only write this because your readers deserve a more open-minded look at christian comedians. Not all of us direct our humor to the church audience. Thank you.

  • Wes says:

    First off, thanks for the comment, Brian — I appreciate the extra info regarding the show and your target audiences. That said, I think you’ve somewhat misunderstood my analysis of the show (or at least the tone of the review). While I found the show to be more “hmmm” funny than “ha-ha” funny, I certainly didn’t mean to come down hard on you guys.

    I suspect that your contention that I “never intended to give any of the comedians [I] saw at synergy a chance” stems from the fact that the article is more focused on exploring the concept of clean Christian comedy than reviewing the individual acts themselves. That much is true — the piece is a discussion about the niche genre itself rather than the comedians — but I didn’t mean to make any implications about what you guys do outside of Christian-specific venues.

    Granted, I don’t think certain jokes would fly in secular audiences — namely, the ones that I would classify as being overt examples of clean Christian comedy. I think Pomarolli’s act, with all of the references to prayer and Southern church culture, might just come across as annoying and/or confusing to a secular audience. But the violent imagery that generally permeates Ruff Ryders songs notwithstanding, you guys’ act had more in common with Weird Al Yankovic than the gospel. So I have no problem believing that secular audiences dig your work as well and I didn’t mean to suggest the contrary (with the possible exception of the prophet joke ;)).

    Anyway, I guess my point is that this article wasn’t intended to be a look at Christian comedians, but Christian comedy and what it entails — and, admittedly, I was less concerned with giving (or not giving) the performers a chance than I was with trying to determine just what constitutes clean Christian comedy. Readers more interested in learning about the specific performers at the show can always click the links in the article text to visit your sites. 🙂

    Thanks again for reading and commenting, Brian!

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