“When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realized that the Lord doesn’t work that way, so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me.” — Comedian Emo Philips
A man touched by divinity, set apart from so-called normal society because of the truths he speaks, travels the region, standing in front of a new crowd each day, his voice raised in proclamation. His face shines with sweat as he calls on the gathered mass of humanity before him to accept the wisdom he delivers.
This man is, of course, a stand-up comedian on a regional tour. Or is he a tent-revival preacher, bringing the gospel to rural believers? The two archetypes may have more in common than these superficial stereotypes suggest. Indeed, the roots of modern comedy, as one Tennessee-based author explains, lie in the ancient and subversive custom of spiritual revelation.
Jason Crawford, a Union University professor of Shakespeare, tackles that very subject with his new book God’s Fools: Saints, Prophets, Martyrs, and the Making of Modern Comedy (Bloomsbury). Crawford’s first book, Allegory and Enchantment, was published by Oxford University Press in 2017, and his essays have appeared in ELH, The Cresset, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
“Keeping joy at the center was a big part of it. I think there’s a kind of trust we lose when we’re writing for gatekeepers.” — Jason Crawford
Though the link between Shakespeare, comedy, and religion may, at first, appear difficult to discern, Crawford believes there exists much common ground between the subjects. “I spent a lot of my life thinking about these really old artforms — tragedy and allegory,” Crawford says. It comes with the territory as a scholar of Shakespeare. What he noticed in his study is that tragedy lacks its formerly hallowed presence in the contemporary world. Comedy, however, is not only present but considered important.
“Why is it that we don’t have a huge tragedy industry, but we’ve got a massive comedy industry?” Crawford wonders. “Comedy meets religious needs,” he says, answering his own question. “The answer to the question has to be a spiritual answer.”
Why Comedy?
In his childhood in south Louisiana, Crawford loved writing and telling stories. As a hobby, storytelling eventually fell by the wayside, as many children doodle in their youth but usually abandon the pastime before learning to drive. When he went to college for his undergraduate degree at Louisiana State University, Crawford didn’t expect anything of intellectual adventure or discovery. “I just wanted to get a degree and get a job,” he admits. As the saying goes, though, man makes plans, and God laughs. The young student had an English teacher who radically altered his point of view.
Jason Crawford
It happened in English class. I was there because I had to be, but that professor reawakened my love for literature and love for stories,” Crawford explains, possibly echoing a sentiment he has shared with general education English classes in the past. His academic career continued, now on the path of literary study. While working on his Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard (Class of ’08), Crawford had an epiphany, to borrow a phrase from the language of religious enlightenment. He realized that such academic scholarship wasn’t the kind of writing that brought him the deepest joy.
“I found myself writing sentences that I was proud of, but I found myself wondering if anyone would ever read them just for joy. Would my students ever read it? Would my neighbors?” Crawford asks. So he decided he wanted to write a fun book. He wanted to tell a story rather than defend a position. Like many artists chasing their own personal “perfect tone,” he is still working on the balance between an intellectually challenging work and an entertaining one, but the immensely readable God’s Fools is certainly a step in the right direction.
As a grad student, Crawford had often pictured a professor or other grad student, an academic ready to poke holes in his thesis, as his reader, so he ended up writing defensively. It yielded highly rigorous intellectual study, though that method was not entirely conducive to a side-splittingly funny piece of scholarship. When working on God’s Fools, Crawford tacked a different course, imagining his friends and family as his readers.
“I’ve got small kids, and they make me laugh as much as anyone in the world,” Crawford says, admitting that he hopes they might read his work and chuckle someday. “Keeping joy at the center was a big part of it. I think there’s a kind of trust we lose when we’re writing for gatekeepers.”
In other words, one must trust one’s audience — even when presented with the proverbial tough crowd.
Tough Crowds and Martyrs
The comedian’s job, Crawford asserts, is to provoke, to break rules, and to confess embarrassing things, all publicly and for the benefit of others. “You’re actually making yourself as vulnerable as possible,” Crawford says. “That danger is what makes comedy so compelling.”
Charlie Chaplin receives a fair amount of consideration in God’s Fools, with a long discussion of his Tramp character from the film City Lights. Crawford quotes Mack Sennett, Chaplin’s early boss, saying, “Those who knew him best always suspected that under all the charm and performative vitality, Charlie Chaplin was curled up tight around some sort of pain.”
The conventional wisdom is that, in confronting that kernel of pain at the center of comedy, the comedian acquires an almost religious transcendence. In other words, the spiritual is discovered through an unflinching examination of the most mundane and material of our woes.
“When it’s at its best, comedy is beyond all that,” Crawford says. “We get a glimpse. We are more than all this frailty and all our pain. Comedy has to show us our brokenness, and it has to show us something beyond our brokenness.” In this way, the author explains, comedy charts a path forward past this current moment of discourse fueled by the language of culture war. If social division is the enemy of wholeness, then comedy presents an avenue for meeting friends and neighbors that does not require anyone to renounce a former religion and adopt a new savior. Nor does comedy rely on the logic of revolution. In that way, Crawford contends, the act of a comic is not unlike that of a martyr.
“It’s going to be a power that comes from somewhere else. It isn’t going to be more violence, and this is where comedy is similar to martyrdom,” he says. “The martyr doesn’t prevail by drawing a sword and fighting back. The martyr prevails by saying, ‘I’m connected to a life that you can’t touch. I’m connected to something beyond the scope of your power.’”
To put it simply, Crawford says, both comedy and spirituality harness the spirit of hope.
