#1 by Animavore » Jan 21, 2012 11:45 am
In the South Park episode, Trapped in the Closet, which touches on Scientology there's a scene were a Scientologist is explaining Scientology to Stan and as he explains it with accompanying animation depicting the description there is a caption on the bottom during the duration which reads THIS IS WHAT THEY ACTUALLY BELIEVE pointing out that they are not making this up, this is, in fact, what they actually believe. They recycled the joke for the episode on Mormonism when the story of Joseph Smith is explained.
There's a certain bias here from Stone and Parker in that they single these two religions out like this as being of a particular level of ridiculousness because, let's face it, the joke works with every religion.
They did on two occassions in South Park try to tackle atheism but on neither of them were they able to actually mock the worldview itself. On one episode Stan's parents become atheists and keep talking 'shit' (literally, shit came out of their mouth) and on the other they had Richard Dawkins have a pretty funny love affair with Miss (previously Mr) Garrison and some side-story of people in the future worshipping science, saying things like, "In the name of science" and there was some war between multiple factions of atheists with slightly different scientific believe. Basically falling into the tiresome, "atheism is a religion too". No where could they actually mock the lack of belief itself, no where did we see THIS IS WHAT THEY ACTUALLY BELIEVE.
I've only seen one stand-up comedian try tackle atheism, and that was Dane Cook, who talked about some atheist guy sneezing in an elevator. Dane says, "God bless you." The guy says, "I'm an atheist." Dane asks him what he thinks happens when he dies? The guy says (something like) he believes when he dies he'll go back into the ground and grow into a tree (?). Dane says something like he hopes that tree gets cut down and made into paper used for Bibles.
Now, this is passive aggressive for a start, its like that joke about the Marine who punches the atheist professor saying, "God sent him", after the professor (vainly, according to the joke) asks God to strike him down. Trying to show nothing will happen. But, that aside, I'm not bothered about that, notice he doesn't actually make any type of witty deconstruction of atheism. He takes the piss out of a particular guy who, if the story is true and happened how he told it, sounds like a bit of a prat.
Now you compare that to the amount of material religon has provided for comedians over the last, over the last ever. From legends like Dave Allen, George Carlin, Eddie Izzard, Monty Python and Not The Nine O'Clock News. Religion is absolutely ripe for ridicule. It sets itself up like a straight man about to be pied. The nonsense they come out with stretches incredulity so far the only way break the tension is to laugh.
Can anyone think of any comedian who has successfully mocked the atheist's non-belief? Is it possible that atheism is untouchable in this regard, not being a ridiculous position and one primed for ridicule that goes beyond religious passive aggression or needs to be straw-manned to sound ridiculus (atheists believe that the universe came from nothing, by nothing)? And; will Lion reply that atheism isn't used in comedy because it's boring, the little train that coudn't, choo-choo?
Last edited by
Animavore on Jan 21, 2012 11:50 am, edited 1 time in total.
A most evolved electron.