The Joke's on Him
PODHORETZ, JOHN
The Joke’s on Him Bill Maher could use a lesson in civility from Michael Moore. BY JOHN PODHORETZ It is the thesis of the new nonfi ction fi lm Religulous that religion is a “neurological...
...Becoming mankind’s savior would be quite the career advance for Maher, who spent years as a secondrate comedian on the brick-wall circuit...
...BY JOHN PODHORETZ It is the thesis of the new nonfi ction fi lm Religulous that religion is a “neurological disorder,” and that “belief must be destroyed so that mankind might live...
...And throughout, whenever he wishes to dip into religious history, he does so by using snippets of Hollywood Bible movies...
...The only rabbi who appears is an anti-Zionist Hasid who attended a Holocaust-denial conference in Tehran sponsored by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad...
...Now, 15 years later, his chat show is on HBO, and he still scowls should anyone else dare to say anything funny that wasn’t scribbled down for him by his ghostwriting team...
...But then, so is Religulous, which takes rationalism and reduces it to mere crassness...
...I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone conduct himself as rudely—either on fi lm or in real life—as Maher does here...
...Maybe Michael Savage on the radio...
...His method in Religulous is to interview people who are far poorer, far less sophisticated, and vastly better mannered than he, and as he does so, to laugh at them, tell them that their deepest beliefs are the sort of nonsense he gave up when he was 11 years old, and then press ahead with another question intended only to expose their idiocy...
...In the last 10 minutes Maher and his director, Larry Charles, literally turn into fi re and brimstone preachers as Religulous becomes a raging secular sermon about humankind meeting its end in a fl aming furnace...
...Making fun of religious kitsch is the easiest thing on earth, because that kitsch is an uglifi cation of something beautiful, a literalization of something abstract...
...He makes mincemeat of a Puerto Rican guy who claims to be the direct descendant of Jesus Christ, and a onetime member of Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes who wears $2,000 lizard-skin shoes and can’t properly quote the Bible...
...In my experience, when comedians decide the moment has come for them to speak seriously, they instantly transform into the most earnest, humorless, and irony-challenged people on the face of the earth...
...As he does this, his interlocutors freeze, slack-jawed with disbelief, and then gamely attempt to go on because (a) that’s what their mother taught them, and (b) there is a camera in their faces and they’ve fi gured out that if they let Maher have it, he is just going to make them look worse...
...Rather, he waits until he is in the editing room...
...The movie spends 10 minutes in a Florida amusement park called The Holy Land Experience, in which the crucifi xion is reenacted, with Christian rock music, seven times a day...
...Maher insults the obese worshippers at a church inside a trailer parked at a truck stop, then fi nds a former Jew for Jesus—obese, naturally— to insult—inside the man’s ludicrous religious trinket store...
...Maher’s boorish conduct on his own shows is nothing, however, next to the behavior on display in Religulous...
...It cheapens, lowers, and distorts, and refl ects not righteousness in the service of truth, but self-righteousness in the service of Narcissus...
...And like Al Gore in his fi lm, An Inconvenient Truth, Maher clearly thinks he offers such an airtight case that Religulous may actually save the world...
...As his fi lm concludes, Maher seems genuinely to believe that he has, in the preceding 100 minutes, made an unassailable argument that religious belief is not only stupid and mindless, but apocalyptically dangerous...
...John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic...
...Perhaps Maher is braver than Moore, although I doubt it...
...Call it “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Godless...
...Of course, the faithful he shows us are nothing more than caricatures...
...Maher stands in the midst of rubble in Megiddo, the hillside in Israel that the book of Revelation calls Armageddon, and consigns humanity and the planet to destruction either from nuclear weapons or ecological disaster if silly people do not cease their demented belief in divinity...
...But it is far from certain...
...Maher’s own towering vulgarity on the subject of faith—the most powerful and meaningful force in the history of human existence—is nothing more than a mirror image of religious kitsch...
...on the evidence of his conduct in Religulous, he just seems like a jerk...
...True, Michael Moore makes fun of the yahoos he interviews, but he doesn’t do it as he interviews them...
...This is the creed of Bill Maher, the stand-up comedian turned talk-show host, who appears in virtually every frame...
...He had a bit of luck when, in the years that any comedian on the planet could get a television show, he found himself hosting a nightly chat session on the then-unwatched Comedy Central in which political pundits sat cheek by jowl with comics even less talented than Maher discoursing uncomfortably on subjects of the day—and earning only a scowl from Maher if any of them got a laugh, since he was the host and the laughs were all supposed to be directed at him...
...I suppose the irony of Maher the Atheist calling down nuclear hellfi re on believers, as Jonathan Edwards threatened unbelievers with eternal damnation over 250 years ago in his astonishing sermon, is intentional...
Vol. 14 • October 2008 • No. 6
