"It profits me but little that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquillity of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life."

--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

On SNL's "Djesus Uncrossed"

The Regular Wife and (especially) the Regular Son were outraged by the Saturday Night Live skit called "Djesus Uncrossed," which depicts the story of the resurrection as a trailer for a Quentin Tarantino movie, complete with blood-soaked mass mayhem and movie dialogue.   (When Jesus emerges from his tomb, he says to the camera, "Look who's back," a la Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Terminator movie.)

As for me, my reaction is... meh.   It's not that big of a deal.  Saturday Night Live is a niche comedy show for urban libs nowadays.   The skit, like most of SNL in recent years, simply isn't that funny.   The writers are part of the generation that has grown up with no cultural inheritance other than movies and TV, so the only things they know how to write are take-offs of movies and TV shows.   (Watch SNL sometime... nearly every skit is riffing off a movie or TV show.   Then compare it to the originality of sketch comedy from the 1950s or 1960s on Your Show of Shows or the Ernie Kovacs show or the Carol Burnett show.   There's no comparison in terms of creativity and laugh-out-loud moments.)

Yes, it's mildly offensive in the way that the calculated outrages of the supposed avant-garde against Christianity are offensive.   Yes, it's sacreligious.   Yes, it's in extremely poor taste to air it at the beginning of Lent.   But mostly it's just embarrassing for the writers and performers.   That's the best they could come up with.   Pathetic.

Oh, and more than pathetic... it's also cowardly.   Their supposed edginess, their supposedly "transgressive" comedy is in making fun of Christianity.   Wow.   Really risk something there, SNL.   It's not like comedians haven't been doing that for about 50 years.

But there is a religion that desperately needs to be skewered by comedians.   There's a religion that does ridiculous things all over the world that needs to be delegitimized through humor.   There's a religion that is all of the things the Left in America thinks they are opposed to -- oppress women, oppress blacks, enforce restrictive sexual regulations, murder people who are apostates, destroy art and culture that has existed for centuries.   There's an expansionist, violent, imperialistic, backward-looking, anti-scientific, anti-progress religion out there that comedians could make fun of and actually do something good at the same time.

It's called radical Islam.

But don't hold your breath for SNL to do a Muhammed parody.   They won't do it.

They are cowards.   They are like middle-school bullies:  they'll make fun of the little kid, but they won't dare make fun of someone who might fight back.

Video below the fold, if you really want to watch it.



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