Colbert, Comedy, and Death is Not Defeat
When I was 23, I moved from the Bible Belt to Chicago to take comedy classes at Second City. I was serious about comedy and serious about my faith, but I wasn’t sure where the two met. I had no intentions of being a church comedian, but I was obsessed with the question, “What does it look like to be a Christian comedian?”
I learned firsthand how complicated it can be to work out your faith in a given field. The evangelical “faith and work” movement was hopping and I was disappointed that my answers couldn’t be found with a simple Google search. Lots of wise people were talking about art, but it was crickets with my kind of art. Being funny on purpose, and the creative community around it, is a beast of its own.
My classes didn’t provide a secular alternative. Today, there’s a progressive moral code around joke content (spurred on by #MeToo, Black Lives, and other movements), but the early 2010s were the twilight of “anything goes if you can get a laugh.” At Second City, we were given a moral proverb: “Punch up, don’t punch down.” If you bite, bite the one in power (senators, billionaires, etc), and conversely, don’t target someone with less power. We only talked about it briefly, and it was assumed we knew up from down to begin with.
I desperately wanted wisdom from a professional comedian - or even a thoughtful amateur - on how to navigate this field as a Christian. I wished I could ask someone like Stephen Colbert how his faith intersects with his comedy. Recently, his Late Night guest Dua Lipa did just that. The whole exchange is lovely, and here’s the heart of his answer:
“I'm a Christian and a Catholic and that's always connected to the idea of love and sacrifice being somehow related, and giving yourself to other people, and that death is not defeat…
Someone was asking me earlier what movies [I enjoyed] this year and I said "I really like Belfast," which is Kenneth Branaugh's story of his childhood. And one of the reasons I love it is that … it's funny and it's sad and it's funny about being sad. In the same way, that sadness is like a little bit of an emotional death, but not a defeat if you can find a way to laugh about it.
Laughter keeps you from having fear of it, and fear is the thing that keeps you turning to evil devices to save you from the sadness… If there’s some relationship between my faith and my comedy, it’s that no matter what happens, you are never defeated. You must understand and see this in the light of eternity and find some way to love and laugh with each other.”
I wish I could send this clip to my younger self, but I’m not sure I was ready. Colbert gave two minutes of remarks and I wanted a whole book. No, a playbook that spelled out what I could and couldn’t do or say. I wanted law in the moral wild west of comedy.
The most Christ-like thing about Colbert’s answer is that it’s the kind of answer Jesus would give. It sounds lovely and spiritual, but there’s nothing you can really do with it. “Death is not defeat” is as practical as “You are the salt of the earth,” and “I liked Belfast because it was funny and sad” is like telling a story about a field. There’s not much you can immediately do with these sayings, and I can imagine my younger self walking away sad like the rich young ruler. Sad and funny.
Today, I think “Love, sacrifice, and death is not defeat” is plenty for a Christian humor ethic. In fact, it’s a great starting point for any Christian trying to navigate a given field. Jesus summarized the Old Testament with two “love” commands: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.” If you’re guided by love, it will lead you to do certain things and not do other things.
Right out of undergrad, most of my vocational angst swirled around the idea of righteous content, what’s okay and what’s offensive to joke about. This is important to wrestle with, but at times I missed that “offensive” is less about objective standards and more about loving my neighbor. Any racist, sexist, and every other “-ist” joke lacks love.
But to help people with their sadness is very loving. Life is painfully hard, and external forces team up with our internal shortcomings to keep it that way. Something always has us worried, frustrated, angry, or sad, and that’s on our better days. We all need relief, and humor can provide joyful relief, either through delightful distraction or helping us face hard things by finding a way to laugh about it.
Like anything, humor has its dark side. Unloving jokes can still get a laugh. Not all laughter is relief, at least not for everyone. We’ve all been hurt by jokes, and in those moments the presence of laughter actually inflicts more pain. Laughing at unloving jokes may feel good, but it’s the shallow relief of the religious leader who prays, “Thank God I’m not like that guy.” Rather than helping us with the sadness, laughing at this kind of humor can mask over it.
If there are good and bad laughs, then comedy requires sacrifice, passing up on opportunities to gain for yourself. If laughter is your primary goal, then loving your neighbor will often take a backseat. If you want to love your neighbor, you have to ask, “Am I here to get a laugh? Or am I here to give a laugh and offer relief in a hurting world?” Or as Colbert put it, are you here to give of yourself to other people?
“If you want to love your neighbor, you have to ask, ‘Am I here to get a laugh? Or am I here to give a laugh and offer relief in a hurting world?’”
These last few paragraphs are a bit more practical, closer to what I was looking for. But it fails another unspoken test I had: a desire to “feel” Christian. I thought a Christian’s way in the world would be distinct somehow, something that couldn’t be copied. Colbert’s simple “love and sacrifice” idea is a framework that any comedian can use, and I know plenty of non-Christian comedians who want their jokes to help people and restrain their content out of respect for others.
But it’s good to have ethical overlap with our non-Christian neighbors. It’s good that we can join others as we encourage and reinforce the helpful parts of our field, and resist and dismantle the harmful parts. It’s good that we can learn from our neighbors about love and sacrifice. It’s also good that our neighbors can learn from the Bible. Right now a local church sign quotes James 1:19: "Be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger." This piece of wisdom is possible outside faith, and widespread implementation would vastly improve social media.
The Bible is full of practical commands that aren’t very spiritual and spiritual declarations that aren’t very practical. They work together. It’s easy to see our need for practical handles on spiritual truths, but we also need larger truths to motivate our actions. With humor, it’s hard to keep sacrificing laughs if it’s an obligation. It’s especially hard after a big laugh to be told your joke was offensive. It felt good to get a laugh and you’ve got every incentive to ignore the 1 for the 99. But if your motivation is to love your neighbor, you’ll want to sacrifice, which is hard but gets easier with practice.
It takes time and discernment to figure out what “love and sacrifice” look like in your particular context. With a community of fellow Christians, none of us is on our own. As a comedian, the sum of my circumstances is unique, yet each part overlaps with other fields. Writers wrestle with what content to include or cut. Pastors struggle with internalizing the response to their “performance.” Everyone has difficult relationships, and most of us find it hard to rest. With more than a little help from the Holy Spirit, brothers and sisters can move toward wisdom together.
Of all the things Colbert said, “death is not defeat” is the least practical and the most impactful. He tied it to comedy: “sadness is like a little bit of an emotional death, but not a defeat if you can find a way to laugh about it.” Of course I love this portrayal of comedy because it makes my craft feel human and beautiful. But it’s only true of life’s “little deaths” like sadness, because big, final Death is still a big, final problem. I’ve experienced cathartic laughter at funerals, which were grace in the moment but didn’t bring them back.
Laughter has serious limits on relief and healing. As a comedian, this can be terrifying. If you dedicate a significant amount of time to something, you want it to mean something. But even “high impact” professions have limits. As an elementary teacher, you can help students feel loved, but only in the hours they’re in your classroom. As a therapist you can offer clarity and techniques but cannot make a person change. Even a surgeon, who can literally save a person from death, can’t save everyone and the relief is still temporary.
This puts us all on equal footing. Professions may vary in their ability to directly address and relieve the smaller deaths, but capital-D Death lurks in the shadows like a patient wolf. It can be ignored, but not all the time. We can make our peace with it, but it’s only a truce. Sometimes Death looms so thick that we swear we could reach out and touch it, or worse, that it’s reaching out to touch us. We can adjust how we think or feel about Death, but in the end there’s nothing we can do about it.
But what if Death itself were defeated? And what if we weren’t the ones doing the defeating? What if it’s not our love and sacrifice that offer victory? “Love, sacrifice, and death is not defeat” is like a paraphrase of John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
By embracing the enormity of Christ’s vocation, we can embrace the smallness of our own. If Death is not ours to defeat, then we can find a small corner of this earth and relieve small deaths with jokes and many other things. The impact isn’t small, because the “small deaths” are incredibly painful and relief is like cold water in a desert. The cost isn’t small either, it’s called sacrifice for a reason. But as we do the difficult and important work of love and sacrifice, there is rest in knowing that death is not defeat.
Ben Fort is a comedian in Fort Worth, TX. You can find more of his faith and humor thoughts at Mockingbird or his Funny Beliefs podcast for Christ and Pop Culture.
