Spike Milligan is a Catholic hero of mine.
In his will, he asked that he be buried in the chuch cemetery in the village in Ireland where his parents came from. On the tombstone he asked that the inscription read: “I told you I was ill.”
Just to complete the comic routine, the next joke came in – as if scripted – from the parish priest of the village: ” ‘Tis a terrible ting: making a mockery of death (pronounced debt) and on his tombstone too. I won’t have it.”
International furore and a bishop who got the joke later, and the decision was reversed and Spike’s tombstone inscription stands as he wished.
Why is Spike a hero to me?
Because, as John Cleese said when Spike died, British humour owes a debt of lasting gratitude to him as the fountainhead of a rich stream of absurdist comedy that flowed through The Goons, to Around the Horn into Monty Python and The Goodies and even gets a look in with Little Britain. There’s legacy that lasts to this day.
But he’s a hero for much more than his achievements, monumental as they are. He didn’t just turn a living out of absurdity. He lived it, at great personal cost.
Louis Armstrong was once asked what sort of music he liked and he replied: “There are only two types of music – good music and bad music. I like good music.”
I have the same view about comedy. And the best sources of comedy are religion and sex. Where would Woody Allen be without either?
And so, when I was asked by The Hoopla when does the lampooning of religion in general, and priesthood and Catholicism in particular, ” hurt and cross the line?”
My answer is simple: When it’s bad comedy!
For the rest – the good stuff – it’s welcomed by me as a timely reminder of just how comic a lot of religious carry-on can be. And not just religious carry-on of course. Comics render us a much wider service.
Long ago – like 20 years ago – I got used to the idea of turning up in unexpected places and to unfamiliar groups, walking into meetings or parties and being known to be a priest and immediately presumed to be at least mentally deficient, if not a danger to humanity.
The rants of people like Richard Dawkins or, closer to home, Peter Fitzsimons, are just saying what’s beneath the surface of popular consciousness in Australia: that believers are either brain dead or fanatics, or both, and that a celibate person by choice is so psychosexually distorted as to be good for nothing better than a padded cell.
Back to Spike, the master absurdist
It’s only when you look at life askew that you see it for what it is and can see it in perspective.
Puncturing the balloons of the pompous and presumptuous is the public service comics provide.
Being an outsider, as comics have to be, is the best place to live if you want to see life long and see it whole. That’s where the reality of paradox dawns and unsuspected life forces emerge.
The early 20th Century English journalist and author, G.K. Chesterton was also a handy coiner of one liners. He had a succinct definition of a lunatic: Someone who lives only in one world – his and hers. What he meant of course is that fanatics and narcissists are two common and undiagnosed versions of madness.
Dr Freud was right: we’re all a bit mad, and some more than others. The maddest are those trapped in a single universe where the elements of surprise, the unexpected intrusion and a grasp of paradox never afford entry.
Only those, like Spike, with a dedicated commitment to the absurd as a source of revelation, really get this. And we’re indebted to them because they are, above all, circuit breakers, trapped as we can be in our own little worlds.
And pompous Christian people – those who claim to be “leaders” but are actually in touch with nothing apart from their own importance, or real nutters like the Koran-hating American evangelist trying his best to start World War 3 – are doubly worthy of attention from such circuit-breaking comedians. Why?
Well, obviously, because they’re inherently farcical and stupid fanatics.
But also because they’ve missed the whole point of their faith which is about irony, paradox and what are, to an outside observer, simply absurd, unverifiable claims – like the world as we have it finding its source and foundation in an unfathomable mystery and the even more arresting claim that it doesn’t end at death.
These are outrageous claims. They get their purchase not because they “make sense” but precisely because they break the circuit of our self-preoccupation and put us in a place where only a paradoxical sense of life’s meaning can be adequate to life’s challenge.
And if we don’t have them – the circuit breakers – all manner of abominations take over.
For example, what was the point of Kevin Rudd’s apology if it didn’t begin by admitting that a form of “group think” had been in the ascendency – where all the powers-that-be agreed that Aborigines were sub-human and incapable of loving their children into life.
Living in one world can be shared experience of inestimable destructiveness.
So, far from being hurt or dismayed by comic accounts of religion, I say, bring them on!
And I think God would be pleased with them too.
In a recent silent retreat I made, I kept banging on to God that he really ought to lift his game. He’s created such a wasteful universe. Why did he create a species that could be so destructive, self-destructive and hurtful while rejoicing in its own missed opportunities?
It was only one of the reasons I was quite angry with him at the time.
I sat and waited and listened as you do in a serious conversation where you make a well-justified complaint.
The only thing that came back: “And you think you’ve got a problem?”
– Michael Kelly SJ
Father Michael Kelly entered the Jesuits in 1971. After studies in philosophy, theology and social sciences, he worked as a journalist in Australia and Asia for various publications, religious and secular. He was ordained in 1984 and co-founded Albert Street Productions, a TV production company, in 1986. In 1989, he founded Jesuit Publications, publishers of Eureka Street, Australian Catholics and Madonna magazines. He is now the executive director of ucanews.com – Asia’s Catholic news source.
Originally published in The Hoopla.
Used with the permission.