Here’s the latest from the crossroads of faith, media & culture: 11/06/24

God doesn’t call the perfect, he perfects the called. Not that Donald Trump is perfect. None of us are but I do believe the crucible he has come through (including oppressive lawfare and two assassination attempts) have, with the grace of God, has honed him into a leader that can heal America – and we need healing.

From Election Day to the Apocalypse. One way to heal is through humor – even about the things that divide us. as I wrote in my New Year’s post putting forth 14 Personal and Cultural Principles for 2024 “Laughter is truly a very good medicine. It can literally add years to your life and can can bring people of diverse backgrounds together in a way that few things can. It’s the antidote for self-importance in ourselves, in the powerful and even in those who perceive themselves as perpetual victims. The ability to laugh at one’s self is freeing. A good joke can range from nonsensical to pointed but it should never cross the line into being cruel. Anything can be abused.” I think the Christian humor site The Babylon Bee is a good example of media that employs sometimes pointed humor to help us all get through this world without taking the things we fight about – or ourselves – too seriously.

In their new book, The Babylon Bee Guide to the Apocalypse: How to Survive All the Possible World-Ending Scenarios From Artificial Intelligence to Zombies due out next Tuesday (if the Apocalypse doesn’t arrive first) Babylon Bee Editor-in-Chief Kyle Mann and Managing Editor Joel Berry take on just about every doomsday scenario the so-called mainstream media would have us curling up into a fetal position about – including climate change, alien invasions, zombie attacks and, of course, the political resurgence of Donald Trump and his MAGA terrorists. As the latter threat becomes a bone-chilling reality, Kyle Mann speaks with me about the path forward.

JWK: First of all, I’d like to get your thoughts on the election.

Kyle Mann: That’s still pretty fresh, isn’t it? As comedians we’re always just looking for the most entertaining result. I think it delivered on that. I think it surprised everybody to some extent. I think we were expecting similar outcomes to the last time – or the last couple of elections, including the midterms. It felt like a slap on the wrist for Democrats in a lot of ways. They kept pushing their far-left agenda and they kind of felt they could do it with with impunity for a while. America kind of fought back and said “Hey, you have to correct back to the middle.” That is the beauty of our system. If one side is in power for a long time and is starting to just unilaterally push their ideas, the electorate can say “You know what? We’re rejecting those ideas.”

JWK: At some point did it seemed like it was even hard to lampoon them – considering the things they were coming up.

KM: Exactly. It was hard to hard to write comedy about the left sometimes. It was hard to satirize. It’s true. This administration was so far to the left it felt like they started to feel invincible. So, next time they run somebody – in four years – that person is gonna have to both run and govern much more to the center – which is a good thing for American politics.

JWK: Do you think humor plays a role in helping bring the politicians back to sanity?

KM: Absolutely. Humor is so important in a free society because humor mocks bad ideas, it makes ridiculous things look ridiculous and it snaps us all out of kind of a numbness where we start to get used to bad ideas. You know, you hear a lie often enough and you start to believe it. The comedian is the boy in the fable who points out that the emperor has no clothes. He says “Hey, everybody! Snap out of it! He’s naked!” That’s been the comedian’s role not just the past four years (but) all of American history.

JWK: I’m a conservative and I think you’re a conservative. Now that Trump has won, does that pose its own kind of challenge – when the powers-that-be are on your side?

KM: The Babylon Bee experienced some of its most significant growth under Trump. The reason for that is that we were willing to make fun of him but we did it in a way that was fun, played with his personality and was clearly done with a little bit of respect – whereas the left went completely the other direction with their late-night shows, satire sites, sketch shows and all that. They weren’t even really doing comedy. They were just lecturing you on why Trump is bad. That created a huge opportunity for us. We love making jokes about Trump. We’re excited to be able to do that for the next four years.

JWK: Beyond making fun of Trump, to a large degree many of the late-night comedians mocked his voters – and much of their audience. Do you think there will be an upheaval in the world of television comedy after this?

KM: I don’t think so because I think they’re so tone-deaf that they’re gonna keep doing what they’re doing. You already saw it on news shows last night. I think it was on MSNBC, Joy Reid was saying Kamala Harris ran a perfect campaign (and she did) everything right – and you’re like “Do you guys not have any introspection where you could say ‘Hey, maybe we did something wrong here.’? I don’t know that the comedy shows have that ability to look inside themselves and wonder what they’ve been doing wrong for the past eight years.

JWK: Now that we’ve gotten through the election, you’re looking ahead toward the Apocalypse with your new book. So, what do you think are some of the greatest threats society now faces as posed by The Babylon Bee Guide to the Apocalypse?

KM: Yeah, our book is a lot of fun because we talk about all the different possible apocalypses that we can face. The structure of the book is that we send one of our employees out into the multiverse to observe every apocalypse and come back and bring you all the great survival tips. It’s a fun way to play on the fears of all the different political and religious sides where everybody thinks the end of the world is coming – and they think they know how it’s coming and the end is always near. So, whether that’s liberals screaming about climate change or Republicans screaming about our the imminent communist takeover, we have hits for everybody in here.

JWK: So, it covers everybody. I know you don’t want to give away too much of the humor in the book but is there an example you can share?

KM: Yeah. Every chapter has things like how to prepare (and) ways to fight back. So, we have ways to fight back against climate change (and) things you can change in your life now to help fight climate change. Of course, it’s all pretty silly stuff. We have great graphics. You know, stick figure diagrams. That’s always the tone of these books, these silly corporate-style graphics of what to do and what not to do.

JWK: Is part of the role of humor to help us deal with our fears?

KM: Absolutely. Humor is a tool to fight back against fear and anxiety. If you can make fun of your fears they lose their power. That’s part of what this is. There are people on the left that are literally going to get counseling because of climate change anxiety.

JWK: There’s a private school in New York that is reportedly allowing students to take today off so they can cope with the emotional trauma of the election. The election is causing a lot of mental anxiety among a lot of people

KM: Yeah. You get the sense that they don’t have a sense of humor about it – obviously because they’re going to counseling or safe spaces or whatever…It’s so sad. Whether it’s on the left or the right or whatever political side, people that buy super hardcore into a political angle, political party or political platform, they’re going to see that political party as their salvation, as their god. Their spirits rise and fall with the success or failure that political party. When you see all these picture and videos that are gonna come out over the next few days of liberals crying, collapsing on the floor and freaking out – all the TikTok freakouts – it’s because that’s where their hope is. Their hope is in politics. They put all their hopes and all their chips on this one electoral outcome.

As Christians, we know that the sweep of history is so much greater than that and that our God is in control of history. So, we don’t have to worry. We don’t have to be anxious about each and every election result. If Trump had lost I wouldn’t be in a puddle of tears on the ground. I would shrug and say “Well, I guess I’m gonna be writing some jokes about Kamala Harris for the next four years.”

JWK: What you do is point out absurd premises whether they come from liberals or conservatives. Do you think the problem with late-night comics is that the goal seems to be more aimed at being hurtful to people they disagree with – or owning their opposition – rather than to really focus on what’s funny? As I think your mentioned before, a lot of these jokes aren’t even jokes.

KM: I’m going to say something controversial. The number-one goal of a comedian should be comedy. That’s true of any profession when you’re a Christian or when you’re a conservative. If you’re a Christian architect your goal should be to make a great building and not to make a building in the shape of a cross or something as your first goal. Now, there are churches that are shaped like crosses and cathedrals that shaped like crosses because that worldview comes out in your work. So, our comedy is going to be cross-shaped a lot of the time because that’s who we are – but our goal is to be funny, not to make a point. I think that is the problem with leftist comedy these days. It’s so focused on making a point that it completely loses all its power in being funny. Comedy is magic in so many ways. You have to respect it. Comedy doesn’t take kindly to being used as a cudgel. You ruin it in that case.

I’m sorry I’m going on a soapbox – but I think for too long conservatives have focused on comedy and the arts as a means to get their message across. Everybody can see right through that. The shift now is that liberals are now the ones doing that. Liberals are now the ones lecturing you and treating their comedy shows as a vessel to get you to believe the same things as them. So, liberal shows are the new cheesy Christian comedies or cheesy Christian movies.

JWK: I guess the irony is that if you just follow the funny you’re more likely to actually make a pretty good point whereas, if you’re trying to make a point, you don’t make it – and you’re not funny either.

KM: Exactly. If you approach it saying “I’m gonna tell a great joke!” well, guess what?, it’s gonna eventually make a point. You’re gonna get there. Just trust the process – but, if you try sooo hard to make a point, it’s not gonna be funny at all.

JWK: So, what’s next for you folks after this book. It seems to me that it would be a natural for somebody to develop an SNL-type show around you guys or something like that. Do you have any plans in that direction?

KM: We have explored a lot of different options when it comes to film and TV. It would be really exciting for us to finally do something in that space. We did just release our first movie, January 6: the Most Deadliest Day, which is available for our subscribers on BabylonBee.com. It’s been really cool to see so many people interacting with that.

KM: We’re gonna leverage that experience into what that might look like for Babylon Bee to do something like an SNL or a late-night show or whatever other fun, crazy ideas we can come up with.

JWK: Do you think the scope of Trump’s very decisive victory – it appears he’s got the popular vote – will open the door to conservatives, and not just conservative but people of general traditional values, reasserting themselves in Hollywood and the entertainment industry? They’ve been maybe cowed over the past few years – or several years. This might be a case where the culture is downstream from politics.

KM: We’ve already seen it. I mean you’ve already sensed so much boldness from people that were – quote, unquote – “closeted conservatives.” You have Zachary Levi who is coming out out after doing all these big Hollywood movies and shows. He’s now an out-and-out Trump supporter. So, you have a few people that are like leaking out in that way. You definitely get the sense that people are less afraid now to just be who they are and say what they believe.

It was stupid in the first place for us to be scared. We’re talking about normal beliefs. We’re talking about normal things that everybody believed for thousands of years and, all of a sudden, because of this push from the entertainment citadels and from Big Government top-down in the Biden Administration everybody all of a sudden were scared to say that they believed very common normal things – like 2+2=4. I think it’s been really cool to have this awakening in the last six months over the course of this election. I think we’ll start to see more of that.

John W. Kennedy is a writer, producer and media development consultant specializing in television and movie projects that uphold positive timeless values, including trust in God.