Rejected By David Letterman, Accepted By Christ: The John Branyan Interview
On The Babylon Bee Interview Show, Ethan and Dan talk to stand-up comedian, John Branyan. They talk comedy, frogs, and bad Atheist memes. John Branyan has been doing stand-up comedy for the last 25 years. His 'Shakespeare' version of The Three Little Pigs has been viewed more than a million times on YouTube. He has written his second book titled, Life is Hardy-Har-Hard: How to Use Comedy to Make Your Life Better in which he discusses why we need to laugh more at ourselves when we fall down, especially if a banana peel is involved. Be sure to check out The Babylon Bee YouTube Channel for more podcasts, podcast shorts, animation, and more. To watch or listen to the full podcast, become a subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans Topics Discussed Ethan's on drugs and Dan's replaced Kyle Indiana Being rejected by David Letterman Comedy as a weapon and a shield Why falling down is good Frogs Story time with Ethan The most important topic Why we need to bring humor into Christianity Comedy as a shield Banana peels Chasing your own hat Subscriber Portion Profanity Paul's choice of words Bad atheist memes 10 questions Another great Carman story
I just have to say that I object strenuously to your use of the word hilarious.
Hard-hitting questions.
What do you think about feminism?
Do you like it?
Taking you to the cutting edge of truth.
Yeah, well, Last Jedi is one of the worst movies ever made, and it was very clear that Brian Johnson doesn't like Star Wars.
Kyle pulls no punches.
I want to ask how you're able to sleep at night.
Ethan brings bone-shattering common sense from the top rope.
If I may, how double dare you?
This is the Babylon B interview show.
You know what my favorite book is?
Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan.
And that's who we brought in today.
John Bunyan?
Oh, crap.
It's John Branion.
Branion.
And he wrote the book almost as iconic, Life is Hardy Harhard.
It's more of a bathroom reader than Pilgrim's Progress is.
Ew.
Well.
So a peculiar instance.
So we're recording this intro in the future from back when we recorded this interview.
And on the day that this interview happened, John actually traveled quite a distance to get here to be on the show.
He was excited to be on.
And on the day, Kyle's car broke down in Palm Springs or something.
Yes.
Which is not that far away.
could have gotten uber if we're gonna be honest i tried and it was gonna be you know how much it was gonna be and And I had $900.
Company expense.
$900.
Really?
$900?
That was a $900.
Cow.
Wow.
Train.
That was my first plan.
But I had a fresh blood clot in my leg.
It was like at the peak of its pain.
So I was like, I was in severe pain during this interview.
That's why I was sitting on the other side of the table.
And so Dan filled in.
So Dan's here.
And in this interview, he's there now.
In the interview, he was here.
So we talked about joking and satire and comedy as a weapon.
Should I pretend to be Dan?
Yeah, do your Dan voice.
Yeah.
Solia Deagloria.
Man.
He's not amused at all.
So without further ado, here's me and Dan.
Oh, yeah.
And you can look up John Branion on johnbranion.com and his book, Life is Hardy Harhard.
And you can see the interview now.
Does anyone have a Guinness that I can have?
Did I do good?
Did I do a good job?
Oh, hello there.
Wait a minute.
What's going on?
Ethan's sitting in Kyle's seat.
This is weird.
This is weird.
This is the weirdest episode of the Babylon B interview show ever.
Because Kyle's car broke down.
So he's down here.
So I'm not Kyle, for those of you who have already noticed.
Oh, yeah, you're not me.
And I'm not you.
And I'm in your chair.
You're in my chair.
I've never sat around here.
Kyle's chair.
This is all backwards.
And then this is John Branion.
John Branion's comedian.
He's also not Kyle or Ethan.
Right.
And I'm sitting over here because my leg is propped up because I have a blood clot in my leg that is like painful.
And so I'm on all these drugs, right?
Or this pain drugs.
And so if I just kind of zone out in the middle of the interview, it's not you, John.
It's me.
Well, it's also not the first time that people have zoned out interviewing me.
I'm completely used to that.
If you fall asleep, I can still handle it.
Perfect.
We're off to a good start.
This is good.
I like this.
So John Branion, comedian.
You're from.
I'm from Indiana.
Indiana.
The mecca of comedy.
Indiana.
Yeah.
People always ask, you know, Indiana?
I don't know anyway, Indiana.
Right.
It's like Canada.
We don't know anything about Canada and we don't know anything about Indiana.
What's in Indiana?
I don't even know.
There you go.
That's right.
That's all I'm not trying to do.
Is there like a raced car there or something?
There are many race cars there in Michigan.
You do a thing called the Indianapolis 500.
Is that the same thing?
It's not important.
It doesn't happen in California.
As non-Indianapolis Indiana guy, I think, wait, Indianapolis, that might be a whole different place.
I don't want to.
I'm actually impressed.
You knew a sports thing.
That's pretty good.
I just want to take up second recognize that.
And he did it under the influence of heavy narcotics.
That's right.
Pretty good.
So we wanted to get connected with you, John, because it seems like we have a lot of things in common.
We do have many things in common.
And I actually was, I actually forced you guys to have me come out here.
You forced our hand.
I did.
I kind of made a jerk of myself to get out.
The reason I'm sitting in this chair is because I would not take no.
I admired his persistence.
And you guys actually got off easier than other people have gotten off because I know exactly how to be a royal pain.
I know how to be unignorable.
Squeaky wheel?
Squeaky wheel gets the grease.
A few years ago, I decided that I wanted to be on a Letterman Show.
Oh, wow.
You pulled that off?
I did not.
An attempt was made.
It was harder to wear him down than it was you.
But here's what I did.
I got a bunch of postcards printed up that were the top 10 list of reasons why I should be on the Letterman show.
That was the thing that he did.
And so I don't remember all 10 of them, but the number one reason was because I, and then there was a place where people could write their name in, think he would be a great guest.
And then I distributed those postcards at my shows.
And there were thousands of them.
I distributed thousands of postcards.
And I said to people, I want you to take one for yourself and some for friends and whatever and just hand these out at church and have people sign them and put a stamp on them and mail them in.
And so on this date.
And so they did.
And I got a call from the producer of the David Letterman Show, and I was not expecting that.
I picked up the phone.
It's like, hey, this is Zoe, producer of the David Letterman Show.
Are you the guy sending us all these postcards?
And I said, yeah, I probably am if you're getting a lot of them.
And she said, well, you need to stop because it's not going to work.
And I said, oh, contraire, Zoe.
You're talking to me on the phone, are you not?
And she said, you need to not send us any more postcards.
And I said, well, this is bigger than you and me at this point.
I have no idea.
I can't just shut it off.
And so long story short, I got a rejection letter from David Letterman's show, and it's framed in my office.
It's a badge of honor.
You're a fan of rejection.
We noticed on the back of your book titled Life is Hardy Har Hard that you have some real one-star reviews on your book.
Those are copies I garnered.
Yep, those are actual reviews that are on Amazon from people who haven't read that book.
They haven't read it.
They just from a different book ears?
Well, they just, no, from a different thing that I did.
They just loathe me.
But that book is not the reason that they loathe me.
Did I read some?
So you've got just haters that follow you around.
And whenever you put out something new, it's like, oh, I got to put a one-star on this.
I have amassed haters from much the same way that you guys have.
That's why I wanted to come and talk to you guys.
We have things in common.
Because I'm a piker compared to the number of haters that you guys have.
What's a piker?
We're going to have to bleed.
He's a guy from Indiana.
Is that a bad word?
We're going to have to bleat that out.
Guy who lives in Indianapolis.
Awful author.
Could probably get better advice from a second grader, terrible comedian.
Wow.
Unfortunately, I can't give a negative star rating.
I would if I could.
That's brutal.
It is unfortunate.
Yeah, this one's rough.
The only thing funny here is the author's sad, pathetic life.
Oh, Jesus.
So that's something I didn't know about you when we booked you.
We didn't know that you had this much hate surrounding you.
That's a big sell for us.
Well, I should have led with that, shouldn't I?
I should have started with that rather than the comedy angle, I should have said.
I have a lot of people that hate my guts.
So what are you saying out there that's causing that kind of a reaction?
I'm curious.
I say, like you guys do, I say true things.
And if you say true things in a manner that is entertaining and particularly satirical, you'll get in trouble faster than if you say true things and nobody's paying attention because the thing about comedy is that it makes people pay attention to you.
When you're funny, people will listen to what you have to say.
And when they listen to what you have to say, the people who don't want you to say that get angry because they themselves are not funny.
And so people aren't listening to them.
And so in order to get people to listen to them, they have to go to your website and write one-star reviews about your book.
That's all they can do.
Yeah, if you can't, because yeah, that is the thing.
Humor gets people to pay attention.
It has strength to it when it makes you laugh.
It's disarming.
There's power behind it.
And if you can't compete with that funny-wise, then it's more, it does seem like you have to either go the route of outrage.
You have to do something.
You have to get people worked up in another way, right?
Right.
That's the most popular response is outrageous.
Yeah, humor seems to be disarming because it's just you have to respond in kind.
You can't, if you just react to it, then you've already lost, right?
Well, it's also an involuntary response if you laugh.
That's what makes comedy so great.
You go to like a speech or like a, you know, whatever those things are that professors give because my brain is shut down right now.
I can't talk.
A lecture.
You can act like you really got something from it.
But like, you know, you can kind of fake laugh, but like there's an involuntary response that like, you know, the crowd doesn't lie.
Like if you're funny, you get the response.
So.
Well, and but that point that you just made, even though your drug-addled brain doesn't know it, is very profound and important because it is a response that we have to humor that is not, you can't help it.
When something is funny, then something is funny.
And that was actually one of the impetuses for writing this book is the idea that comedy, I used to get the question, I still get the question after shows.
People go, how do you think of that material?
How do you think of that material?
And my response used to be, oh no, I don't know how to do it.
And a few years ago, I started thinking, you know, I really should have a better answer than that.
I should have some idea how I do this.
Yeah.
Psychedelics.
And so I started thinking about, well, how do you write material?
And that was where the book came from.
And the first thing that occurred to me is that comedy is not actually created by human beings.
Comedy is created by God, and it's sprinkled throughout the universe.
And all we do is discover it.
All creativity is created by God.
We discover it.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
And so, but, but that has implications, for me at least, and for you guys, I hope, that it sort of takes the pressure off.
It takes all the pressure off, really.
Because when you laugh at something, that's not your fault that you find something funny.
It's actually God's fault.
Every offensive thing that the Babylon Bee has ever published belongs at the feet of God.
And if you guys...
Is the devil playing any jokes?
No. No.
No, because evil doesn't know how to be funny.
Humor is, it all belongs to God.
And humor is the way that we get through suffering.
Because God knew that there was going to be all kinds of suffering and hardship in life.
And he had to give us some way to respond to that evil.
And it's comedy.
And the people who are wicked, they try to do comedy, but it does not have the same effect because they don't have they I read an article that was published by and I should have written it down, but I didn't.
I didn't come prepared with that.
But this guy was basically saying that comedy, he said the same thing that I'm saying.
He said comedy is a weapon, but he went on to say, because he's not a Christian person, he went on to say, but you can use that weapon to harm other people.
You can use it to hurt people who don't deserve to be hurt.
And he's incorrect about that, because the same humor, a robust sense of humor, not only can be used to expose truth as a weapon, but it also is a shield.
It's a suit of armor.
And when you understand how comedy works, you don't get your feelings hurt.
You're not.
People who have a robust sense of humor have never been offended by anything you guys have written.
Because that's what humor does.
It enables you to hear things that would offend mere mortals, but because you have put on this comedy cloak, it doesn't hurt your feelings.
I don't get offended anymore.
It does seem to put up a barrier between if you're just spouting your mouth off and saying things.
Comedy, that's one thing I like about making satire articles is like, we're generally not aiming our joke, even if we're bringing up an actual person, we're usually aiming our joke at a satirical version of them.
It's not them personally.
But even we're making a joke about an idea most of the time.
And so it is different.
It's different than if you just called a person out and said something.
And there's just always that safety of, well, it's a joke.
Right.
Calm down.
It's a joke.
Right.
But the reason, what separates a good joke from a not good joke is the truth.
And so if you say a thing that's true and it's funny, then all bets are off.
It's funny.
And if you're offended by that, well, you're going to have to do better than just being offended by the truth.
And we have a culture in church that sadly doesn't understand that when people are offended at you guys or at me for saying something that was a joke, that's actually their problem and not our problem.
Because we don't get to decide what's funny, and we also don't get to decide what's true.
The truth is also out there.
And it's either, once it's discovered, there's nothing you can do about it.
And it doesn't do any good to be mad at it.
It's like being angry because water is wet.
It's like, okay, well, that's, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry that, but that's, that's just the reality of it.
Yeah, cultural Christianity has set itself up to not be able to be very funny because like to be funny, you have to say the thing everybody's thinking but doesn't want to actually say out loud.
And the moment you say that thing, everybody's thinking it, you say it, that's what causes this relief, this laughter.
Right.
I remember talking to an atheist guy about like, what is the explanation of laughter to atheists or to people that believe in pure evolution?
He said, the closest thing we'll figure out is like if a monkey, you know, is walking around out in the woods or whatever.
Oh, no, the bunch of monkeys hanging out, cavemen or whatever, and they're sitting there.
That was Mr. McFeely dropping off her mail.
Okay.
Oh, the mail guy.
Yeah.
We named Cousin W.D. Ford.
So louder mailing.
It's like, this house is from the 20s.
So there's the caveman sitting around, and all of a sudden they hear rustling in the bushes and they think it's like a wolf or something.
And all of a sudden, their buddy Thag comes walking out like, oh, it's just Thag.
So it's like a relief that I thought I was going to get killed, but I'm alive now.
But I think that there is a connection to that.
Like when you make a joke that like you said something that I thought I was going to get killed for saying, but oh, everybody agrees and we're not, we can laugh about it.
Like it creates that relief.
So now the drugs are kicking in.
I don't know where I was going with that.
Well, they're relief because you're the one that's going to get killed now and not them.
It's the, well, yeah, it's the relief that like he said it.
I didn't say it, you know, but I get to laugh.
And also, and so in church, we very much, cultural Christianity, we like to put all these soft boundaries up, all this, you know, cuddly pillows everywhere, bunny pillows and stuff to make it feel like we're all being very nice.
Nice is a little too much of a value, I think.
True is better than nice.
Kind is good, but it's so I think that we put up so many boundaries that you're only left with jokes like puns and like things that are like, oh, you know, how did Noah fed all those animals in the ark?
He must have had to, who knows?
I was trying to come up with one on the spot.
Probably had to shrink them or something.
He'll still wait for the joke.
Where's the joke?
He had to use a bunch of butter.
Butter.
I don't know.
Butter those hippos.
Get them on the ark.
Well, no, that's exactly right.
If we have this idea that you can be funny, cultural Christians think that you can be funny without a barb somewhere, without some edge, and you can't.
There's no humor unless there's conflict somewhere.
Specifically, there's no humor unless there's pain.
And the pain can come in many different forms.
It's not always life or death, but it has to be something that's awkward or uncomfortable or somebody has to get hurt in comedy.
Somebody has to be injured.
And I was watching a video a few years ago on YouTube, and it was just a guy sitting out in front of the school, I guess, waiting to pick up one of his kids.
And it was icy, and he's filming out the side window of his car as these kids are coming down the sidewalk off of the bus.
And there's a patch of ice on the sidewalk, and they're just falling, you know, and they're throwing books and lunch boxes.
And it's just one kid after another coming down.
And he's kind of narrow.
Oh, here comes another one.
Oh, there she goes.
And then down they go and their legs fly up in the air.
And the comments underneath this video, it was like 10 minutes long.
I mean, there must have been 300 kids that fell down in front of this guy.
And the comments underneath were from people going, why doesn't he warn them?
Why doesn't he tell them there's a patch of ice there?
It's like, because if he told them that there was ice there, they would stop falling down.
That's a person who doesn't understand anything about how comedy works.
So somebody has to fall down.
Someone got to fall down.
And what I am encouraging people to think about in the book is being the one that falls down because we're all going to fall down at some point.
And if when you fall down, it completely undoes your life and it ruins every aspect of your existence.
Well, then you're not really well suited to live on this planet.
At some point, every single one of us is going to fall down.
And when you change your perspective to more of a comedy perspective, then when you fall down, you get to kind of rub your hands together and go, this is going to be a fantastic story.
I am so glad that this happened because now I can tell my sister, I can tell the people at church, I can tell whoever about this boneheaded thing that I did.
And then they will do what?
Well, then they will laugh and they will laugh at you.
People talk about, oh, it's okay to laugh with somebody.
There's no such thing as laughing with somebody.
There's only laughing at people.
Let's just say that because that's what it is.
We're laughing at people.
We're not laughing with you.
I was having a conversation with a guy just this week who's been reading my book.
And he's exactly the guy that I would hope would read this book because he's a Christian person and he's a very nice guy.
He's a very gentle, nice guy.
But he was telling me that when he was at work, he had a guy who worked with him who was a funny guy.
He goes, he was a really funny guy, but he would say things and he would cross a line.
He'd cross a line and it would really hurt.
He would say really hurtful things.
And so I'm reading your book and I got to ask you, there's a line, right?
There's a line where people shouldn't cross that line.
And I said, you're talking about that person crossing a line?
I said, no, there's no line.
If you're expecting a bully to suddenly have a streak of conscience and he's going to go, oh, I probably crossed a line there.
I shouldn't have said that because that really hurt that guy's feelings.
If you're expecting that guy to figure out where the line is, well, he has all the power.
He has all the power.
You're at his mercy.
What if he never draws a line?
What if he just keeps getting harder and harder and harder and harder?
What are you going to do?
See, the wise thing to do is to develop a sense of humor so that you can push back.
You can give as good as you get.
And that's where Christians start to kind of get a little uncomfortable because they, well, is that what Jesus would do?
And I think the answer is yes.
You know, Jesus had so many things that he said that don't translate well.
You know, first century comedy doesn't translate well to 20, 21.
But He would say things like, it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to go into heaven.
And my granddaughter was reading just yesterday about the rich man coming to Jesus and Jesus saying, well, you need to sell all, give all your money to the poor people and come and follow me.
And Cammy said to her mother, she goes, well, why would Jesus tell people, tell the rich man to give his money to the poor people so then they would have a harder time getting into heaven?
Yeah.
I think Jesus definitely had a sense of humor because, you know, his parables that he was teaching the people with, and it was like, hey, don't tell somebody with a speck in their eye when you're, you know, hey, you got a speck in your eye because you're walking around with a huge plank.
Right.
I mean, he's like his use of that.
It's a great slapstick.
Yeah.
It's just well, and that's comedy.
Comedy is just grossly exaggerated contrast, and he just put his finger right on it.
And again, it doesn't, the best way to destroy comedy is to analyze comedy and to talk about it, which is counterintuitive.
A lot of people think, oh, it'd be interesting to hear these guys talk about comedy because it's like dissecting a frog.
You know, you get to start dissecting a frog, you can learn a lot about it.
But the thing about dissecting a frog is you don't end up, what you end up with is a bunch of things that don't look anything like a frog.
And this is the same thing happens when you take a joke and you start slicing it apart.
You end up with a table full of stuff that's not funny.
When I dissected a frog in eighth grade, the knife slipped and hit it in the eye and all the eye juice shot directly in my mouth.
And I had to just gargle.
I just put my head in the center.
I was trying to do it, find the brain for extra credit.
That's my story.
No, story time with Ethan Nicole.
Did you?
No, we're going to.
Did you find the brain?
I think I did.
You're supposed to very slowly scrape away until you find this little patch of brain, you know?
And that was the thing I was slowly scraping away as over lunch break for extra credit, find the brain.
You should have gotten extra credit for tasting the IQ eye juice.
For science.
Yeah.
That's way more interesting.
You are the only person that knows what that tastes like now.
What does it taste like?
I mean, you know, whatever that juice is.
Chicken aldehyde or something.
Oh, gross.
Frog water.
Frog water.
So you kind of talk about using comedy as a weapon in the culture.
So what are things in the culture that you see as needing to be pushed back on or to have a sword with?
There's a lot of things in the culture that we do at the Babylon Bee, of course.
I'm just wondering if you're seeing the same things or.
Yeah, well, most of the cultural things that you guys put your finger on, one of the things that makes the B so great is that you know exactly what culture is talking about.
And so those are the things that you talk about.
I think over that, you know, we can talk about the categories of things that we need to talk about.
But I think the overall thing, the culture is missing.
And by extension, the church is also missing because the culture has seeped into our church and given us the idea that there is a, for lack of a better terms, a separation of church and state.
And the culture has done a great job of convincing Christians that we're supposed to shut up about politics and culture because separation church and state.
Separation church and state.
So you can have your religion, but you've got to keep it to yourself.
And that is absolutely wrong.
The reason that separates church and state exists is to keep the culture from damaging the church.
It's not to keep church from speaking to culture because the truth is that every important thing that mankind talks about is religious.
Politics is secondary.
The most important things that people talk about, the things people really care about, are religious ideas.
They're not political ideas.
They're certainly not mathematical or chemical or physics-based.
They're not science-based.
It has to do with religion.
And so everybody is religious.
And the church, the Western church, cultural Christian church, has swallowed the idea that we need to keep our mouths shut because this is a religious thing.
And my religious convictions have no place in the public forum because religion is personal.
Religion is something that we should sit down over coffee and one-on-one we can have a conversation about that.
And that's the correct way to do it.
But I shouldn't go on social media and I certainly shouldn't publish a magazine where I express my religious views to the culture because that's not, you know, that's not appropriate.
That turns people off.
You're pushing people away from Jesus when you jam your religion down their throat.
And I think that as a comedian, that's how I made a living for 30 years, was I jammed my religion down people's throats.
Right?
Everything that I talked about, you know, my relationships and my job, everything, every aspect of my life is underpinned by my faith.
And I didn't say that when I was standing on stage at the comedy club, but I knew that.
And so the reason that people allowed me to jam my religion down their throat, in fact, they paid me money to jam my religion down their throat, was because I was funny.
And so that's the gospel that I'm trying to preach to the church now is you guys have got to be funny if you're seriously trying to share your faith with people.
And if you're not willing to share your faith with people, if you don't want to jam your religion down their throat, then your religion must suck, right?
I mean, if my idea isn't good enough that I think you should have it, then my idea is not that good.
Why should you have it?
Why should I have it?
Yeah.
Yeah, you must ultimately not think it matters.
That's the thing that I don't know.
Yeah, people that think that, oh, I just keep my faith here and I don't want to impose on anybody, then like, you must not think it is actually consequential to reality then, right?
Right.
That's the thing is like all the big conversations that are being had about equality and racism and all that stuff, like the real base question there is what is a human being and what is our meaning?
And they're all, like you said, they're religious questions.
And we think we can just gloss past that and talk about justice somehow.
So what is justice for a bunch of morphing animal creature things that are just like at this particular state of evolution, but who knows what we're going to be at some point at least some kind of rhinoceros octopus things at some point.
God knows.
Right now we're just some horrific thing.
We don't know we're horrific creatures that look like some kind of amoeba that came out of the slime and like, you know, we think we're humans, but so yeah, justice among some kind of meat-bone things that walk around.
Just the idea that like there's some idea that justice can exist there.
We take it for granted because we have that basis of, I guess we just, we have the basis of a Judeo-Christian society that we live in.
But it's all taken for granted.
Right.
Yeah, there's that worldview where it's like we all came from nothing.
We're all just evolving states of matter.
Right.
And then someday the sun will burn out and the earth will be dead and nothing mattered.
And you're like, but human rights are very important.
Human rights.
Right.
By human, I mean this stage of past monkey.
Not monkey, but whatever this is.
Right.
Don't be on the wrong side of history.
Which is everything dying eventually.
Which is everything.
Yeah.
Everything that history is is going to be the wrong side of history.
Right.
And so it, but yeah, that's exactly it.
And that is hilarious.
I mean, that is, that's funny that we've got these people who don't believe in God.
And they say Christianity is immoral.
Christianity is oppressive and immoral.
But at the same time, justice does matter.
And immediately you guys see the problem with that.
And that's the reason that what you do is important.
And you can tell when the message has been received when people get mad at you.
So every piece of hate mail that you get, every angry letter from Christians or non-Christians is them saying to you, I understand what you've said.
Because if you don't get any if you don't get any hate for your comedy, then your comedy is vanilla and it's unremarkable.
And so I have for years looked at criticism as validation that people are paying attention to what I'm saying.
Because when they understand what I'm saying, yeah, it is offensive.
I'm suggesting that there is a God and that you're not as good a person as you think you are.
You know, the idea that we can met out justice, that we have any idea how to be fair and equitable to human beings is ludicrous.
It's insane.
But when you say that, you ruffle a whole lot of feathers of self-righteous people who think that they know what's good for mankind.
And like you said, Dan, underneath that is the assumption that there is a God.
There's a Judeo-Christian ethic that bolsters everything in Western culture.
America exists because of Judeo-Christian ethics.
And we just ignore all of that now and want to start with justice and goodness and tolerance and inclusiveness.
And none of those things make any sense outside of a religious framework.
I'm sure that'll end up well.
That'll go well for us.
As time goes on, we'll see the wisdom of just forgetting all that stuff and moving on.
I kind of want to talk a little bit more.
You mentioned it at the beginning.
So that's comedy as a weapon, but you're also saying it's also a shield.
And your book is Life is Hardy, Harhard.
I'm wondering how you see that shield and how that looks in your individual life or how that can be applied to my life.
Because I agree, life is hard.
And I'm wondering what your views are on that.
How does comedy help us through life?
When you have the attitude, and not just give lip service to it, I'm talking about genuinely internalizing the idea that conflict is a good thing because it's going to result in a good story.
That's what people want to hear about.
If you go to YouTube, for example, and you look at the number of hits that a fail video has, you know, those fail compilations where people wipe out on their bikes and overshoot the swimming pool and they jump off the roof and all of that sort of stuff.
Those have millions of views versus the views that people have at a commencement, for example, when they're receiving a diploma.
Nobody cares about success.
Everybody wants to hear about your epic failures.
But there's something to that.
There is a message that Being shouted basically by the culture.
And the church is still not hearing it.
We don't care about seeing you get a trophy.
We don't want you to put your best foot forward.
I've got a beloved member of my own family who's like, I just want to put my best foot forward.
I want people to see me at my best.
Is that wrong, John?
For people to just see me at my best?
And it's like, they don't want to see you at your best.
They want to see you fall down the stairs.
Because that's what's funny, right?
And it's not that people want to see you get hurt.
That's not, it's not, but we don't have control over what's funny.
Somebody falling down the stairs is funny.
If you're going to watch a video of somebody getting a trophy or you're going to watch a video of somebody getting hit in the crotch with a football, there's no question which one of those you're going to watch.
Well, I think we see ourselves in the guy falling down the stairs.
We all know we're clumsy.
Yeah.
I do think, yeah, because you'll get that criticism.
I've heard Christians say, this is malice, laughing at somebody falling down.
Yeah, there's a real question there.
I don't know.
I don't think that I don't take pleasure in the guy's pain.
No.
It's the, it is.
It's that like it resonates.
It resonates with reality.
We're all trying to do one thing, then suddenly a banana peel messes it all up.
Right.
That's exactly right.
That is exactly right.
And we don't have to apologize for that because, again, comedy, we didn't create it.
We didn't make it funny when people fall down.
God decided to do that.
And so what are we going to say?
Is God unrighteous?
Is he wicked and evil and mean?
No, we must be interpreting it incorrectly.
If it's funny when people fall down, well, God is good.
And so there's a goodness when you fall down.
And sometimes you get hurt and sometimes you bleed.
And yes.
Now, what if you put out the banana peels?
What if you put out the banana peels?
There's some moral questions there.
Yeah.
Well, even if you put out the banana peel, it's still funny when people fall down.
It's true.
And so, and that's where that gets back to your question.
How is it a shield?
Well, if I know that Ethan is the guy sprinkling banana peels around and I'm the one who falls down, well, is it funny?
Do I think it's funny when somebody else falls on a banana peel?
Yes.
Do I think it's funny when I fall on a banana peel?
No.
Okay.
So what's the problem with that?
Well, the problem is I'm a hypocrite.
The problem is I will acknowledge that it's hilarious as long as I'm not the one that's suffering.
And so comedy becomes a shield when you realize, oh, if I'm the one that's suffering, it's still funny.
Just because I'm in pain now and I can't necessarily respond appropriately, this is going to be a great story later.
This is basically G.K. Chesterton's On Chasing Your Own Hat essay.
So play the G.K. Chesterton thing.
G.K. Chesterton.
Have you read that essay?
No.
So he makes the argument that you're this proper British gentleman and then your hat falls off and suddenly you're chasing it around the park.
You should be excited about the kind of the comedy and laughter and joy you're bringing the world rather than getting all upset.
And the whole, it's a short essay, but I think we read it on a subscriber portion.
We did.
Yeah, we did.
We read it.
It's one of our favorites.
But yeah, highly recommended.
It's a Chesterton thing about finding the comedy and even when you're a part of it.
It talks about the guy who's like, his drawer is jammed.
He can't unjam it.
Just imagine there's some terrible dragon is holding it or something.
You're trying to, your life becomes an adventure thing.
You're trying to rip the sword of Scalbrow Star, and he makes it super epic.
My socks.
It kind of became like a running gag around here.
Like if someone's stressed out or having a bad day, it's like, oh, you're chasing your hat.
That's great.
It kind of seems like, yeah, that shield against despair.
It's like you're trying to remind yourself that there's a truth or there's an objective arc to your life, that stubbing my toe isn't the end of the universe.
That later on, when we get to the end of the story, we'll look back and it'll be funny.
Right.
Right.
Whereas if you're like in a secular perspective, you don't really have that.
It's just like right here, right now, this sucks.
Right.
And it can't be funny.
Right.
Well, and they're wrong about that for the same reason that they're wrong about justice, too.
I mean, from a secular perspective, how do you determine what sucks and what doesn't?
How do you say what's funny and what's not?
You can't make any declarative statements of any value without some sort of religious underpinning.
You can't say it's not funny when I fall down the stairs if you're a secularist.
Because on what basis are you saying this isn't funny?
What is your standard of funny that you're appealing to?
And that's when you have outrage because they can't answer that question and it infuriates them.
And so they will blame you for causing them even more pain.
And that's why it's important for people who deem to be funny, for Christian people who say, I'm going to use humor to proclaim truth, to have all of this hat chasing kind of under their belt so that when the people who don't understand what comedy is for and how it works come at you and they do come at you, I'm not telling you anything that you don't know.
It's difficult.
It's relentless.
I mean, I've gotten it, but you guys are in the spotlight.
I've never had the New York Times write about me.
Oh, man, that's so crazy.
Do you see the latest that they kind of retracted their slight retraction?
Yeah, they're a misinformation site disguised as satire.
And then the guy tags Seth and Adam on Twitter and he's like, hey, I rewrote it.
And it's like, it still says the same thing.
It's like, it's not a retraction at all.
It's just exactly the same, but he slightly reworded a few things.
So we're still right-wing misinformation.
Right.
Yeah.
But now it says disputed with Snopes and Facebook.
There's a little note on there.
I think that legitimizes their argument.
Yeah.
Right.
Well, but that is like a wave crashing against a rock.
And eventually it does have some erosive power and it starts to sting after a while.
And you get the thing about criticism is that it always seems larger than it is.
The New York Times writes about you and that has the possibility of creating in your mind this idea.
It's like, man, the whole world's against us.
Why are we doing this?
But it's legitimate even if you're the only one that's standing on this truth.
One of the things I talk about in the book is that your sense of humor is like your other five senses.
God gives you a sense of sight to see lights and colors and he gives you a sense of hearing, he gives you a sense of taste, and he gives you a sense of humor for detecting comedy.
That's what it's for.
And so when you detect comedy, that is legitimate.
And I've heard people say many times, oh, that's not funny, or this is not funny.
And you're just wrong.
If a single person on the planet thinks it's funny, then their sense of humor is telling them that.
And my sense of humor, everything that I do on stage is what I think is funny.
Everything that I write is what I think is funny because I don't know what you guys are going to think is funny.
That's up to your sense of humor to determine that.
I can't possibly write something that Dan is going to think is funny.
I just have to write what I think is funny and then let the chips fall where they may.
And some people get uncomfortable with that when they have a large group of people that disagree with what their sense of humor is telling them.
But it doesn't make it illegitimate.
It's still legit.
They're just wrong.
They're just wrong.
Have you ever had like a big epic bomb?
Like you go up on stage and just crickets, nothing happened.
Not a epic bomb.
My career is built on epic bombs.
Yeah, I talked about it.
And then you got off stage and you're like, man, they're all wrong.
They're all broken.
Later on.
No, early on, early on, they were not wrong.
Early on, they were not wrong.
Because humor has rules.
There's laws of laughter, just like there's laws of physics and laws of chemistry.
And you can't break those laws.
You have to work within the confines.
God created it.
And so there's ways that it has to work.
And if you break those rules, then it doesn't work.
You don't have comedy.
But experience teaches you what those rules are.
And then gradually, hopefully, you learn kind of, you get better.
You get better at predicting what's going to work versus what's not.
Sometimes it's not 100%, but it's a higher percentile than it was when I first started.
I can kind of look at material and go, okay, this will work.
This won't work in this present form.
It's going to have to be adjusted.
But it's all at some point, just throwing it out there and seeing what the audience says.
Yeah, that's the unfortunate thing about this day and age with stand-up comics is like most of the shows that stand-up comics do are supposed to be preparing and figuring out what material works for their big special or whatever.
So like they're testing out stuff at their smaller shows, you know, but now everybody's recording with their phone and these videos are going up online.
Because I've learned, I learned, just I just did one open mic night and I realized like this is there's a there's a part to stand-up comedy that can only be figured out and worked out in front of a crowd, a huge part of it.
So you have to be, that's why comedy always takes some level of bravery unless you're doing really cowardly comedy.
But because you do have to throw a joke out there, you have no idea what the response will be and find out what it is.
Right.
Right.
Well, and comedy, comedians specifically have already said, I'm going to be funny.
I'm going to stand behind this microphone and I'm going to make you laugh.
People who I've never met, room full of strangers who doesn't know me, I'm going to make you laugh within 30 seconds of taking the stage.
It is a preposterously arrogant thing to do, to get up behind a microphone and suggest that I'm going to make you laugh when you don't know me.
And that's the expectation.
Speakers have it much easier because if a speaker's funny, it's like, oh, we weren't expecting that.
Yeah, this guy's funny.
And then if you try to be funny and it's not funny, you can just pretend like you weren't trying to be funny.
Comedians can't do that because I've already told you I'm going to be funny.
And so if I'm not, they don't know.
They don't really have just stand-up speaking, do they?
Or like someone's just called speaking.
Hannah Gatsby.
Hannah Gansby.
Yeah.
Well, when you talk about being part of the comedy, I'm reminded of this story from when I was working at a gas station, graveyard shift.
I had somehow developed horrendous hemorrhoids.
And it was in Oregon, so it was raining like crazy.
I had sold my car, even though I still owed a bunch of money on it.
So I was paying off a car I didn't own, and I had to walk home with horrendous hemorrhoids in the pouring rain.
And somewhere along that walk, where I was doing this weird, bow-legged, like woody walk, you know, like Woody from Toy Story, and like grimacing and clenching in the rain, somewhere along that, I realized that there's something really funny about this, and I started laughing.
So I think I'm tapped in.
I'm tapped into that.
That's awesome.
Yep.
So we're going to go to the subscriber portion and put on our smoking jackets.
Yep.
Subscriber lounge for subscribers only.
We're going to talk more with John.
I kind of want to get more into humor in the Bible.
Okay.
Because that seems to tie into that comedy as a weapon thing.
Maybe talk about Elijah.
Do I get a jacket?
You do get a smoking jacket, man.
And I saw something on your blog about bad atheist memes.
I think that'd be kind of fun to go over.
Okay.
Anything you want to do, Ethan?
That sounds good.
Ethan's like, I just want to put my leg up and pass out.
Take some more pills or something.
Ethan's going to take a nap.
All right.
Thanks, guys.
Freeloaders.
We're kicking you out.
Goodbye.
Coming up next for Babylon B subscribers.
So I really like this Richard Dawkins meme.
We can throw it up on the screen.
I have a theory of profanity.
Let's get into profanity.
Carmen antics.
I don't personally have a practice, but my brother does.
Enjoying this hard-hitting interview.
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