'No God But Funny' and 'Earth Angel' Are Preaching to the Choir

[rug]

It's challenging enough to write good comedy. It's nearly impossible to do so burdened with an agenda, even one as innocuous as featuring a "likeable atheist" as the protagonist.

by Sean Miller
1 October 2015

The Center for Inquiry, a nonprofit headquartered in Amherst, New York, recently announced the winners of its writing content, No God But Funny. Contest entrants were to “Contribute to the downfall of civilization by writing a sitcom and/or producing a webisode that features a likeable atheist.” In the teleplay category, the contest winners were the tandem of Rachel Lewis and Daniel Beecher for their sitcom pilot script, Thank God I’m Atheist.

The cash prize for the webisode category went to John Dardis for his webisode, Earth Angel, which “blew [the] judges away.” They won US$15,000 and US$25,000, respectively, with the “possibility” of future development.

I wrote in a previous column about the contest and why I was skeptical that it would yield real comedy. The source of my skepticism was essentially the same reason why Milan Kundera complained in her book, George Orwell, that Orwell’s novel 1984 would have been better off as a political pamphlet. Kundera found 1984 to be a heavy-handed lesson unconvincingly packaged as narrative exploration.

It’s challenging enough to write good comedy. It’s nearly impossible to do so burdened with an agenda, even one as innocuous as featuring a “likeable atheist” as protagonist. This isn’t because atheists aren’t likeable. Many surely are. It’s because comedy rarely succeeds when it tries to be what Kundera might call “authoritative”, which is to say, when it sacrifices vulnerability for the sake of pedantry.

http://www.popmatters.com/column/no-god-but-funny-and-earth-angel-are-preaching-to-the-choir/

[Bluenorthwest]

1. TV's currently most popular character is agnostic at least. Dr Sheldon Cooper.

Glee also featured a character who was atheist. There are several others. House, but likable is not the word to describe him at all. Still, an atheist and a very popular character. Jean Luc Picard of course equated religion with the supernatural and rejecting such things as a positive for a culture. People found him to be very appealing.

[rug]

2. I don't think Spock ever ought into kolinar either.

[MisterP]

3. CSICOP comedy? I do know they have summer camps and tried to create "skeptical anthropology"

and "skeptical linguistics" but the whole attempt at becoming a total institution seems to falter quickly:
mostly it's Tim Minchin screaming about how stoopid everyone else is, especially furrners

also they're going from "good without God" to "funny without God" which is a very bad contrast to set up ...

[rug]

4. The winning video is mildly amusing but I'm not sure that's what they had in mind.