Representative Laughter: Religion, Humor, and Representation

Between 1950 and 1976, single frame “gag” cartoons depicting clergy and congregations in humorous situations flourished in religious publications, but also in syndication in major metropolitan newspapers across the United States. Coinciding as they did with important issues in American religion, these images—their rise, their content, and their decline—have been overlooked by historians of Catholicism, Protestantism, and American religion generally, as well as scholars of popular culture, print media, and graphic arts. This paper analyzes over 13,000 images, putting them in historical and sociological perspective. It argues that, because these images reflect both what the artists understood about their own religious traditions and what the religious and secular publishers understood about presenting that image to the public, they reveal an unexplored perspective on the post-World War II integration of Catholics into American public culture, concurrent transformations in American Catholicism and Protestantism, and broader shifts in American religion.

While Muslim men – nearly all comedians – have ascended in the world of American pop culture representation, the many Muslim women comedians performing across the U.S. have not found the same success. Why is it Muslim men who primarily reap the benefits of the “Representation Matters” movement? The dearth of fully-realized Muslim women in pop media imagery of Islam emerges out of patriarchal dividends and discourses of consumption and control which hover over Muslim women’s bodies. In standup, this becomes an added precondition to the material Muslim women comics write and make light of, a limitation on the “secular range of motion” available otherwise to Muslim comedians who are men. Due to the heightened apprehension that the dangerous Muslim amalgam continues to summon, those that resemble the terrifying Muslim (man) are thus also the recipients of the opportunity to confront him while the possibilities of women are swallowed and sacrificed.

Afterlives of Jesus in the hybrid medium of comics illustrate complex and provocative dynamics of reception and textual reworking. Much of the irony that characterizes so much of Mark Russell and Richard Pace’s _Second Coming_ (Ahoy Comics, 2019) and _Second Coming: Only Begotten Son_ (Ahoy Comics, 2020-21) cleverly echoes the iconoclasm of the historical Jesus in its critique of Christianity and American culture. However, the alternative put forward is marked by leitmotifs of failure, melancholy, and regret. This article traces these themes across the narrative and argues that the comic’s proleptic recasting of Jesus results in a nihilistic dystopia reflective of postmodern ennui, thus contributing to conversations concerning how questions about the present and future are being negotiated in this present historical moment.