No laughing matter?

When comedy and religion collide

Earlier this month, the public radio show "Fair Game" presented four "secret family recipes" of presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, who is a Southerner, an evangelical Christian and a man who once weighed nearly 300 pounds. The satirical dishes included the Huckaburger (ground beef mixed with marshmallows and rocky road ice cream, served with bacon grease and candy corn) and a recipe for — this is where all the trouble started — "Deep-Fried Body of Christ."

"Boring holy wafers no more," the recipe began. "Take one Eucharist, preferably post-transubstantiation, deep-fry in fat, not vegetable oil, ladies, until crispy. Serve piping hot. Mike likes to top his Christ with whipped cream and sprinkles. But his wife, Janet, and the boys like theirs with heavy gravy and cream puffs. It goes great with red wine."

The tag line, delivered by "Fair Game" host Faith Salie, was, "Now that is just ridiculous. Everyone knows evangelicals don't even believe in transubstantiation."

But Catholics do. And, the next morning, an upset Utah listener called Bryan Schott, news director for KCPW, which is one of Salt Lake's public radio stations and one of about 30 or 40 markets nationwide to air the New York-based "Fair Game." The angry listener also contacted the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, which later issued a news release titled "Jesus trashed in anti-Huckabee skit."

Before long, KCPW's Schott was getting phone calls that would begin this way: "Why do you hate Jesus?" Before it was all over, the station manager had received death threats, and the station had received nearly 800 e-mails, 98 percent of them from people out of state who had not heard the actual skit, Schott says, but who were offended by what they felt was less a lampooning of Huckabee and Southern eating habits, and more a jab at Catholicism and Christ.

"Catholics believe that the Holy Eucharist is actually God," wrote one man. "It is truly the Body of Christ. It is the most sacred of all that we Catholics have on the Earth." Humor is fine, the man concluded, "but while we may disagree where the limits are drawn, we can agree that they do exist."

Of course, it's that disagreement over "where" that causes all of the problems.

"We have a judicial right to satirize any religion," notes Stanford University rhetoric lecturer Helle Rytoken, who teaches a class called "Satire in American Life." But, she adds, "we also have a moral imperative to at least question when to do so and why we're doing it."

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Last fall, San Francisco comic Lisa Geduldig put together a comedy show called "A Muslim, a Mormon and a Jew Walked Into a Bar: The Comedy of Religion." The title was a nod to those jokes in which, famously, three members of different religions — or, sometimes, three clergy of various faiths — are the set-up for a punch line that pokes gentle fun at one or all three.

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