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More than 13 million people tuned in to watch Netflix’s celebrity roast of actor Kevin Hart last month. This not-so-special event featured jokes about Charlie Kirk’s assassination and shock and awe profanity and moral degradation that would have been unthinkable on mainstream TV just a generation ago. However, this is where American comedy has arrived.
Sociologist Philip Rieff gave us a useful word for understanding what is happening. He called it deathworks. He defined these as cultural artifacts that don’t build anything up but rather tear down anything sacred. A roast built around moral degeneracy, desecration, and mocking murder is a deathwork. It has no redemptive purpose — it exists only to degrade.
Humor is uniquely human. It reflects the creative image of Himself that God placed in us. As such, it is capable of something far better than shock and profanity. Truly creative comedy operates within a framework that recognizes what is funny and, equally important, what is sacred. If nothing is sacred, nothing is off-limits. And if nothing is off-limits, comedy stops being funny and becomes merely cruel.
C.S. Lewis put his finger on this decades ago in The Abolition of Man, writing: “In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.” In other words: when we remove moral discernment, true comedy dies.
Now, the good news is that the market for something better is enormous. Nate Bargatze — a Christian comedian whose material is entirely clean — has become the top-grossing comic in the world. His Saturday Night Live sketch about George Washington has accumulated over thirty million views. People are hungry for humor that makes them laugh without making them feel dirty afterward. The conservative, Christian satire website The Babylon Bee has built a massive audience doing exactly that — using satire to speak truth in a post-modern culture.
With the growing hunger for humor, we need C.S. Lewis’s “men with chests” to continue to have the courage and hone the craft to step in and offer something better.
Let’s leave behind the “deathworks” and offer the world comedy that acknowledges the sacred is not just better morally – it’s simply better comedy.
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