The Comedian

Isaac sent me the link to this video last night of comedian Dane Cook telling a story about an atheist. I’ll warn you, the ecstatic delight in violence and hate at the punchline disturbed me so much that I had trouble falling asleep.



But the story has some important thematic and structural similarities to the medieval host desecration stories told about Jews, which is a central element of Atheist.

Cook begins his story weaving this way and that, but the central thrust is that some jerk sneezed on him. It’s a failure of character we can all agree on: don’t sneeze on people. It’s gross, it’s uncivilized, and most importantly for the story, it shows a disdain for your fellow human beings. It’s crucial to assign the villain in these stories a universally agreed-upon flaw. It’s even more crucial to tie that flaw in the story to the central quality of the villain. In this story, the villain’s disdain is a direct result of his atheism.

In the host desecration story, the Jew is usually given some nasty quality that can be tied to his Jewishness. Avarice is old standard, also disdain, a violent temper, or deviousness. Whatever the flaw is, it has to bullseye the anxiety of the audience about the villain’s stock type. Since Jews in medieval Europe were often in the loan business (as that was the only trade they were allowed to practice), avarice worked neatly. When a Christian heard a story about a Jew paying a poor Christian to steal a host wafer, it fit in with fears of loss of financial control to these yamurkle-sporting fellows. It’s a nice trick that Cook doesn’t reveal his villain is an atheist until almost halfway through his story: it allows his listeners to connect “atheist” to “disdainful.”

Cook shows his Christian charity by restraining his anger and saying, “God bless you.” The villainous Atheist then reveals himself, showing contempt for the storyteller (and by extension, the audience). In the desecration stories, the reasoning behind the Jew’s theft of the host and violent acts upon it is often summed up in an overt statement about the credulity of Christians that believe the wafer to be Christ’s flesh. It allied the Christian listener to the teller (“Jews think you’re a fool”), making the later miracles and travesties plausible and acceptable. Cook allies the audience with himself in a similar manner through the “God Bless You” section. (“We all say, God Bless You! Atheists think you’re a fool!”).

As a side note, it’s at this point in the story where I suspect it’s, at best, a collection of different incidents collected into one story; or, at worst, a lie. Storytellers work in both manners, and that’s legit, except when the lie is offered as a true anecdote that we should act on. And I do think Cook is encouraging action, if not directly. But the story is suspect, if you think about it: Notice there’s no location given? It’s somewhere where the Atheist has the time and comfort level to get into a theological argument? And honestly, I don’t believe any atheist would declare their atheism every time someone says “God bless you.” Who has time for that? All that said, even if the story is true, his telling of it follows the pattern of desecration stories, even when it turns into a fantasy.

Cook and the Atheist get into a theological argument where the Atheist mocks Cook’s Catholicism and declares his own version of the afterlife, where the Atheist will die into the ground and come back as a tree. Normally that would define the Atheist as not really an atheist. He’s a nature-centered, Mother-Earth, reincarnation-based, hippie-dippy-ist. This is important, though. In host desecration stories, the Jew has to confirm certain fundamental aspects of the Christian worldview. The desecration of the host is often ritualistic (confirming that the host really is sacred). Sometimes the Jew directly challenges the Christian God, rather than addressing the Old Testament God he would actually believe in. In Cook’s story, the Atheist accepts the premise that he has a soul, which many if not most atheists do not believe. It confirms the worldview of the listener: the Atheist has anxieties about death, and faith in the unverifiable, but he’s too mule-headed to accept Christianity. And it’s not like Cook isn’t aware of atheism’s fundamental rejection of the soul and the afterlife. He makes a joke about it. But for the purposes of Cook’s story, the Atheist has to paradoxically have faith in a soul, otherwise the story can’t work. In desecration stories, the Jew has to paradoxically believe the Christian host is holy. Again, the function of this is to create alliance between storyteller and audience in their worldview, so that the later violence is acceptable and just.

Speaking of violence, when Cook engages in the fantasy of chopping the reincarnated Atheist-tree down with an axe, dragging him through the mud, grinding him up in a woodchipper, turning him into paper and printing the Bible on him, it’s a fair distinction that he’s not commiting actual violence. But his violent imaginings follow the same pattern as the results of the desecration stories, so I take no comfort in that. In the host desecration stories, after the guilty Jew is caught, he’s killed, sometimes with his family and neighbors; and the site of the desecration, usually the Jew’s home or temple, is converted into a chapel. This reconfiguring of the villain’s property (or flesh) to serve the faith is more than in the service of irony. It’s a deliberate threat of postmortem aggression against every Jew (or Atheist) that steps out of line: not only will I destroy you, but everything you own will be made mine. The ecstatic screams and howls of Cook’s audience leave no room for doubt as to the delight they take in such an idea. I wonder, if Cook had followed his punchline with the suggestion, would the audience have gone out and made their rage plain to the next atheist they met? The notion was certainly hanging in the arena he played. To me, Cook's macho swagger as he relays the story feeds the fire of violence in the listeners, perhaps not inciting them directly, but certainly in their private minds. I have trouble believing that a person could walk out of that show, having engaged in that bloodlust, and not be changed.

You could defend Cook’s story by claiming it’s not atheists he’s attacking, but condescending people. But if that were true, the final punchline (turning the corpse into a Bible) wouldn’t make any sense. This illustrates the importance of first painting the Atheist or Jew with a common character flaw: it provides the storyteller and listener a psychological defense if confronted with their bigotry.

In the end though, it’s not Cook’s story but the rapturous reaction of his audience that’s frightening. Part of what I want to get to in this play are the reasons why we believe implausible stories. The righteous joy in the voices of that audience show how Cook provided them with something they all desperately wanted: justification to hate. Cook makes a joke that he doesn’t like to say “Gesundheidt” because he feels like it’s a tribute to Hitler. I think his bit is very much a tribute to Der Fürhrer’s method of crowd control.