Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. Over 13 million people have watched the recent Netflix celebrity roast of comedian Kevin Hart.
Now irreverent insults are always part of roasting, but the recent series of Celebrity Roast has featured increasingly outrageous and often profane jokes, from mocking abortions to vilifying women.
However, Heart's Roast has won the prize for the vilest yet. The extremely inappropriate comments made at this roast include about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, for example, and it demonstrates just how debased mainstream comedy has become. Even worse, in a social media context, comedy is captive to likes and shares, so the desire to provoke and to shock is ever escalating.
So what is the proper approach to comedy? Can the current state of comedy be redeemed?
Sociologist Philip Reif coined a unique term for understanding many elements of modern culture, including this kind of debased comedy. Cultures produce artifacts, but cultures without a moral center produce what he called death works, cultural artifacts that don't build up, but only tear down the sacred orders of a civilization. Rose like the one for heart or a death work. Leveraging humor for no constructive, no-bore, redeeming purpose. It's just about degradation, or to borrow Carl Truman's term, it's about desecration all the way down.
Humor is a unique human characteristic that reflects the creativity and the world-making for which humans were made by God. As such, it should rise above mere profane and childishness.
Now a Christian worldview can offer the kind of moral framework that humor needs, including the ability to discern between what one should laugh at And what one should not laugh at.
However, if nothing is sacred, then nothing's off limits. Truly creative comedy operates within a worldview that identifies what is humorous while recognizing and respecting what is sacred. But simply, if everything's funny, and nothing sacred.
Now a notable exception to the current comedic trend is Nate Bargazzi, comedian who professes belief in Christ and stands out from virtually everyone else in his field. Bargazzi's humor is clean, it avoids morally objectionable content, and yet he has emerged as the top-grossing comic in the world right now. His Saturday Night Live skit, Washington's Dream, and its sequel, Washington's Dream 2, became two of the most popular SNL skits in recent memory, with the first sketch now having amassed an amazing 30 plus million views on YouTube. In it, his comedic genius highlighted the quirks of American culture that we now hardly notice. Or consider the Babylon Bee and its humorous satire on real-life events.
B humor includes both inside jokes that point out the foibles of the Christian community and also outside jokes that expose dangerous ideas, the kind that need to be taken captive. A common experience after reading a B headline is to chuckle and then think, that could be real. That's because they use satire to speak truth from the Christian worldview in a post-truth culture when others do not. As Babylon B CEO Seth Dillon said at our 2025 Great Lakes Symposium, humor is effective as a vehicle for truth delivery and a way to expose an absurdity for what it is. The gulf between comedy that acknowledges the sacred and comedy that denies anything is sacred reveals to us truth about reality.
In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis described how modern attempts to remove man's moral discernment has formed men without chest. He put it this way, quote, in a sort of ghastly simplicity, we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chest and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.
We castrate and then bid the geldings be fruitful. Notice Lewis's words here: we laugh at honor. In a morally castrated culture, nothing's truly sacred. In such a scenario, nothing's off-limits from what's considered funny. Instead, when the counterbalance of a Christian worldview is removed and the laughing gas is emitted, We then laugh at anything, even the honorable.
Such a perspective brings to mind the less than morally upright comedian Woody Allen, who sometimes would close his routines by saying, I'm sorry, I can't leave you with something positive. Would you accept two negatives? At least Allen's joke acknowledged the objective nature of mathematics. But still, even so, since so much modern comedy or death works, there's opportunity for Christians to provide something better. comedy that's not only funny, but properly speaking, is holy.
For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored with Andrew Carrico. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast. And for more resources or share this commentary with others, go to breakpoint.org. Are you a Christian educator looking to grow in your faith and impact your students?
The Colson Fellows program is designed to equip you, and now it's more accessible than ever. Christian school faculty, administrators, and homeschool educators receive 50% off with our educators' tuition discount. And if you're part of an ACSI-accredited K-12 school, you can also earn 120 continuing education units when you complete the program. Invest in your calling and bring a deeper Christian worldview into your classroom. Learn more at colsonfellows.org.
That's colsonfellows.org.
