The comedy show

It was finally the night. The date had been circled on my calendar for weeks. Wanting to bury the hatchet, my older son surprised me with expensive tickets to a show by a European comedy trio (that’s as specific as I’ll get) touring the country. This was on the basis of a hilarious YouTube skit about a snob in prison that I had casually forwarded to him.

I have to say, in my lame defense, that I had pretty much checked out of comedy after Rodney Dangerfield and Phyllis Diller hurled one-liners on Johnny Carson, where I now realize they offered the cleaned-up versions of their road shows, as television had decency standards back then.

Arriving at the Tudor Revival–style theater, the pride of Glenside, which over the years has hosted the likes of Willie Nelson, B.B. King, and Kenny Rogers, my husband and I happened to queue up just behind our former pastor and his wife. The four of us chatted, then paired off to our assigned seats.

I mentioned in a former column that the Quebecois prefer blasphemous to sexual profanity, and now it dawns on me that this is not so much a function of Frenchness as of Catholicness. The three-man skits of the Dublin lads were punctuated with exclamations of “Jesus Christ!,” always a cheap way to add pungency to dialogue, which, if it had been omitted, would have changed the subsequent course of events.

At intermission my husband leaned over and said, “Do we really want to listen to this?” I thought about my son and the price of the tickets. And I thought about God. And I followed my husband to the exit. Whatever you think of me for doing this, let me hasten to admit that it is a thing I have never done. I have sat on my sofa before Hollywood films in which the Lord’s name was misused, without leaving the room except to get a bowl of ice cream.

I do remember a total stranger at a women’s retreat decades ago sharing with me about her great-uncle who swept floors in a factory, and who whenever he heard “Jesus” or “God” employed as a cuss word, would exclaim in the hearing of all: “Praise His holy name!” Let that sink in. All these machinists are long dead, but the humble floor sweeper—like Cain’s brother Abel (Hebrews 11:4)—continues to speak.

Still, there was the money thing. It was a considerable expense, after all. (I’m chuckling as I write, reminded of a joke about two old ladies in the Borscht Belt, one complaining to her friend in a restaurant, “This food is terrible!” And her friend replying, “Yeah, and such small portions!”)

A better free association is with Amaziah, King of Judah, who paid a hundred thousand mercenaries from backslidden Israel to buttress his own troops for an impending war. A prophet came and warned him not to use those Israelite fighters because the Lord was not with them. To which Amaziah replied, “What about all the money I spent to hire them!” The prophet replied: “The Lord is able to give you much more than this” (2 Chronicles 25:6-9). So much for the argument that we should have stayed for the second half of the show “because of the money.”

Objection No. 2: How about the sweetness of my hardworking son, who in all innocence sought to please his mother?

What does Jesus say to this? “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:37).

Objection No. 3: What if my husband and I wrongly appraised the situation, failing to factor in salient features that would have altered our conclusion? Or what if we are fanatics? Or overly righteous (Ecclesiastes 7:16)? Or too literal? Or lacking in exegetical subtlety and balance, and have failed to see what more sophisticated Christians see—that worldliness is in the very air we breathe and cannot be escaped while we dwell in this world?

The answer to that remonstrance is easy: While it is true that one can always have overlooked a relevant fact in a moral scenario, if the choice presented is binary (one must either leave the theater or stay), what can one do, if desirous of pleasing the Lord, but to lean toward the way that has the better claim?

I wonder what the pastor and his wife did. But that is not for me to know.