A joke or an indictment?

You can tell a lot about a society by the jokes it tells and the entertainment it finds funny. I thought about this when a recent Saturday Night Live sketch came to my attention.

In the sketch, two parents (played by Maya Rudolph and Andy Samberg) seek to impress the music-loving Italian Prince Enzo by showcasing the singing ability of their son Antonio (played by guest host Ariana Grande). Antonio impresses with his high voice, at which point his parents inform the prince that his ability is a result of him being a “castrato,” a young boy who is castrated at 8 or 9 years old to preserve his beautiful falsetto singing voice. The rest of the sketch plays on Antonio’s awkward and pained dead eyes as his parents extol the experimental treatment to a skeptical and incredulous prince and court. Watching the sketch, I couldn’t help but wonder, “Where’s the joke?”

Of course, good humor can address serious and fraught subjects. Eight years ago, amid a contentious presidential election, Tom Hanks appeared in another SNL skit as a contestant on a fictitious game show called Black Jeopardy. His character named Doug was a white working-class guy in a MAGA hat who was “ready to win me some money.” The entire sketch was built upon similarities among working-class folks across racial lines—similar customs, skepticism of the government, and shared taste in Tyler Perry movies.

Similarly, two of SNL’s more recent successful sketches feature comedian Nate Bargatze as George Washington celebrating American liberty and freedom. While the humor is largely built upon America’s seemingly arbitrary system of weights and measures and the way that we “do our own thing” with the English language (as well as the superb delivery of Bargatze and his chemistry with SNL’s ensemble), the most persistent running joke is Kenan Thompson’s black soldier who repeatedly wonders what this new nation of liberty means for “men of color such as I.” Bargatze’s Washington consistently ignores the question and changes the subject. (“You asked about the temperature?”) Even chattel slavery, it seems, is capable of getting laughs—but politically acceptable only on SNL?

This brings me back to the recent sketch and why it failed so miserably. Humor is built on overturning expectations, highlighting absurdities and incongruities in life in a surprising way. This means such humor is built on common notions of what is normal, on shared boundaries and standards. The cross-dressing in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night or movies like Mrs. Doubtfire is only funny in a society that knows the difference between men and women.

This is why certain older SNL sketches fall flat in the present day. Think of Julia Sweeney’s androgynous “Pat.” Or Rob Schneider claiming to be a college freshman named “Jennifer Kenton” while trying to get his female roommates to take a shower. It’s not funny when it’s happening in real life (and not just to college women, but also to elementary school girls). Or the scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian in which Stan claims that he wants to be a woman and have babies and cries that he’s oppressed when John Cleese’s character refuses to indulge him. The absurdity of such sketches depends upon a shared sense of reality that our culture is hell-bent on denying.

Similarly, just as a joke about slavery is only funny in a society that has made slavery unthinkable, a joke about castrating children for adult fulfillment is only funny—if it’s ever funny—in a society that would never castrate children for adult fulfillment.

But we don’t live in that society. We live in a society whose major institutions—whether medical, media, business, or state—have bought wholesale into the derangement that men and women can change sexes through hormones and surgery. More than that, we have inflicted this derangement on vulnerable children. Recent data from Stop the Harm shows that in the last five years, 62,682 prescriptions were written for the almost 14,000 minors who underwent treatments to change their sex characteristics. That includes 8,579 minors who received hormones and puberty blockers and 5,747 who had surgeries to alter their anatomy. That’s almost 14,000 Antonios who, with the aid and influence of doctors, teachers, and parents, irrevocably harmed their own bodies, while doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies got rich—to the tune of $120,000,000.

This means the Castrato sketch is not actually a joke but an indictment. And, on this issue, the most important thing for Christians now is to recover the political will to protect the Antonios of the world. This includes amplifying stories of detransitioners and prosecuting the hospitals and doctors who enrich themselves on the bodies of children. It means voting out every politician—from legislators to school board members, from gender ideologues to feckless cowards—who have in any way encouraged the ideological grooming in our schools and libraries.

In short, don’t laugh—pray and take action.