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SoulCycle, Hasan Minhaj, and evangelical Christians: WashU hosts three lectures on religious parody
Washington University’s John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics hosted its third event in the four-part series “Reverent Irreverence: Parody, Religion and Contemporary Politics,” featuring a panel of academics whose work centers on the intersection between comedy and spirituality, Feb. 29.
The event’s three lecturers spoke to an audience of around 30 students and visitors in Emerson Auditorium. The first lecture was held by Joshua Wright, an Assistant Professor at Hope College, who talked about the history of Christian satire beginning in the 1960s.
Wright began his presentation, titled “Jesus and Jest,” by discussing how before the 1960s, there was a longstanding view that Jesus never smiled and that Christianity placed a negative connotation on humor.
“The fact that Christ is mocked in the Gospels while being crucified has led to the kind of sensibility that transgression and even blasphemy is never all too far away when laughter is present in the realm of religion,” Wright said.
Wright added that views on laughter shifted in the late 1950s when theologians like Harvey Cox began to critique Christianity for losing the sense of festivity the religion once provided for followers.
“Cox’s fear primarily was that American churches had become too formal, too stuffy, that they had lost a sense of spiritual authenticity and vibrance,” he said.
Wright explained how in response to this perceived dullness, atheists and Christians alike began to poke fun at Christianity in somewhat obscene ways.
He gave an example of a cartoon published in the satirical magazine “The Realist” titled Religionland, which was modeled after Disneyland, and it included a booth selling crowns of thorns, a restaurant called “The Last Supper,” and a sign inviting passersby to “See the ghastly atheist.”
Wright concluded his lecture by describing the 1960s satirical movement in Christianity as short-lived because of how vulgar and alienating it eventually became to some Christians. He said that despite the decline in religious parody after the 1960s, the movement has a significant impact on modern comedy.
“To a degree, even something like the cartoons that are showing up in “The Realist” creates a culture of underground cartooning that eventually leads to things like South Park and Family Guy,” he said.
Samah Choudhury, an Assistant Professor at Ithaca College, spoke next and centered her lecture on Muslim representation in stand-up comedy.
She touched on the controversy surrounding Muslim comedian Hasan Minhaj after he admitted many of the experiences he recounted in his stand-up routines were not actually his own. They were instead inspired by true stories he had heard from other Muslims, like one where he said he was arrested by an undercover cop who suspected he was a terrorist.
Choudhury discussed how the allegations of lying were particularly damaging to Minhaj’s brand of comedy because his jokes relied on the release of tension from more serious moments in his stories.
“I wanted everyone to be able to see how he toggles between the laugh lines, but then also the moment where he says, ‘My friends lined up, and then the walkie-talkies were going off, and I was going to be brought in,’” she said. “Those are incredibly sincere, unfunny moments that maybe the punch line relies on, but it’s because the audience believes it to be sincere.”
The final speaker was Cody Musselman, a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at WashU, who presented on how the company SoulCycle incorporates and profits off of spirituality in its spin classes.
She began the lecture by sharing her own experience attending a spin cycle class, noting the $37 price, the hour-long time frame, and the class structure focused on a breakthrough moment.
“These breakthrough moments or moments of catharsis usually happen near the end of class after the sprint intervals,” Musselman said. “The dance choreography and the motivational phrases have physically and emotionally exhausted the exercisers, making them susceptible to the instructor’s daily reflections on spiritual or social matters.”
Musselman added that moments like these allow SoulCycle to be easily satirized, which benefits the company’s image from a marketing standpoint.
She presented a Saturday Night Live (SNL) skit where two characters attend a SoulCycle class led by a rotating group of people auditioning to be SoulCycle instructors, all delivering outlandish inspirational sermons.
In the skit, SNL cast member Bowen Yang encourages his class of cyclists to live life with no regrets and claims he could’ve stopped the Lincoln assassination from happening.
“If I could’ve been there, I would’ve stopped it. But I wasn’t. Will you be? Let’s ride!” Yang said in the skit.
Despite how the skit mocks SoulCycle and its employees, the logo can be seen all around the cyclists, which according to Musselman, means that SoulCycle would have had to approve SNL’s parody. Musselman said that this move is good for the brand’s image.
“If you take SoulCycle seriously, it profits. If you laugh at SoulCycle, it still profits,” she said. “By being in on the joke, SoulCycle is ultimately ensuring that even the most high profile parodies remain on message and get reabsorbed into the brand.”
Junior Kate Farmer said an interesting takeaway she had from the event was the idea that comedy can benefit faith, and she said she enjoyed how the event left her questioning the role of parody in religion.
“This event gave me no answers on where I think the line is between reverent irreverence and just straight-up irreverence,” she said. “It didn’t get me any closer to the truth. It just made me appreciate more how difficult it is to find.”