Religion
Related: About this forum'No God But Funny' and 'Earth Angel' Are Preaching to the Choir
It's challenging enough to write good comedy. It's nearly impossible to do so burdened with an agenda, even one as innocuous as featuring a "likeable atheist" as the protagonist.
by Sean Miller
1 October 2015
The Center for Inquiry, a nonprofit headquartered in Amherst, New York, recently announced the winners of its writing content, No God But Funny. Contest entrants were to Contribute to the downfall of civilization by writing a sitcom and/or producing a webisode that features a likeable atheist. In the teleplay category, the contest winners were the tandem of Rachel Lewis and Daniel Beecher for their sitcom pilot script, Thank God Im Atheist.
The cash prize for the webisode category went to John Dardis for his webisode, Earth Angel, which blew [the] judges away. They won US$15,000 and US$25,000, respectively, with the possibility of future development.
I wrote in a previous column about the contest and why I was skeptical that it would yield real comedy. The source of my skepticism was essentially the same reason why Milan Kundera complained in her book, George Orwell, that Orwells novel 1984 would have been better off as a political pamphlet. Kundera found 1984 to be a heavy-handed lesson unconvincingly packaged as narrative exploration.
Its challenging enough to write good comedy. Its nearly impossible to do so burdened with an agenda, even one as innocuous as featuring a likeable atheist as protagonist. This isnt because atheists arent likeable. Many surely are. Its because comedy rarely succeeds when it tries to be what Kundera might call authoritative, which is to say, when it sacrifices vulnerability for the sake of pedantry.
http://www.popmatters.com/column/no-god-but-funny-and-earth-angel-are-preaching-to-the-choir/
Bluenorthwest
(45,319 posts)Glee also featured a character who was atheist. There are several others. House, but likable is not the word to describe him at all. Still, an atheist and a very popular character. Jean Luc Picard of course equated religion with the supernatural and rejecting such things as a positive for a culture. People found him to be very appealing.
rug
(82,333 posts)MisterP
(23,730 posts)and "skeptical linguistics" but the whole attempt at becoming a total institution seems to falter quickly:
mostly it's Tim Minchin screaming about how stoopid everyone else is, especially furrners
also they're going from "good without God" to "funny without God" which is a very bad contrast to set up ...