Revisiting Religulous
You may recall that I already reviewed Religulous last month as one of the many screenings I took in during the Toronto International Film Festival. You might also remember that I enjoyed it and gave it a rather high recommendation. There were a couple of reasons that I wanted to revisit it so soon. One had to do with audience. At TIFF the crowd was stacked with the Maher faithful, and others perhaps more friendly to the film’s agenda. Seeing it at the corner cineplex would offer a different gage, not to mention a different audience, to see how the film is received on its own.
| Secondly, it was something Maher said during the Q&A. He noted that while he was pleased that the film was getting such big laughs, we, the audience, were missing a lot of other jokes do to our rambunctious laughing. Here’s the thing, I didn’t discover a lot of new laughs in the film, but I did rediscover a lot of funny bits that got buried in the comedic avalanche the first time around. Mostly these came in the form of little cut away gags, like when Maher talks about how the Bible skips over Jesus’ teenage years and postulates that as an adolescent Christ would probably have been rather awkward – right down to his “Jew ‘fro.” On cue, the film cuts to a clip of Superbad’s Jonah Hill, which really put the “awkward” in the “awkward Jesus” conversation. Another thing I noticed in the second viewing was the presence of director Larry Charles. This is probably the virtue of a second time viewing, but you can really tell that this was a true collaboration between these two men: Maher and Charles. Maher is the one out there on a limb, in front of the camera, so naturally he eats up a lot of your attention. Charles, meanwhile, makes his presence known in subtle ways. If Maher is a tracker out in the intellectual wilderness, than Charles is the man guiding him from base camp, telling him where the good hunting is and how much further he can go into the woods before getting lost. |  |
Like Borat, Religulous is on close terms with discomfort. The idea that when you hold up a mirror to somebody and they see what they are reflected right back to them, you find true human comedy. Maher relishes getting people on the ropes and he pushes them hard to get them to stand up for their beliefs. It’s about getting honesty on film, which is a lot of what Borat was about. I have feeling that the reason a lot of people featured in that film filed lawsuits is because they recognized a truth in themselves that when seen on the big screen was worse than they ever thought existed. In Religulous, Maher is interviewing US Senator Max Pryor, and after testing some of his beliefs Maher says sceptically, “Come on, you’re a smart man…” To which Pryor replies, “Well, You don't have to pass an IQ test to be in the Senate.” Touché.
The line about the Senate not requiring am IQ test was the funniest line in the film, at least according to the crowd I saw it with last weekend. But that probably comes from the universality of appreciating that our elected official need not always been the brightest lights in the heavens. I’m pleased to say that Religulous does hold up well on the second viewing, but really it was no match for the first time. It’s too bad though that it was beaten opening weekend by the rightwing polemic An American Carol. It’s funny because I always though that if there’s one belief we could get behind it’s that comedies made with a Conservative bias just aren’t that funny.
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