So A Vicar Walks Into A Pulpit...

What preachers can learn from stand-up comedians. And it's not what you think.

Preaching every week must be very frustrating. There’s never enough time to prepare. Some members of the congregation never seem to listen, and those who do often misunderstand. And those who do understand are rarely excited.

What’s going wrong? How do we improve? Who are the role models showing the way? Who is doing this sort of thing well? That’s what this column is about. In so doing, I explain why you might be interested in a preaching webinar I’m running on 17th March. But we’ll get to that.

Modern Prophets

Who are the prophets and preachers of our day? Only the faithful few are listening to bishops, vicars or leaders of faith groups (unless they’re talking about sex, of course). In the past, society hung on every word of our august politicians who tended not to say very much. What they did say was printed on the front pages of the newspapers of record. Now our politicians vie with journalists and estate agents for a place at the bottom of the table of the least trusted people in society.

An Ipsos Poll of 2017 placed nurses and then doctors at the top of the most trusted people in our society, along with professors and scientists. But so-called experts have become political footballs. Each side likes to think that they have the facts and their enemies only have opinions, dogma and prejudice.

Here is a group of people rarely featured on the list of trusted sources: comedians. They are not hard to spot. Although it’s shifted to BBC2, Live at the Apollo is still watched by millions. Before lockdown, many theatres were heavily reliant on income from touring comedians from Mock The Week.

What do the comedians do? Preach. They don’t do this overtly, although some do. A few still tell jokes, like Milton Jones or Gary Delaney. But many, perhaps most, talk about their own experiences and lives. In so doing, they are establishing and changing consensus about what is right and what is wrong. How is that not preaching?

Trust Me, I’m a Comedian

Being in a crowd of hundreds listening to a comedian is intoxicating: one person is holding the attention of the entire room just by using words and a microphone. Words, as we saw last week, are powerful. Words used comedically are doubly so. A few years ago, I saw Jerry Seinfeld at the 02, being funny for a long time in front of at least 15000. He didn’t sing, juggle or do magic. He just used words.

Preachers may look at this rhetorical display with some version of righteous envy. How can those skills be harnessed for preaching? If Eddie Izzard could make people fall about with his quasi-fictional piano teacher, Mrs Badcrumble, surely we can bring these techniques to bear on the life and teaching of a non-fictional all-powerful Messiah?

It’s easy to draw the wrong conclusion here, which would be this: I should start my sermon with a joke. Don’t. Please don’t. In the Sacred Art of Joking, I explain why:

Lots of preachers like to start their sermons [with a joke] or with a light-hearted anecdote. They do this to break the ice, warm up the congregation and show outsiders that they have a sense of humour. Initially, this sounds like a good idea. But I would advise against it. There are many reasons why.

First, we have already seen [earlier in the book] the myriad of ways in which jokes can go wrong. Telling a joke to a congregation, some of whom might be visitors or strangers, is a high-risk strategy. The joke may fall flat, which takes the wind out of the preacher’s sails. Or it may offend unnecessarily, which renders the rest of the sermon suspect. Far from establishing one’s credentials, the joke could destroy trust, which is vital if one wishes to preach effectively.

There are other reasons for my concerns on starting with a joke, but here is the one most relevant to the matter in hand: it undermines the idea that comedy can be found in Scripture itself. If the preacher repeatedly uses his or her own comic gifts and gets the congregation to laugh, what does that say about the comic potency of the Scriptures? Over time, the impression is given that any laughter in church will only ever come from the preacher and never from the Bible itself. This will perpetuate the stereotype that the Bible is always sombre and stern, when that is not the case. The result will be that comedy will continue to be seen as a deviation from Scripture, and something transgressive, like the funny song in a musical, rather than the natural outworking of the Scriptures.

Since writing the book, I’ve run a few workshops on preaching, in which I’ve dug into this – and that’s the plan with the webinar I’m running – but here are a few of observations to be going on with and get us warmed up.

Writing is Rewriting

There are some key differences between what the preacher is doing and the stand-up comedian when he appears on Live at the Apollo or in person at the Playhouse. They’ve been working on that routine for months, perhaps years. It’s seventy-five minutes of material that’s been honed, edited, rewritten, workshopped and dropped and reinstated. You might be watching that comedian say that bit for 150th time. For you it sounds fresh and spontaneous. It isn’t.

A sermon written in a slight rush that week about a text that is probably not of your choosing is not the same animal. Not one bit. And there is no comparison between their process and the weekly grind of preachers. If you only had to deliver one sermon a year, and you got to deliver it forty times, it would probably be quite good by the end.

The comedian has the luxury of rewriting. The preacher does not. Bear that in mind and cut yourself some slack. But maybe you have too much slack.

Taking Up The Slack

Comedians are hungrier than preachers. The comedians’ job is to delight, to entertain and to make people laugh. There may be some politics or critical race theory lurking in there, but if the comedians don’t get laughs, they don’t get booked, they don’t get paid and they don’t eat. And they’re not just hungry for food. They are hungry for fame, and more gigs and the chance to do their show in a better venue, win awards and mostly impress their peers.

The preacher is not as hungry. They’re booked for every Sunday if they’re the pastor. It’s a guaranteed gig. You have your own club. Make a mess of it, nothing much seems to happen. Your career isn’t in ruins. Have another go next week. It’ll be the same people.

This situation could lead to a little complacency, when compared to the comedian who gets more immediate feedback which directly affects his or her career. So there’s that.

But the preacher is not trying to get laughs or entertain. Neither is he just trying to explain. The job is to exhort the congregation to live for Christ, to glory in him, delight in him and build his kingdom.

So the jobs, outcomes and pressures are very different. Maybe there’s nothing to learn. There is. And here’s one.

Know Thyself

A comedian knows one thing: who they are. Or at least, how they appear. They know their status on stage. They have to own it. Listen to episodes of The Comedians’ Comedian podcast and you’ll hear a similar story from comedians looking back on their careers and how they started it. One thing they had to do was learn who they were on stage. What was their status? What was the audience thinking?

For some presentation is an artifice, like Milton Jones’ wide-eyed odd guy persona, or Al Murray’s Pub Landlord. For most, though, their persona is just a heightened version of themselves. Stewart Lee has really mined this for all it’s worth and often refers to his on stage persona. If you have 25 minutes and are interest in this stuff, I really recommend this (as well as my 90 min webinar obvs): 

Your ‘on-stage persona’ is one of those slightly odd and magical things. It can be worked on, but there’s an element you’re just born with. Tommy Cooper made people laugh merely by being on stage. Billy Connolly just came across as your funny mate down the pub who happened to be standing in front of two thousand people, telling them about the docks or his dad.

The Camera Never Lies

One thing preachers may have noticed in lockdown is that the camera loves some people and not others. And vice versa. Again, there’s no shame in that. It’s all very mercurial.

Look at Benny Hill. He was the first comedian in the UK made by TV. His grinning cherubic face and physical comedy routines (often stolen from European physical comedians) – as well as his inappropriate lewdness - made him a darling of the small screen for twenty years. Most of his contemporaries, like Morecambe and Wise, had come up through the variety circuit. It bothered Benny Hill that he’d not made it as a live comedian. He tried to be a success on staged and failed. (Read all about him in a biography of his life Funny Peculiar).

Comedians have learned to deal with their persona and work with it, rather than against it or try to be something else.

But I already hear the objection. The preacher doesn’t preach themselves but Christ crucified, so how do we get round that? Sign up for the webinar and find out.

You can also get The Sacred Art of Joking - which makes a good present, by the way. But please get it directly from me – not least because I’ll sign it (unless you ask me not to!).