Comic Belief: Religious Irreverence and Irreverent Religion in Cold War America

Abstract

“Comic Belief” identifies evolving standards of humor as both reflections and engines of the cultural changes that reconfigured American institutional Christianity in the half-century following World War II. It contends that both traditionally religious and religiously unaffiliated Americans increasingly turned to comedy to critique and offer alternatives to the midcentury denominational system and the constructions of Judeo-Christian civil religion that supported it. To make this case, this dissertation follows two parallel, and often intersecting, threads. First, in the 1950s, iconoclastic comedians, artists, and publishers began deploying parody and satire in a variety of mediums to castigate organized religion for authoritarianism and moral hypocrisy. Although such efforts encountered religious protest and censorship, these post-denominational figures expanded the cultural and legal space for irreverent treatments of religion. Meanwhile, recognizing the growing American valorization of authenticity, American Protestants and Catholics reevaluated a longstanding Christian ambivalence toward laughter and came to see humor as the antidote to a pervasive religious formalism that threatened the vibrancy of Christianity in an age of secularism, commercialism, and pluralism. “Comic Belief” shows that both comic strands—those operating within organized Christianity and those outside of it—propelled a process of religious deformalization, characterized by the decentering of the institutional structures and symbols of organized religion in favor of more personalized, and often eclectic, modes of spiritual belief and practice.