Outrageous! Actually, just irritating
Religulous is a shallow and mildly annoying attempt to mock religion, says Andrew M Brown
3 April 2009

As the presenter of Religulous, comedian Bill Maher does not listen to the people he speaks to; instead he is only interested in making pre-prepared jokes

The distributors were keen the Catholic Herald should see Religulous, which made me think they hoped for "Outrageous! - Catholic Herald" to put on the poster. Outrageous, no - slightly irritating is nearer the mark.

It's a jokey documentary in which Bill Maher, "comedian, acerbic commentator, raconteur, sceptic", spends an hour and a half interviewing a succession of stooges about their religious beliefs, talking over them and generally making fun of them. Maher is well-known on American telly but is unfamiliar to British audiences. His approach is unfailingly shallow and dishonest. He doesn't show any real curiosity, doesn't let his subjects speak at any length and seems to want only to confirm his prejudices. He is interested in the easy targets, the barmy extremes of religion, and only wants to mock rather than examine them.

Maher's technique is fraudulent. He wants the audience to identify with him as this wry voice of sanity in a topsy-turvy world. But he doesn't trust us to do this unaided. So to make sure, he loads the dice. Only Maher is filmed straight; the people he interviews are set up like fairground dummies. With hardly any exceptions they are specimens of eccentricity or dim-wittedness.

When Maher is not interrupting them, they suffer aggressive editing that cuts short their answers. Also, while the interviewee is speaking, subtitles may pop up containing gags or contradicting them. For example, Maher interviews the Rev Jeremiah Cummings, now a telly evangelist who wears lots of jewellery and lizard-skin shoes but formerly a member of soul group Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes. While "Dr" Cummings answers the questions, subtitles pop up that say: "He's not a doctor" and "He doesn't have a university degree".

The director is Larry Charles, who worked on television shows such as Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, so, as you might expect, parts of Religulous are funny. I confess I laughed out loud about five times, mainly at some excerpts from old films. Maher himself occasionally provokes a smile but just as often he irritates. He has an insufferable, self-satisfied grin permanently fixed to his face and in the style of American stand-up comedians he flags up his own hilariousness by laughing uproariously every time he says something. This is phoney, too, since few if any of his remarks are truly spontaneous and no one can find their own old jokes that funny.

Perhaps if you were a biblical literalist or Islamic fundamentalist this film might outrage you. Maher is obsessed with Christians who believe in talking snakes, and whether Jonah really spent three days inside a big fish. One of the few Catholics he interviews is Fr George Coyne SJ, formerly of the Vatican Observatory. Maher cannot understand why the Church, which he thinks is irrational, should involve itself in the science of astronomy. Fr Coyne replies with great good humour: "It's not that the Church wants us to get out there and baptise those extra-terrestrials before the Mormons get at them."

He explains how scripture was written hundreds of years before the age of modern scientific investigation. Therefore you would not expect the composers of the Bible to use scientific terms that hadn't yet been invented. He also says biblical fundamentalism, and a fundamentalist approach to religious faith, is "a kind of plague".

He makes complete sense and sounds calm and reasonable, which is probably why Maher only gives him a minute or two before moving on. Fr Coyne offered in his reasonableness, I thought, a reassuring contrast to the Bible Belt fundamentalists Maher interviews who display a scary certainty that they know exactly what God thinks.

The other Catholic priest Maher speaks to is the veteran Fr Reggie Foster, the famous "Pope's Latinist". Fr Foster delights in confounding Maher's expectations. Standing in front of St Peter's, Maher asks him if the grandeur of the cathedral seems at odds with the message of Christ. "Certainly," Fr Foster replies, grinning. "That's obvious!"

The scene reveals how little Maher is interested in learning anything from the people he talks to, since he hardly pays attention. In a prepared routine he asks Fr Foster if he ever gets so fed up he wants to pull his dog-collar off and say: "That's it captain, take my badge and my collar!" It doesn't work because, as Fr Foster says, interrupting Maher: "I don't wear a collar." He's dressed in a blue boiler suit, but Maher carries on with the dog-collar routine regardless.

Religious types come out well. Maher visits a truckers' chapel in Raleigh, north Carolina, where he makes jokes to a collection of over-sized fundamentalist truck drivers. One of them says he found God after repenting of his addiction to drug-dealing and women. Maher mocks them - an unpleasant streak of snobbery runs through the picture - and one, suspicious of his intentions, walks out. However, the truckers without exception behave with graciousness and good manners towards this urban sophisticate who's insulting their beliefs.

The most unfortunate consequence of Maher talking over people is the sense that something interesting has been missed in the relentless pursuit of laughs. For instance, I could have listened to more of the British Islamist rapper Propa-Gandhi, who spoke in gentle Yorkshire tones that didn't match his alarming words.

Religulous ends with the sort of booming music and apocalyptic visuals that you might expect in propaganda. Wars of religion, argues Maher, will lead to our destruction. I don't know if he's right, but anyone who watches this picture in the hope of finding illumination is likely to come away feeling short-changed.