(It’s a crowd; it’s a rock concert; it’s a Christian metal band! The megachurch ambience rolls for a handful of lyrics before abruptly scratching out.)

Julia Longoria: Okay. Why don’t we start with you just telling me the joke?

Emma Green: (Laughs.) I guess I can pull it up to see what year it’s from. [Typing.] “Ghost smoke machine …”

Longoria: I recently asked Atlantic staff writer Emma Green to pull up a joke she’d told me from a Christian satire website called The Babylon Bee. 

Green: So here we go. [Chuckles.] Okay. So this is from their early days—from 2016. And the headline is “Holy Spirit Unable to Move Through Congregation as Fog Machine Breaks,” which is really funny because, you know … [Sighing lightly.] I guess now I’m explaining the joke, which is a little lame. [Longoria laughs.] 

(The cheering and rock-concert ambience returns, duller, as if through some kind of haze.)

Green: This is poking fun at the fact that there’s a certain kind of megachurch where the environment is very much like a rock concert. It’s, like, fog machines and skinny jeans and neon lights.

So it’s just a funny joke to be, like, “We’re here to be reached by the Holy Spirit, but the fog machine kept us from doing that, because we got distracted thinking that the fog machine was the point.”

(A faint guitar solo plays, then ends and takes the whole concert with it. After a moment, a funky lopsided beat begins to play under a synthesized melody.)

Longoria: Emma, of course, covers religion for The Atlantic, and she first came across The Babylon Bee as the sort of evangelical answer to The Onion.

Green: I remember thinking, Oh, this is something different. This is, like, insiders, who totally get what evangelicalism is and love it and consider themselves part of it—and also just told a really hilarious joke about smoke machines at a megachurch.

Longoria: But, if you’ve followed The Babylon Bee over the last few years, you know it doesn’t just poke fun at megachurches. 

Green: The Babylon Bee has always had a political streak to it—and you could say a political mean streak. Like the headline “Trump Announces Illegal Immigrant Gladiator Games,” or another one, “Hillary Turns to Husband for Advice on Attracting Young, Impressionable, Female Voters.”

So, as these political posts have started to go viral, they have gotten a lot of criticism for pushing satire past the line of making jokes and into misinformation. 

Lisa “Kennedy” Montgomery: Liberal media wouldn’t know a joke if it punched them in the Tic Tac sack, especially jokes from a popular satire website, The Babylon Bee.

Tucker Carlson: The New York Times recently denounced The Babylon Bee as, quote, [Adopting a mockingly serious tone.] “a far-right misinformation site” that, quote, “sometimes traffics in misinformation under the guise of satire.” No humor allowed! (Fades under.)

Green: So, with my reporting, I spend a lot of time in the evangelical world that The Babylon Bee inhabits, and I wanted to know directly from them: What do they think they’re doing when they’re telling these jokes? So I called up the editor in chief of The Babylon Bee, Kyle Mann.

Kyle Mann: Well, I’m not going to explain the joke to you. Do you want me to explain the joke to you?

Green: (Exasperated.) Yes! (Laughs.)

Mann: ‘Cause the joke—the joke is that …

Green: Humor is this weird thing where either you think it’s funny or you don’t. Either you see it as a joke or you don’t. And I think understanding the “why” behind that can also help us understand something bigger about politics, about this divided political world that we’re living in. And I really think it’s important to understand the people who think that The Babylon Bee’s jokes are funny. 

(The music transitions into a cacophony of metallic wind chimes and industrial percussion.)

Longoria: This week, Atlantic writer Emma Green sits down with Kyle Mann, the editor in chief of The Babylon Bee, to talk about Christianity and comedy. 

Mann: There’s this idea that conservative comedy can just say something and everybody will laugh because they agree with it. If it just comes off as angry, it’s not going to hit that mark. Like, it has to be clever. The balance of comedy is trying to find that line.

Longoria: Where is the line between making a joke and doing harm? And what can humor tell us about where we are right now as a country?

I’m Julia Longoria. This is The Experiment, a show about our unfinished country.

(Music cuts out.)

Longoria: Okay. So, Emma, you sat down with Kyle Mann. And I’m curious, how does he fit into the evangelical world that you know so well? Did he grow up religious? 

Green: Yeah, the environment where he grew up was the kind of feel-good, rock-concert Christian environment that that fog-machine joke makes fun of.

Mann: I grew up in a kind of megachurch-type atmosphere, with the big show and the laser lights. My rebellious-teen stage was becoming a theological conservative. So a lot of my buddies have a similar story, where, like, Christianity had become this just kind of cultural tradition. And so the call of conservative theology for us was like, “Wow,” like, “There’s this rich, centuries-old tradition of good, solid, biblically faithful teaching, where people just dig into the Bible and they just see what it says, you know, and that’s the primary concern.”

Green: More or less, Kyle is kind of part of the philosophy bros of the Christian world. And this is exactly who The Babylon Bee was trying to target when they first launched in 2016. Even though Kyle didn’t have a formal comedy background, he started pitching jokes to the Bee.

(A quiet, distant electronic loop plays underneath the narration.)

Mann: It was more the natural outpouring of everything I had just enjoyed in life. I absolutely loved all of Christopher Guest’s mock-umentaries. Um, I love The Onion. Anything—anything that’s, like, just very dry. Monty Python or that kind of stuff. That’s kind of like, to me, the gold standard of comedy.

Green: A couple years later, Kyle ascended to the top and started running the place. 

Mann: As an editor, I have to think along a lot of different axes, like, you know, “Has anybody done this joke before? Is this in The Babylon Bee’s voice? How could this possibly be misinterpreted?” You know? [Chuckles.] So there’s constantly stuff that I can’t publish. It’s just, “Yeah, here’s the problem with that one. I know exactly what lefty Twitter is going to say as soon as we publish that.” [Laughs.] So you have to be careful with that.

(The music fades out.)

Green: So are—are you scared of lefty Twitter? Like, you’re scared of the dog pile?

Mann: Umm … No. I—I mean, lefty Twitter doesn’t matter to anybody except lefty Twitter. So I don’t really care. And they’ve hated us for five years. And so, I mean, it doesn’t really matter that much. But, you know, at the same time, we do have this brand that, you know, we want to be careful. We—we don’t want to make it easy for them either. 

And so, like, we did this great joke, one of our best jokes, where we said—oh, the headline is “Dumb AOC Accidentally Strangles Herself Tying Her Shoes (Because She Is So Stupid).” And, uh, every time we repost that one—we’ve reposted it to Twitter a few times—every time we do, lefty Twitter gets so upset, and they’re like, “I can’t believe they wrote this joke. Like, who explains a joke right in the headline? It’s not even funny.”

Green: When some people read that joke, they see it as just a shot at AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They’re being mean to the most hated Congresswoman on the planet. But in Kyle’s mind, the joke is actually not aimed at AOC at all. 

(Introspective, low music plays, like a slow, existential lobby.)

Mann: The great thing about this headline is we’re making fun of stupid Boomer jokes about AOC, because, at the time, you know, there were just constant memes about AOC being dumb or whatever. And so we said, “Well, what if we just kind of went all in with this weird Andy Kaufman bit where we’re making fun of ourselves, but we don’t tell anybody we’re making fun of ourselves?”

It really is this kind of weird litmus test where, you know, if you see it and you know what we’re doing, which most of our audience does, they laugh at it. If you don’t know what we’re doing, people on the right who don’t like AOC, they'll be like, “Yeah, I don’t like her either. But, you know, this joke isn’t very good.” And then, uh, [Laughs.] people on the left just … I don’t know. I think people on the left think that we’re always 100 percent serious and we’re always saying what we’re saying. Um, they don’t understand that comedy can take this ridiculous position just to kind of mock it a little bit.

Green: But it’s not just people on the left who misinterpret Babylon Bee articles. There are also plenty of people on the right who read these headlines and just think that they’re news. Take, for example, this article that was published in January of 2020. It was shared 3.3 million times according to the numbers that are on the Bee’s website. The headline was “Democrats Call for Flags to Be Flown at Half-Mast to Grieve the Death of Soleimani.” That, of course, is Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian leader who was killed in an American strike. 

Green: Like, I want to know what makes this funny. I know that’s the worst question for somebody to ask to somebody who writes jokes, but, like, why is that funny?

Mann: Yeah. [Deadpan.] Well, it’s funny because General Soleimani died, and then they called for flags to be flown at half-mast, to grieve his death. Get it?

Green: But that’s what I’m saying. Like, what—what … [Laughs.] Besides just saying the joke over, what makes it funny?

Mann: Well, I’m not going to explain the joke to you. Do you want me to explain the joke to you? 

Green: Yes! (Cracks up laughing.)

Mann: ‘Cause the—the joke is that the joke is that General Soleimani died and Democrats were sad.

Green: But why is that funny?

Mann: (Stammering for a moment.) If you don’t know why that’s funny, then you’re not the audience for the joke. 

Green: I think what's tough about this joke is that, on the one hand, there are conservatives who would read this headline and not give it a second thought. They would think that it's real because it exactly fits all of the stereotypes and clichés that people on the right use about the left all the time. And by the same token, there are people on the left who look at that and say, “Hey, you’re not trying to tell a joke. You’re trying to mislead people.”

There’s no shared kernel of truth. There’s nothing that people from different political perspectives could look at and say, “Hey, I actually see something a little bit true about the joke that you’re trying to tell.” But, obviously, Kyle disagrees. 

(The music fades out.)

Mann: The funniest part about that is that it got fact-checked because it was so believable that Democrats would do that. And so that’s the funniest part to me.

Green: I don’t think the reason that they fact-checked it was because it was so plausible. I think it’s because it was being shared millions of times on Facebook. And—

Mann: (Cutting Green off.) But why was that? It was because it was plausible! (Laughs.)

Green: Yeah, but … So, okay, what if people did believe that was real? Which, I think they gathered evidence that some people thought that was real. Do you worry about that? That people—regardless of how many times you, you know, make it clear that you’re a satire website or whatever—that people will read that and be like, “Oh, this is actually a fact that I saw. I’m a Boomer, you know, scrolling through my Facebook feed. [Mann laughs.] I actually think that this is a real thing that Democrats do.” Does that pose any ethical responsibilities for you guys?

Mann: I mean, not any more so than any other comedian who gets mistaken for being real. Does SNL bear responsibility ’cause people still think that Sarah Palin said that she could see Russia from her house? The Onion’s had been shared by politicians who thought it was real. Stephen Colbert, people always thought was—was being serious. 

Green: And you feel like you get slammed for it more because you are writing from a conservative perspective?

Mann: Well, we do! You know, we’ve seen this time and again with fact-checkers and stuff, that there’s a different way in which they fact-check our articles and accuse us of intentionally muddying the waters, of intentionally spreading misinformation, versus the way that they would fact-check other sites in the past, where they would say, “Come on! This is satire, obviously.” And there’s just a totally different tone in the way that they approach us.

(Wind instruments huff and puff in harmony, soft and reflective.)

Green: It’s pretty clear that The Babylon Bee sees themselves as an underdog. They are the opponents of the liberal elite. But what that means is that they’re often telling jokes that other people find offensive. 

Mann: As soon as someone sits there and says, “Oh, you can’t make fun of this class, because that class is oppressed,” that’s going to make me want to tell a joke about that.

Green: Fat jokes, jokes about Black people, jokes about gay people. And I wanted to know: Is there a line for them that they wouldn’t cross in their pursuit of standing against the liberal media elite? 

(The music shifts. The air stops and static shimmers in its place.)

Longoria: That’s after the break.

(The music ends, and the break begins.)

(The sound of a cheering audience crescendos and then cuts out.)

Longoria: So, Emma Green, you’re sitting down talking to Kyle Mann, editor in chief of The Babylon Bee. And, I’m curious, was there a joke that was a clear example of one where “Okay, these guys might’ve crossed a line”?

Green: Yeah, there was one from this new book that Kyle just published.

Green: I want to talk about one of the many drawings in your new book. There’s one in particular that’s at the beginning of Chapter 2, which is on race. I wonder if you remember that particular image. It has three little stick figures. Do you remember the one I’m talking about? 

Mann: No.

Green: Okay. So I’ll—I’ll just describe it to you.

There’s Chapter 2, and “Race” is the heading, and then there’s a little stick figure that’s, like—I don’t know—peach-colored that says, “Bad.” And then one that’s next to it, to the right, that’s gray that says, “Better.” And then there’s one that’s next to it, to the right, that says, “Best,” and it’s black. And I wonder, like, why do you think that’s funny?

Mann: Well, it’s because being peach is not good, or being yellow is not good, or whatever color that is. I—I’m not looking at the drawing, but being gray is better, and then being black—being dark-colored—is best.

Green: Right, but you’re not just talking about that in terms of stick figures, right? Like, you’re talking about that in terms of how progressives think about a hierarchy of race?

Mann: Sure.

Green: So why—why is that funny?

Mann: Um, well, I’m not—I’m not sitting here with the book. And I’m not going to sit here and deconstruct and explain every joke to you. I think what you’re doing is, you’re pulling out these, like, singular jokes in the midst of a book that is written in this voice that says, “Hey, here’s a guide to being woke, and here’s how you get there.”

And there’s one joke that does that in the middle of a chapter on race. And the hope is that, as you’re sitting there reading it, we’re writing in this voice and we’re taking this ridiculous position in order to mock something—in order to make fun of this idea that your skin color matters in terms of your hierarchy, in terms of setting up this oppressed-versus-oppressor class. And so, that’s one joke in the midst of that. And [Stammering.] if you really don’t get the joke, I—I—I don’t—I can’t help you.

Green: Well, I guess what I’m wondering is whether you think that spirit on the left that you’re trying to capture with that cartoon—do you think that that mentality is actually true to liberal or progressive subcultures in America?

Mann: Well, absolutely. And obviously that’s kind of an extreme example. The role of the comedian is to stand there and be the court jester and say, “Hey, like, what the heck are we doing with all this wokeness and cultural Marxism?” and to just stand there and point at it and hold up a mirror to mock it.

Like, it’s not supposed to create this nuanced discussion and make these nuanced points. Um … Do I think everybody on the left thinks that way? No. But the second you say that in comedy, you’re not making a joke anymore. Now you’re just, like, writing a think piece.

Green: I think you made a joke at one point about switching out the steeple of your church, with the cross, for a Black Lives Matter fist.

Mann: Mhm.

Green: And I think it’d be easy to make the mistake—which I assume is a mistake—of thinking that you guys think any kind of reflection on, for example, the history of racism in the Southern Baptist Convention is stupid. And I guess I just wondered, do—do you think it’s stupid?

Mann: Yeah, I think it’s ridiculous to talk about racism at all, obviously, because I made—we made a joke about one thing. 

Yeah, no! I mean, obviously, like, that—this is exactly [Laughs.]—I’m being sarcastic. This is the whole point I’m trying to make about comedy. To go so far to say, like, “Let’s replace the cross that redeems us—that unites humanity, that destroys racism!—let’s take that cross down and replace it with a Black Lives Matter fist” is to make a point about the way that a lot of people who are thinking in kind of a Marxist mindset are trying to approach race in the church. So to read into it, like, “Oh, well, do you care about racism at all? So you’re saying racism is not a problem?” is to not understand how satire works.

Green: Do you feel like your work at The Babylon Bee helps you to live out or uphold what you see as the image of Jesus in the Bible?

Mann: So, would Jesus joke about the things The Babylon Bee jokes about? Yeah, I think—I think Jesus would make fun of the most powerful man in the world, the president of the United States. I think he would do that. Sure. I think he would make fun of—and call to repentance—the LGBTQ community. Sure, I think he would do that. Who controls a huge part of our cultural institutions. I think he’d make fun of major corporations. I think he’d make fun of universities. I—I think he would make fun of those things because the—the real irony right now is that the left controls a ton of our cultural institutions and thinks that they’re oppressed. And so, yeah, we’ll make fun of that for sure. 

And I think that’s certainly in line with the way that Jesus inverted things and turned them on their heads. But, at the same time, I want to be clear that Jesus—I mean, we can’t sit here and map our modern political divide onto Jesus. 

Now I do think, like, maybe what you’re asking is, like, “Is the tone and the—you know, is there something Christian about that?” or is, like, “What is—what is Christian about mockery?” And—and—and there is a place in it for the Bible. But I, you know, I do think there is a danger, too. 

1. S. Lewis famously hated writing The Screwtape Letters because it’s a book that’s written from the perspective and the voice of a demon, and he’s mocking sin, and he’s mocking the way that we’re tempted and the—the way that we reason with ourselves and fall into sin. But he hated writing in the voice of a demon for so long because he started to think like a demon, you know. And I think there is a danger there. 

Like, I think—especially if I’m writing a bunch of political jokes and it’s like, “Oh, how can I make fun of the left right now?” you know—it’s like, [Laughs.] there is something that’s not good about that, I think, uh, on some level. So, just being completely honest and vulnerable with you, it’s like, there’s—there is, uh, a level where, you know, you have to stop yourself and say, “This isn’t good for my soul, you know, on some level.”

(Waves of synthesized noise move up and down, full of light, drifting in and out of focus.)

Longoria: Do you feel like Kyle grappled with the ethical questions of: Is he doing harm with these jokes in any real way?

(Slowly, the music fades out.)

Green: You know, even to him—somebody who clearly thinks his own jokes are pretty funny—he thinks it’s worth sitting back and stopping to reflect on whether his jokes are actually right in the sense of right for a Christian to be telling.

There’s something about humor that, I think, is designed to help us negotiate the margins of culture and what’s acceptable. Humor, comedy, standup has always been around pushing the boundaries a little bit. It’s critiquing—or calling out by name—something that other people have found to be taboo or too sacred.

And in a certain way, the Bee is an important experiment for us in this time, which does feel so serious, and in which people are unable to find common cause with people from a different point of view, by and large. We’re living in really serious times around the consequences of the actions of people with power for the lives of people of color. We’re living through really serious times in terms of Americans’ trust in their government and in each other and in their institutions.

And I think there’s some segment of people who feel very much as though they sit on the opposite side of a fence from people who view these problems radically differently than they do. And those are their enemies. And of course they’re not going to find the same stuff funny! And of course they wouldn’t want to! And I don’t know, I—I think there’s something real and almost bittersweet about that idea, that there probably isn’t humor—especially humor that gets at all political—that Americans could just set aside their differences and find funny together.

(A melancholy electronic line floats down from the rafters, over and around the conversation.)

Longoria: It is really sad. It’s like, strangely, it really is, like, the symptom of the main problem we’re [Laughs.] having right now, which is, like—I feel like, with a joke, you have to have some common ground, right?

Green: Yes.

Longoria: You have to, like, kind of have some shared narrative—

Green: Yes!

Longoria: —that you can both laugh at. And [Chuckles.] it’s so hard right now, uh, to find that.

Green: Like, can we not sit down and just share a good belly laugh at a dumb joke anymore? This is my lament for America.

(A long moment of music, led now by a plucky guitar and enrobed in a cascade of synthesizers like Swarovski crystals.)

Peter Bresnan: This episode was produced by Gabrielle Berbey and Julia Longoria, with reporting by Emma Green. Editing by Emily Botein and Katherine Wells.

Fact-check by Michelle Ciarrocca. Sound design by David Herman, with additional engineering by Joe Plourde.

Music by Tasty Morsels.

(The music continues for a beat, then fades slightly, humming under the narration.)

Longoria: And I just want to drop back in for a second—this is Julia again—and give a special thanks to our co-founder and fearless leader, Katherine Wells. Without Katherine, there would be no Experiment. Sadly, this is her last episode with us. She’s off to create new experiments at a new shop, and we will miss her dearly. Thank you, Katherine, for bringing this team together and for teaching us how to trust ourselves.

(The music swells again.) 

Bresnan: Our team also includes Natalia Ramirez, Jenny Lawton, Tracie Hunte, Alina Kulman, and me, Peter Bresnan. 

You can read Emma’s full interview with Kyle Mann on our website, www.theatlantic.com/experiment.

And if you’re enjoying this podcast, please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.

The Experiment is a co-production of The Atlantic and WNYC Studios.

(Notes waft over and under until the music and the episode both end.)

Copyright © 2021 The Atlantic and New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.