Fun with fundamentalists - Column

Christian Century, Oct 13, 1993 by Martin E. Marty

THE FUNDAMENTALIST joke contest, announced in the August 11-18 issue, gave no deadline, so entries keep trickling in, and maybe a really good one will have come in since our staff was subjected to them a few weeks ago.

That sentence implies that no really good one has appeared. But there are some woebegone "pretty good ones," or just enough above average, as they say in Lake Wobegon, to merit mention.

First, let me explain the ground rules. We wanted no cruel jokes, not being in a bashing mood; nor liberal-condescension jokes, feeling insufficiently superior or sufficiently unsuperior to fundamentalists to take that route. We had low expectations. Few religious jokes do well even orally and few jokes of any sort do well in print. Experience had shown that limericks rarely work this side of Catholicism-Orthodoxy-Anglicanism. If we spotted a translation of an ethnic joke, we were not moved. If more than two people submitted the same joke, we were inclined to toss it out on the assumption that it is making the rounds and needs no momentum from us. There were scores that played with the syllables of the word--"fun," "dam" and "mental" (you can draw the inferences)--and they were not prizewinners. Many on our staff are too young to have heard old clunkers, but hear these as new clunkers. James Wall and I are senior staff members but hear too few clunkers to have caught all that may be in this batch.

Some that merited consideration:

* for a bumper sticker: "Fundamentalists Do It with Fervor!" (Jim Gearhart of Paducah, Kentucky)

* many variations on "Why don't fundamentalists have sex standing up? Because it might lead to dancing." (Jim Hollister of Norwich, New York; John E. Burciaga of Clearwater, Florida; Robert Fletcher Smith of Watertown, New York; Jeff Mackey of Utica, New York)

* many light-bulb jokes (see next weeks column).

* the one about the bartender who wouldn't pour a drink for the fundamentalist "unless it was the end of the world" and the fundamentalists response: "Pour that drink; Armageddon thirsty." (Kathleen Kahl of Wanpun, Wisconsin)

* some overly literary, overly denominational ones, such as the line from iconoclast William Brann of Waco in 1898 after he'd suffered from Baptist proto-fundamentalism: "It's entirely possible that we are not holding our Baptists under water long enough." (Mimi McLoughlin of U.S. News and Wodd Report)

* many versions of the one about the fundamentalist preacher who wrote a book and modestly advertised it by praying, to the general effect, "0 God, who has also written an infallible book..." (Perry H. Biddie, Jr., of Nashville, Tennessee; Edward R. Kappeler of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)

* serious ones like this one, told, they tell us, by Bob Jones, or Bob Jones, Jr., or Bob Jones III, all of Bob Jones University (out of whose stylish coffee mug I am drinking as I write). Remember that the Joneses, rounding family of a truly fundamentalist university, do not like evangelicals, about whom this contest was not. Still, we pass it on: "An evangelical is someone who says to a liberal, 'I'll agree to call you a Christian if you agree to call me a scholar."' (Fred Clark, Ardmore, Pennsylvania)

Thanks to all who submitted jokes. Next week: the best, or least worst, fundamentalist jokes.