Me of Little Faith

Starred review from April 21, 2008
Readers already familiar with Black as a loud-mouthed regular on The Daily Show
will be delighted to find he rants just as well on the page as he does in person. Here, he homes in on religion, which he thinks is taken too seriously and therefore is “open to ridicule.” Black may not care a whit about propriety, but he’s serious about waxing comedic about every religion-related angle he can dig up. No one is safe from his dark humor—the Catholic Church, Mormons, people who commit suicide in the name of faith, Jews, and of course Jesus and God are popular topics. Black’s essays consistently deliver zingers, like his speculation in “The Rapture” about how, “If Jesus returns to earth... he better have one hell of a website,” since he’d have to compete with all the “drug-addled young starlets”—not to mention online porn. For those not easily offended, who can stomach the F-word every other paragraph or so, Black’s irreverence is laugh-out-loud funny. The chapters are short, some extremely so, and perfect for a good laugh—before bedtime prayers, of course.

Black, a well-known writer and comedian, examines religion in the acerbic, irascible manner of his stand-up shows, starting with Judaism, the faith he was born into. He tends to reject organized religion but not spirituality. There's real feeling and thought in his cynicism and salty rants, but he's still, at times, laugh-until-you-cry funny. His delivery is important, if not crucial, to that effect--reading this book in print would not be the same. At the end of the program, he performs--with cowriter Mark Linn-Baker--a short play from 1981, which treats comedy as a religion. It's so amateurishly awkward and unfunny that it almost spoils the experience of the book. But that aside, there's both substance and strong humor here. W.M. 2009 Audies Finalist (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine