While flipping through TV channels the other night, VeggieTales writer Mike Nawrocki discovered an absolutely hilarious preacher.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re not talking about the big hair, molasses and glitz humor that makes so many televangelists laugh-to-keep-from-crying funny. No, this preacher was using humor to communicate. He knew his people and he knew how to make them laugh.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was very, very funny. But he was doing this in his own pulpit for his own people,\u201d said Nawrocki, who is \u201cLarry the Cucumber\u201d for 25 million Veggie video buyers. \u201cI don\u2019t know if this preacher would have felt free to be that funny anywhere else. I don\u2019t know if he could have been funny outside his church.\u201d<\/p>\n
Making ordinary people laugh is serious business to Nawrocki and his colleagues at Big Idea Productions, an independent company near Chicago built on the silly idea of vegetables acting out Bible stories. The twist in this tale is that the VeggieTales people have created a brand of humor that sells in mainstream superstores as well as in small Christian outlets. They don\u2019t just joke with the choir.<\/p>\n
Now Larry the Cucumber, Bob the Tomato, Junior Asparagus and the virtual vegetables have jumped to the big screen, where they face the long knives of secular critics and consumers. \u201cJonah: A VeggieTales Movie\u201d opens this weekend in 1,100 theaters nationwide. Once again, the Big Idea team is chasing kids 8-years-old and younger, while wooing parents with in-jokes about Monty Python, \u201cJaws,\u201d \u201cLawrence of Arabia,\u201d \u201cThe Blues Brothers\u201d and pop culture.<\/p>\n
Industry experts are watching to see if the VeggieTales are truly funny \u2014 not church sanctuary funny, but suburban multiplex funny.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe all know that Christians have trouble with humor,\u201d said Nawrocki. \u201cPart of the problem is that all humor is irreverent, in one way or another. But the biggest problem Christians have with comedy is that they\u2019re afraid of offending other Christians. So much of humor is rooted in hard truths and Christians are not fond of hard truths, especially if they\u2019re about the church itself.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nawrocki and Phil \u201cBob the Tomato\u201d Vischer have wrestled with these issues ever since they were tossed out of Bible college in the mid-1980s. Soon, they were combining their puppetry and comedy skills with computer animation and dreaming about taking on Mickey Mouse.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, they watched their hip friends turn into pastors and youth ministers.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe implicit message I received growing up was that full-time ministry was the only valid Christian service,\u201d said Vischer, the founder of Big Idea. \u201cYoung Christians were to aspire to be either ministers or missionaries. \u2026 But I wanted to make movies. And from the movies and TV shows I watched growing up and the influence they had on me, I figured God could use a filmmaker or two, regardless of what anyone else said.\u201d<\/p>\n
The key, said Vischer, is that he was raised in a culture in which everybody went to church. Then he ventured into the harsh world of advertising and corporate media and he had to reach people who never went to church. When he created Big Idea, Vischer was determined to create humor that blended both cultures.<\/p>\n
Vischer and Nawrocki wanted to make videos, and now movies, that were openly religious, but not aimed at pews. They did not, in other words, want to settle for making \u201cChristian movies.\u201d As another Christian in the entertainment industry, David McFadzean of the sitcom \u201cHome Improvement,\u201d once quipped, the typical \u201cChristian movie\u201d is very similar to a porno movie. \u201d It has terrible acting. It has a tiny budget. And you know exactly how it\u2019s going to end.\u201d<\/p>\n
That quote is funny, yet painfully true, said Vischer.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe seem to think every artistic expression by a Christian artist, to be valid, must end with an \u2018altar call.\u2019 It\u2019s the equivalent of saying every valid football play must end in the end zone,\u201d he said. Thus, \u201cmany of our efforts are so philosophically aggressive that they read more like war propaganda than entertainment, effectively limiting our audience to only the most committed faithful.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe end result is that our work and our worldview have little or no impact on the broader culture. We\u2019ve effectively taken ourselves out of the game.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
While flipping through TV channels the other night, VeggieTales writer Mike Nawrocki discovered an absolutely hilarious preacher. We\u2019re not talking about the big hair, molasses and glitz humor that makes so many televangelists laugh-to-keep-from-crying funny. No, this preacher was using humor to communicate. He knew his people and he knew how to make them laugh. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":610,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[205,341,444,1542,905],"class_list":["post-1199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-christianity-and-arts","tag-evangelicalism","tag-humor","tag-movies","tag-veggietales"],"yoast_head":"\n