Metro (Ireland)
“The point of comedy and political comedy in particular is to air inconvenient truths. A political joke by definition is something that someone doesn’t want said or doesn’t want laughed at.”
As the creator of Jesus: The Guantanamo Years, for which he sported a crown of thorns and orange jump suit, Abie Philbin Bowman conceived the Messiah as a stand-up comedian returning for a comeback tour, detained at US immigration then dispatched to the infamous Cuban outpost as a bearded Palestinian with an unparalleled history of martyrdom. So he’s had plenty of opportunity to reflect upon comics’ role as agitators of free speech and the right to offend. Especially as his current show, Eco-Friendly Jihad, is even more controversial.
As a talk radio host on i105-107’s The Third i and self-confessed “hardcore political junkie” who recently sought the views of the Ku Klux Klan on Barack Obama’s presidency, Bowman has, coincidentally, been subjected to delays himself at American customs, endured a bomb hoax while appearing in Belfast and just generally riled conservative opinion. “I couldn’t believe it when the DUP criticised me for dressing in orange and talking about Jesus,” he admits. “It was such good publicity.”
Apparently, the show attracted its best response in Pakistan. “It was phenomenal,” enthuses the comedian, who is the son of political broadcaster John Bowman. “Whatever you say in London, Boston, Dublin or Edinburgh, you’re never going to be arrested for stand-up. But there I was talking about innocent people being locked away without trial just as they were banging up judges, lawyers and anyone speaking out against the government. What’s more, Jesus is a prophet in Islam, so to mock him is blasphemous. Thankfully, my premise is that he’s actually a lovely bloke, smart, charismatic and horrendously misunderstood by those fighting wars in his name.
“If I’d made jokes about Allah I would have had a frosty reception. But while I was mocking fundamentalism, I got the sense that they weren’t laughing at Christianity but drawing parallels. We’re in a unique position in Ireland to understand the Islamic experience, because we’ve also had extremely conservative religion until quite recently. We’ve had our entire culture labelled with the badge of terrorism because of a tiny few who most thought were violent thugs and extremists. And we understand the reality. In places like Belfast and Israel, people can be quite blasé in some ways about terrorism, they’re like ‘yeah, it happens but the chances of being killed are tiny’.”
Having completed a masters thesis on comedy as a weapon of non-violent struggle, Bowman namechecks Michael Moore, Mark Thomas and the late Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiwa as noteworthy exponents. But he believes the most successful have been the likes of Morgan Spurlock taking on McDonalds in the film Super Size Me and Stetson Kennedy, who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s and countered the group’s recruitment by relaying humiliating details of their rituals to writers of the Superman radio serials.
Although Jesus has invariably united audiences against the inhumanity of Guantanamo, Eco-Friendly Jihad is proving more divisive. Portraying an environmentalist who converts to al Qaeda, Bowman introduces the notion that carbon rapacious Western lifestyles are now the gravest threat to our existence and that their complete destruction is radical but necessary.
“The grim irony is that if bin Laden and the Taliban took over America tomorrow, they’d save half a million lives a year through banning alcohol and tobacco under Sharia law,” he points out. “ And if they wanted to kill as many as the tobacco industry does, they’d have to hijack 580 planes over 12 months.”
“There’s also a fundamental contradiction between the idea of making poverty history and halting climate change. Making poverty history is about transforming Africa into Sweden and stopping climate change is about transforming Europe into Afghanistan. We’ve all grown up with the belief that to be good people we should try to save lives, help others out of poverty and protect the planet. But we’ve gotten to a point now with 6.5billion on Earth where those things are actually mutually exclusive. So something has to give but nobody wants to talk about it. Which is precisely why it’s a great subject for comedy.
