Via The Sinner’s Guide: Mike Huckabee’s phone call from God.
To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen: Governor, you’re no Bob Newhart.
The occasion here was a 2004 Republican Governor’s Association dinner. Huckabee, a former Baptist minister, was called upon to give an invocation — that is, to offer a prayer. Instead, he answers his ringing cell phone and pretends to be responding to a call from God.
The comedy here is bewildering.
“God” asks for President Bush’s autograph on behalf, Huckabee says, of Samson. Get it? Samson’s a Bible character, so he must be up in Heaven with God and, like everyone in Heaven, a big fan of George W. Bush. Or something. The joke wouldn’t work no matter which biblical character he’d plugged in there — obsequious hagiography is inherently unfunny — but one still has to ask: Why Samson?
The joke seems intended as praise for Bush, but the Samson reference turns this on its head. If you untangle this joke from Huckabee’s clumsy delivery, the basic structure of it is something like: “President Bush is so _____________ that Samson asked for his autograph!” Yet the story of Samson doesn’t provide any flattering possibilities for filling in the blank there. (Bush is so … fond of prostitutes? Bad at riddles? Enthusiastic about suicide-bombing?) The joke is so poorly conceived you almost have to think it’s meant as some kind of meta-joke at Bush’s expense.
Even worse than the “comedy” here is the trap Huckabee sets for himself of having to deliver a verbatim message from God. He might have avoided this if he had concluded by quoting some bit of scripture — “What’s that, Lord? You want us to act justly and to love mercy and walk humbly with you?” That, at least, wouldn’t have involved putting words into God’s mouth, which is what Huckabee wound up doing with his conclusion, in which he says that God, via cell phone, tells the Republican Governors to:
“Take care of the Family, and Marriage, and the people of America, and all the people, and the children.”
Thus making God sound like an inarticulate contestant in some kind of Republican beauty pageant, spouting random buzzwords in the hopes that one of them might be the right answer.
The creepiest thing about this whole ill-conceived comedy-routine-in-lieu-of-prayer is that it never occurred to Huckabee or to anyone in his audience that if you’ve got God on the line, maybe you should ask some questions.
All of which is to say that this here’s an open thread with the starting-point topic being: What would you ask?
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