A Dog in Sheep's Clothing

Some say that anger is the root of comedy. Underneath the greatest comic novels — like Huckleberry Finn, Bleak House, and Pride and Prejudice — lies a solid foundation of wrath.

So a writer who makes it his business to poke fun at Christianity needs to be careful. He should take great pains not to sound as if he’s being bitchy about a deity in whom he still, secretly, believes.

“Bitchy” is the operative word here. You’ve read those atheist bloggers who blaspheme incessantly because they’re pissed off at their god for not existing. Their ranting and raving about Jesus is not convincing, nor is it funny. It’s pathetic.

Which brings me to Christopher Moore’s Lamb. I suspect that I’m about to become mighty unpopular with some of the other members of the Nonbelieving Literati, because I found Lamb almost impossible to stomach. It’s allegedly a humorous novel, but I didn’t laugh once. It was kinda like the book equivalent of a Three Stooges short, complete with all the subsurface cruelty, except that there were only two stooges instead of three. Jesus was Moe, and Biff, the narrator, was Larry and Curly. There was a ton of verbal eye-poking.

In Lamb, Christopher Moore fills in the “lost” thirty years of Jesus’s life. The Christ’s constant companion on his search for “truth” is his childhood pal, the aforementioned Biff. I suppose the inappropriate name is supposed to elicit giggles, but I just found it — not unlike the rest of the book — unbearably stupid. And sad.

Biff is sarcastic enough (he claims to have invented sarcasm), but he’s never, ever witty. The “jokes” that Moore puts into his mouth are all on the level of high-school locker-room exchanges. They involve inane observations about sex, food, work, and life, as well as pointlessly sacrilegious critiques of his friend. Now, I’m a big fan of sacrilege when it’s clever. But as I said, this was Three Stooges stuff. I felt like I was reading a troubled teenage boy’s blog.

Moore tries to appeal to bible-literate readers. Throughout the novel, he sprinkles references to minor passages in the gospels, passages with which the average reader might not be familiar. Now, truth be told, I’ve read those silly things, all four of them plus a few apocryphal ones, at least half a dozen times. They contain far more belly laughs than Lamb.

According to Moore’s tale, Jesus spent most of his young adulthood searching for truth via various versions of Eastern mysticism. Through Biff, the author tries to sound condescending about this spiritual quest, but you can tell, underneath the cynicism: Moore really digs that claptrap. His Jesus becomes an orientalized holy man. At that point, for me, the book turned into one huge gag, not in the comedic sense, but in the esophageal one. Lamb, which had never been particularly appetizing, became absolutely nauseating.

When I arrived at the unhappy happy ending, I was angry at Moore for turning into a serious, albeit unorthodox, Christian. Later, I felt sorry for him. To have that much antagonism and contempt for a god in whom you actually believe must be emotionally wrenching. That was Biff’s problem throughout the book; that was Moore’s problem when he wrote it; and, for all I know, that’s the problem shared by many readers who are tickled by this third-rate literary slapstick sketch.

But it’s not my problem. Never having believed in the biblical Jesus, I have no reason to feel any animosity toward him. He’s a cartoon character, like Bugs and Daffy. (Duck season. No, rabbit season. No, son-of-god season.) As drawn by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, he entertains me, and sometimes makes me laugh. Lamb did neither.