Some of the early BCs were extremely funny, and very subtle. I remember following that strip for a long time, and my friends were all fans. But somewhere along the line he just stopped being funny, almost embarassingly so. I assumed the creative juices just stopped flowing after a while (other cartoonists have felt this coming and wisely dropped out while still at their creative peak). I hadn't realized Hart had a conversion experience. The born-again thing explains a lot.

I believe humor is the recognition, indeed, the celebration, of the absurdity of existence, and a conventional religious viewpoint is all about the meaningfulness of existence. Humor and religion, particularly fundamentalism, do not seem to be highly correlated. I first realized this when I saw an illustration for a Playboy magazine article of the traditional image of Jesus--neatly trimmed hippy hair and beard, handsome Anglo-Saxon features, laughing. The artist had shown him with his head thrown back, enjoying a hearty and healthy laugh, as if he had just heard a great joke. For a moment it struck me as jarring, disconcerting, almost deliberately irreverent and insulting. I realized that in scripture, Jesus never laughs. In fact, no one in the Bible ever seems to laugh except when they are mocking someone.