'Religulous': O, He of Little Faith

Maher Documentary Goes for the Laughs, Not Enlightenment

Bill Maher doesn't believe in God, but he has a lot of funny ideas about religion. They will either make you howl in outrage or laugh out loud as you watch "Religulous," the irreverent television host's globe-trotting, full-frontal assault on Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

When a Christian sex counselor tells him that no one is born gay, Maher deadpans: "Have you ever met Little Richard?" When U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), a self-described evangelical Christian, talks about the Garden of Eden, Maher good-naturedly replies: "It worries me that people who are running my country . . . believe in talking snakes."

Maher can be entertaining, smart and caustic about religion, as viewers of HBO's "Real Time With Bill Maher" are aware. He's convinced that religion -- regardless of the particular faith -- fosters violence and ignorance. Director Larry Charles, who gave us the merciless "Borat," is a good match for him, bringing the same eye for the sublimely ridiculous.

Consider a little moment in the film in which a carpet steam-cleaner cranks up in the middle of an interview in the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem. Charles cuts from the interview to the machine thrumming away over the vast carpet, vrroom vrroom, clean carpets for Allah -- a delightfully absurd mix of piety and practicality. There's also the imam who interrupts an interview with Maher to answer a text message. Mock subtitles pop up: The imam plotting via text to kill Maher after the interview.

LOL!, he supposedly signs off.

Maher and Charles clearly had a blast making the tour that became the movie, bopping from the Vatican to Orlando to Jerusalem to Amsterdam and so on, with Maher tweaking Jews, Muslims and Christians (and Mormons and Scientologists) about their faiths. (Animists and Eastern religions, for whatever reason, get a free pass.) It has the feel of those "Tonight Show" gimmicks where Jay Leno goes out on a street corner and records the dumb answers that pedestrians have to simple questions. Maher, whose mother was Jewish and father was Catholic, grew up going to church, he says, but lost all faith.

"I'm big on doubt," he says.

Maher is clearly taking a page from Mark Twain, another doubter who launched himself to fame with "The Innocents Abroad," a satire of a religious pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Like Twain, Maher travels and asks questions and has a scornful view of biblical curiosities like the aforementioned talking snake or the big fish that swallowed Jonah. He's not nice to everyone he talks to, and when he targets the violent, homophobic and bigoted failings of religious excess, he is often laceratingly funny.

But one of the rules of satire is that you can't mock things you don't understand. Maybe another one should be that comedians shouldn't take themselves too seriously. "Religulous" starts developing fault lines when it becomes clear that Maher's view of religious faith is based on a sophomoric reading of the Scriptures (he ridicules people for reading the Bible literally, then proceeds to do exactly that). He can't seem to comprehend that many people as smart as himself believe in some sort of divine Creator, even when they can't answer all of life's mysteries.

Instead, he prefers to avoid the smart and the sophisticated -- or to quote them debunking fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible. He spends time with an overdressed preacher who's a former soul singer, a rabbi who is skeptical about the Holocaust, a Christian who believes that humans lived with dinosaurs.

"You're smart people," he tells guys at a truck stop chapel when it is clear he thinks them anything but. He can't get into a serious theological conversation because he's too busy baiting the guy who plays Jesus in an Orlando theme park called "the Holy Land Experience."

"Grow up," Maher admonishes viewers at the close, when he gets alarmingly serious. It might be good advice for him to follow -- but only if he can bring along his sense of humor. No reason to leave that behind.

Religulous (101 minutes, at area theaters) is rated R for language and sexual material.