Nothing Is Less Funny Than Scientologists Doing Stand-Up Comedy

All the great men of history have had their escape valves, their private passions. Einstein played the violin. Disraeli wrote romantic novels. Napoleon used to rub two ferrets covered in sulphur together until one of them caught fire. So it is with the head of Narconon International, Scientology’s notorious drug rehabiliation wing.

His name is Clark Carr. And when he isn’t running an e-meter of pure bullshit over the vulnerable, Clark is part of a comedy troupe called Laughworks, along with the woman who used to voice Cubbi in Gummi Bears, and some other people who aren’t trying to retroactively ruin your childhood.

Laughworks have been taking their laugh-an-hour routines around the Scientological world for the last decade, but of late they’d gone quiet. Clark in particular has been busy defending his organisation from charges they routinely took out credit cards in the names of people they were supposed to be helping. All that changed, though, last Tuesday, when Stand Up For Valley Org took to the stage in LA. As the name suggests, it was an entire evening of Scientological comedy.

The San Fernando Valley Scientologists are struggling to fundraise for an "Ideal Org": which is a deluxe type of Church, "designed to cater for all the spiritual and physical needs of members", apparently. To that end, the San Fernando Scientology crew have already put on bowling nights and sold doorknobs. And now, they have thrown what must surely be their final card into the ring: comedy.

Scientological comedy, mind: which means no swearing, no sexual references, just a bunch of high-ranking Scientologists stood in a hall trying to tickle your funny-bone. Happily, they bagged a big Scientology trump card: The Voice Of Bart Simpson, Nancy Cartwright. Plus meh stand-up Elvis Winterbottom, poor MC ss yy and downright awful comedy songster Evan Wecksell. Laughworks were second-from-top of the bill.

There’s something about Laughworks that is not only unfunny, it’s kind of powerful in its unfunniness. I guess it’s what addicts would call a moment of clarity: the bit where sobriety hits you like a glass brick full of human shit. Where you see not only the futility of your own choices, but the futility of your personal universe, and resolve to change yourself at an atomic level.

How unfunny?

This unfunny:

Yes. "A waitress recites a man's breakfast order"-unfunny. At least it would feel more car crash if the participants themselves didn’t have that blank sheen to them: that emotional impermeability that’s always been the hallmark of their kind. Somehow, it both saves it, and makes it completely unwatchable: there’s just nothing human inside to feast on. Not a morsel of self-doubt, nor a flickering pilot light of human engagement. They load the program. They execute the program. Program executed.

What else is in the Laughworks repertoire?

Well, there is a sketch about their witness protection programme.

It seems like, somewhere in the Church verboten list, between curse words and front-bottoms, punchlines have been redacted. But skits that remind people of the most common media tactic for interviewing cult survivors are perfectly OK.

What about mobsters? “You a wise-guy, I’m a wise-a-guy,” that sort of thing? Like pasta, it’s never going to knock your socks off, but it’s seldom-disappointing workaday fare – I mean, there's just something inherently comedic about the cadence of mafia accents, isn't there?

Hmm. I can’t help thinking the Dolmio puppets caught Italian-American life at a more realistic angle.

Clark Carr is a tall bald man you will see here. The picture was taken in his early days, and features Clark telling an addict that he has a scientific method that will liberate him from his drug prison.

And after that high comedy, his sketches:

If comedy is the ratcheting-up of a superficially logical paradigm towards a counter-intuitive end, then this is certainly comedy.

If comedy is funny, then this isn’t that.

Unfortunately even Laughworks’ piece de resistance is stranded in similar territory. It strives to blow your mind, but instead lands in that awkward and very under-populated middle ground between Jean-Paul Sartre and Roy "Chubby" Brown:

“Any resemblance with the human condition is of course coincidental.” That’s kind of profound when you think about it, isn’t it? And their Scientological audience know it only too well. Note the knowing chuckle they offer: not so much laughter as collective affirmation that they’ve cracked it. That they've figured out what the really big secret to it all is, buddy. As the sketch suggests, we’re all just trapped inside a box. The box being our insecurities. And some of us, we escape the box. But others… well, some of us will just never understand. We'll probably just keep on being a failure all our miserable lives. Your GSOH might comfort you now, but ultimately no one can hear you laugh in space when you're flying off in a big rocket to Xenu.

Anyway, there you go: Evidence, if it were needed, that Scientologists make terrible stand-up comedians.

Follow Gavin on Twitter: @hurtgavinhaynes

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