John Safran takes on world's religions

John Safran

The voice of God, which boomingly accompanies the introduction to John Safran vs God (C4, tonight, 9.30), can't be the voice of John Safran. This is because Safran has a funny squeaky little voice; how you imagine a mouse on helium might sound. It is a cartoon character's voice and is no doubt partly how he gets away with this stuff: he is not a threatening sort of presence.

The stuff he gets away with is taking the piss out of religion. He is an equal-opportunity piss-taker, which is another reason anyone would have to be an idiot to be offended by him.

What could, say, the Catholic church get upset about? That Zen Buddhism gets more air time in which to be giggled at? Well, possibly.

Actually Safran is quite respectful, in a dim-witted "gee shucks what weird stuff they get up to" sort of way and gets hit with a big stick many times for his trouble.

What he came to realise, he said in episode one, was that what white western Buddhists were ignoring was "the best aspect of Buddhism is beating people with sticks".

Some of the gags work better than others. Going to Britain to see how difficult it is to get a fatwa placed on another Aussie comic, Rove, was inspired. Rove, apparently, although who knows, once bumped Safran from his show. For Pink. So if anyone deserved to have a fatwa placed on them it was Rove.

Safran managed this by showing the senior judge of the British Shariah Court a book written by Rove, called Satanic Verses II. Also, a picture of Rove wearing a burqa and underpants.

"He make himself fool," proclaimed the judge. And note, he said, he showed his underpants, and his underpants were ... yellow. Righto, this guy deserves a double fatwa.

Rove was let off the fatwa, we were told, because Safran owned up to having faked the evidence. Except the judge appeared to think he'd put a fatwa on some other guy called Dove. I'm worried about this Dove character.

This was funny, and it showed the idiocy of all this fatwa-ing.

About as idiotic as lefty people who live in Melbourne and believe that the Aborigines should be given their land back. Except, of course, if your house happens to be on their land.

Safran got a vanload of Aborigines, got them to dress up like, aah, Aborigines - they didn't "look Aboriginal enough" in their civvies - then sent them to knock on the door of a house sporting a sign saying: "We are proud to acknowledge the Wurundjeri people as the traditional people of this land."

We're them, said the Wurundjeri people. Could they come in, have a cup of tea and maybe stay for the day, or a day or two? The people who lived there hadn't put up the sign but they were good-natured enough to let the traditional land owners (although not the camera) in for a cup of tea.

It's all pretty good-natured; some of it is very funny and the timing couldn't be better. There's not a lot of laughing about religion going on just at the moment.