Before the Babylon Bee

The Babylon Bee—”America’s newspaper of record,” as Glenn Reynolds likes to put it—has established itself as a premier humor and political satire site of our time. They’ve pretty much put The Onion out of business, though one reason for this is The Onion slowly succumbed to wokery, and hence has trouble in the humor department. (Check it out if you want; it’s pretty weak these days.)

The Babylon Bee’s proprietors are evangelical Christians, and therefore insulated from humor-choking wokery. In fact mocking wokery is about half their trade.

A fold out cover from back in the day. . .

When I first came across the Babylon Bee several years ago, my mind immediately ran back to a predecessor of sorts, the Wittenburg Door, a Christian satire magazine founded in the early 1970s that often carried serious commentary and interviews along with madcap humor. Its heyday was in the 1970s and 1980s, and it still exists today, having been taken over some time in the 1990s by Joe Bob Briggs, though it is not nearly the quirky and iconoclastic publication it once was.

In its early days it was a shoestring operation based out of San Diego, where our newest contributor here, Lloyd Billingsley, often appeared in The Door‘s pages under a pseudonym, “H. Winfield Tutte.” I vividly recall, well before Lloyd and I first met through David Horowitz (that’s a funny story all by itself), his savage and hilarious takedown of Frankie Schaffer’s pathetic and embarrassing attempt at a Christian revenge film, Wired to Kill (1986). Box office gross: $193,000, on a $3.8 million budget. They didn’t have Rotten Tomatoes back then, but OMG if they had! Frankie Schaffer later became a disgraceful leftist, repudiating his father’s worthy life work and legacy.

The lede:

Larry Olivier, Fred Fellini, Woody Allen and myself were at Cannes quaffing Dom Perignon and making deals. Just as Jessica Lange dropped by to plead for a role in my new film, A Is Not Non-A, the phone rang. It was those wackos from The Door.

It seems some guy named Franky Schaffer was having his film screened at the Academy, and being a tasteless bumpkins from El Cajon and Yreka, they wanted me to review it. I said, “Mike, I’m an artist, not a critic.” But he accused me of being pretentious. I said, “Pretentious? Moi?” Then he threatened not only to pull my film school scholarship, but to cancel my Door subscription. I knew I was whipped, and caught the next Concorde to El Lay.

On the way over, I read Franky’s book, Addicted to Mediocrity, the thesis of which seemed to be that most artists, writers, and movie makers were mediocre hacks who needed to take lessons from Franky. Damn, I thought, this dude must be one hell of an artist to make those kind of statements.

And the fun only builds from there, culminating in this beatdown near the end:

After the show, Franky was surrounded by sycophants. I headed for the free champagne to soothe my battered psyche. [It really was a terrible movie. I saw it in the theater, to my great regret.] At the bar I heard a fellow say, “I want to meet the financial backers of this film, because I’ve got a bridge to sell them.” That comes close, but another chap had it right: “It’s a good thing Francis Schaffer died when he did, because this film would have killed him.”

I still have a few back issues, but can’t find one of my favorite send-ups, which imagined what a line of Christian-inspired designer jeans would look like. This was back in the Jordache, Brooke Shields/Calvin Klein jeans days of the late 1970s and early 1980s; I’m glad that fad want the way of the mullet, restoring the status quo ante of Lee and Levi Strauss jeans. Going from memory, I recall a few of the better ones:

• Jerry Falwell Jeans: Two right legs, and no zipper.
• Billy Graham Jeans: They loosen up with age.
• Mark Hatfield Jeans: They look like jeans, but they’re really slacks.

This sendup/mashup of TV Guide and the church periodical Guideposts is worth a close look (you may need to enlarge it—and it helps to know some of the inside-baseball controversies of the time, like the civil war inside Baptist Theological Seminary in Dallas):

And you’ve got to admit they were way ahead of the curve with this cartoon from a 1989 issue:

Some other greatest hits: