I think he may have missed the memo himself, but God, after all, is dead. This makes it harder and harder to listen to the emissaries of his Word with anything approximating sincerity, or more exactly, it’s hard to listen at all. It’s a tough job slanging obsolete product. Pastors and preachers might as well be abacus salesmen, though this, frankly, sounds like an easier gig.

So where do we turn for the gospel? Comedy. We live in a Golden Age of Funny. Whether it’s Louis C.K. ranging from the lowly zone of the bag-of-dicks joke to the epistemological heights, Sarah Silverman poignantly exposing the hypocrisy of privilege with her faux-naivete and cute-girl-gone-crass routine, or Aziz Ansari elucidating the folly of dating via text, it’s comedians that we turn to, not just to laugh, but to understand our ever-changing and almost totally insane contemporary culture.

And the best part about this Golden Age of Funny is that it’s not just on HBO and Comedy Central and Youtube, it’s across the street or down the block, sometimes it’s even calling from inside the house. Between the stand-up clubs, improv companies, and rogue sketch weirdos, local funny is everywhere. At 9:30 pm this Friday, Shady Shores, the Comedy duo of Nolan Culver and Joey Cruz, are bringing back their monthly comedy showcase to the eccentric and lovely stalwart of outsider culture, Cafe Racer. Brett Hamil and Matt Eriksen are featured, and you should go because you probably need to laugh more.

The Monarch Review recently featured Mr. Hamil eating a sandwich and answering questions. You can read that here, and you can watch his very funny video job application below.