Brian Keith Dalton, ‘Mr. Deity’, in Conversation

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/02/20

Brian Keith Dalton is Mr. Deity in the show “Mr. Deity.” RationalWiki describes the web series as follows: “Mr. Deity is a series of comedy shorts based on the antics of God (Mr. Deity), Jesus (Jesse), Lucifer (Lucy), and God’s assistant (Larry, who is not the Holy Ghost). The series is written by Brian Keith Dalton, and distributed via YouTube, Crackle, and the iTunes Store. The scripts are based on Biblical stories, current events, and domestic life in Heaven and Hell. The overall theme is that of a family business in which Mr. Deity is the CEO/patriarch. The show is written from a comedic and skeptical perspective, and has featured Michael Shermer and PZ Myers as guests.”

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, today, we are here with Brian Dalton, who is the Mr. Deity. He has played this persona for 17 years.

Brian Keith Dalton: Yes.

Jacobsen: Doing it for so long, can you recall the origin of that concept, not the idea of God but of the comedy around it, framing it humorously and educationally?

Dalton: The irony, the comedy comes from the tragedy of the tsunami in the Indian Ocean that destroyed 250,000 people or something. I cannot remember. It is just a ridiculous number. Within an hour, a quarter million people are done. How do you get comedy out of that? My brother-in-law at the time was Sri Lankan. He lost all kinds of people. He was Mormon at the time. Talking to him seemed like the strangest thing to me. That he could somehow find a way to find God in all of this horror. I started thinking about natural disasters: Why do you need natural disasters as a God of the universe? Crap is going on all the time [Laughing]. Now, you will pile on with natural disasters [Laughing]. Why do you even need that? With that grew the first episode of Mr. Deity, “Mr. Deity and the Evil,” where Mr. Deity and his long-suffering assistant, Larry…

Jacobsen: …[Laughing]…

Dalton: …are going over all the evils that will be allowed to flourish in this new universe that he created. Larry says to him. “We talked to the boys in R&D. We don’t need the natural disasters complement.” He says, “No, we need it.” I wrote that in 2004. So, technically, this is 20 years.

Jacobsen: Congratulations.

Dalton: I want to say March of 2004. I shot, wrote, and directed a film in 2002. The two lead actors were terrific. They were so good together. They were both groundlings, which is like our Second City. Los Angeles’s Second City Comedy Troupe, my idea was for them to play Mr. Deity and Larry. They didn’t want to have anything to do with it. So, I spent two years talking to my other actor friends, putting it out there, and seeing if they were interested in doing it. I figured. Okay, we’re not doing it. Jimbo (Marshall) and I were doing production. Jimbo is the guy who plays Larry. We had this terrible 18-hour shoot in Santa Barbara. We were driving home. We were so worn out and beat. Jimbo says, “Why don’t we shoot those Mr. Deity things you’ve been writing? Shoot them, see how they come out?” I said, “How do we do that?” He says, ‘I play Larry. You play, Mr. Deity. See how it turns out.” We shot the first episode 3 times because I thought I was terrible. I still was unhappy with the performance. I lived with it. We shot a couple more. Another show launched almost around the day we launched because Jimbo called me. He said, “You’ve got to put up these Mr. Deity episodes.” Because we shot them but hadn’t put them up, people would think we’re ripping them off. So, we released the first three episodes in one shot. 

They took off. There was a mention on Digg. Is Digg still around? I don’t know. 

Jacobsen: I don’t know. 

Dalton: It was like a news aggregator site where people could post stories about things they liked, and others would chime in. That is what I did. We started getting views like crazy. YouTube put it on the homepage. YouTube worked very differently back then. It took off. Then, we got calls from Sony and all the media companies looking to buy the show. We did the second season with Sony. It didn’t work out too well for us. They were hoping to make a YouTube competitor called Crackle. It didn’t go anywhere. We got trapped in that for two years because there was much wringing about whether we do another season with them. We got the show back and had to rebuild entirely because Sony wouldn’t let us on YouTube simultaneously. That was tough. It was probably a wrong move on my part.

Jacobsen:  Those two 2-year periods, the one writing the material and looking for people and the other one stuck with that particular company, and what sounds like a minor debacle or disagreement with Sony. For those who don’t know who are in not media, how does that feel going through a 2-year process twice?

Dalton: Many of my actor friends didn’t want to be typecast. They thought they were going to typecast. Also, they thought the material was too risky at the time. Because Dawkins’s book came out in 2006?

Jacobsen: Late to mid-2000s. 

Dalton: Hitchens hadn’t published when we launched. I know that. I think Sam came up a little earlier, actually, in 2005. Dan hadn’t either. There wasn’t a significant movement yet. I didn’t know anything about any of that. I was publishing this because I thought they were funny. I liked them. We are trying to remake my movie because it got much attention at the International Film Festival in California here. Focus Features: Miramax liked it. We did it on such a low budget. We did it on standard definition. This was before HGD was hitting. HD is the minimum. They all recommended that we remake it. I had a nice chat with a guy from Focus Features who told me. “If you will remake it, here is what you must do with the script. Do this. There is magic when these three people are on screen. It was a great tip.” We thought that if we posted these Mr. Deity things. We’d get money to do it. HD was still expensive in 2006. It was still out of reach for many guys messing around with mini-tv cameras and stuff. All of a sudden, too. It cracks me up. I got my first full HD camera around 2007. Then, all of a sudden, everything went 4k a year or two after that. Now, you can get 8k cameras. I shoot on an 8k camera now. 

Jacobsen: You mentioned the movements. The Firebrand Atheist movement is associated with distinct brands of making non-theism more public and acceptable philosophical views, particularly in American discourse, where people had suffered greatly in private for a long time. Not simply the demographics but the cultural attitudes. How did joining that wave help the persona of Mr. Deity and the brand of it, in a way?

Dalton: It was great. Because, as I said, I didn’t know a movement was going on. Then I got swept up in it. I started doing a lot of public speaking all over the country because, at that time, there was an atheist convention every weekend. It was like, “Wow! This thing is catching fire.” It was great because it helped me get in touch. I was an atheist. I have been an atheist since 1992. I wasn’t vocal about it. I wasn’t an activist in any way. Getting into the whole movement, meeting all the people in it, Dawkins, Harris, I never met Hitchens. But I used to meet Daniel Dennett at the conferences all the time. He returned to the room in Australia and hung out with us. We got to chat with us. He is such a down-to-earth guy. You, Dan Dennett, are this heady philosophy. You sit him down. He is such a regular guy with exciting stuff on sports [Laughing]. It cracked me up. I thought he would walk in here and blow our minds on stuff. He is talking about such mundane little things. It was great. It got me to the point where I realized I needed to be more active. The early shows are very tame. There are very few digs. I come back in the third season. In the third season, I am hitting pretty hard. I go after the silliness of religion and take shots where I can. Still, with a smile and everything, some are pretty hard-hitting. 

I think it made me more of a dick?

Jacobsen: [Laughing]. 

Dalton: I’m sure those on the other side of the aisle see me like that. I know quite a few on the other side do.

Jacobsen: There is a book written by Dr. DiCarlo, a Canadian philosopher or promoter of critical thinking. 

Dalton: I know him. He has been on the show.

Jacobsen: He has that book How to Be a Good Pain in the Ass. Part of the package, depending on the culture, I was talking to Bob Reuter. We were talking about Santa Claus in Copenhagen. It was one of the last breakfasts there. This would make a good interview. He said, “Sure.” It was a long transcript about talking about Santa Claus and using that as a point of critical thinking when these more or less benign myths are around. You can use them as educational points for kids. Suppose you live in a solid theological culture with many democratic cultures that overlap with culture and social life. In that case, you can seem like an asshole or can become a cultural jerk simply for being matter-of-fact about sacred cows.

Dalton: Right; Phil Plait gave his famous talk in 2009. His famous “Don’t Be a Dick” speech at TAM. I was personally offended by that.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Dalton: That is about when we were coming back. I was doing stuff a little harder. The funny things is: The persona I have on screen is different. In my personal life, I rarely get into it with anybody. When I do, I am very gentle about it. Now, it is just me and my Havanese. I lost my greyhound a couple weeks ago. We can go down to Seal Beach here. There are a group of Christians who every Sunday night are singing, praising, and passing out their pamphlets and everything. I’ve become quite chummy with a few of them who are constantly trying to convert me. [Laughing] Praying for me ad infinitum, I’m sure. [Laughing] I have told them. People have been praying for me for 30 years. If it was going to work, it would have kicked in now. Maybe, God is waiting around. [Laughing] “Oh, crap, that Dalton kid!”

Jacobsen: Yes, certainly, Phil has a point. Again, the context and the person, if someone is going through a tough time, that’s not the time to talk about epistemology.

Dalton: Sure, of course.

Jacobsen: But I think we all understand that and make mistakes in application too. 

Dalton: Right, I grew up Mormon. So, one of the things I know about Mormonism is that they literally prey on people. When people go through hard times, they go, “God is pushing them down for us. So, we can get in there.” It is disgusting. I saw that quite a bit within the church where they would take advantage of people going through hard times to get them to fall in line to convert. There is a term for an inactive Mormon. Jack Mormon!

Jacobsen: Jack Mormon.

Dalton: It is a way of saying a Mormon in name only.

Jacobsen: “Not strictly observant.” Orthodox Judaism has OTD, off the derech. 

Dalton: Almost like hawks hovering above waiting for that weak moment where they can move in – ugh. It is so gross. Now, that I think back on it. I was part of that too. I did that. 

Jacobsen: You describe this as a community effort. It raises the question. In your memory, what were the forms of conversation around individuals who are having difficult times? This person is having a difficult time. How can we best reach them with the new Gospel? 

Dalton: I do not know if I remember the specific tactics. I remember it was all about “here’s our open door. God is opening a door for us.” [Laughing] “Their hard times is an open door, opportunity, for us.” When I say that out loud, it is so awful. In all fairness, Mormons are also good at going in and being there in a helpful way as well. It is not like it was all predatory. They would offer genuine help and comfort, friendship. That kind of stuff too. So much of it was done with an eye on, “We can get him now.” I don’t know if you know this. I worked with and for Dennis Prager for years, of PragerU. 

Jacobsen: I did not! [Laughing]

Dalton: He and I used to be good friends. I had an office that was attached to his. He paid my rent. I published his newsletter at the time. I was doing graphic design. We were chummy. We would pray racketball three times a week and over for Shabbat dinners. When I started working with him, I was telling my mother-in-law at the time, who was an Uber-Mormon. The first words out of her mouth were, “He would be a good one to get.” Those were the exact words. “He would be a good one to get.” That was the thinking. That really was the thinking. ‘Here is our opportunity, our score.’ 

Jacobsen: It sounds like that sliver of the faith. It sounds like Scientology light. They are very aggressive.

Dalton: Yes!

Jacobsen: Mormons, “It would be nice.” It is different.

Dalton: Yes, very much so. But they had a weird leader of their own. No one who ever went to his wife and said, “Wife wants me to have another.” That is the boldest thing I can imagine any other religious leader doing. It is so incredibly ballsy. [Laughing]

Jacobsen: So, when you have this Mormon context of growing up, working with prominent conservative speakers and thinkers like Dennis Prager, not knowing about the, at the time, frame of contemporary atheism with New Atheism in Harris, Hitchens, Dennett, and Dawkins. But seeing more of that, as Mr. Deity grew and you moved into season 3 onwards, how did you see both your skill-set developing, boldness and claims developing, and the use of that background to inform the more barbed critiques, the comedy?

Dalton: That’s interesting. The thing that I always wanted to do with Mr. Deity that would have to have been had amongst the Trinity or if God has a manufacturing group. [Laughing] A lot of it for me was concretizing these abstract concepts. I think I started to get better at that as time went on. In fact, the last Mr. Deity I did was “Mr. Deity and the Consent.” Everyone talks about free will. The religious are always talking about free will. Free will is one way to get God off all the bad stuff. “He had to give us free will.” Okay, there are problems with that anyway. One of the big ones. It hit me, recently. You don’t have free will if you’re not put here agreeing to come

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Dalton: In Mormonism, Mormonism has that. In Mormonism, we existed prior to this as God’s spirit children. There were two plans proposed. One by Jesus. One by Lucifer. Lucifer was going to make sure we all got saved, which is a weird concept because Mormonism is universalist anyways. [Laughing] So, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Lucifer is going to make sure we all get saved. Jesus is going to let us be free to choose whatever we want. He will go down and save us. That is the thing. There was a war in heaven according to Mormonism. 2/3rds went with Jesus 1/3rd went with Lucifer. They end up being the devils and demons. The rest of us get to go down and have our bodies and resurrect and then become gods at some point, like the Mormon God, who was a dude at some point. It occurred to me. Nobody has that, at least within Christianity. Where, you have that consent thing. I did an episode, recently, where he is talking to a person who is made in his image. I am not God. I am not the deity. I am some guy he has created to get my consent to go down. Of course, the original conversation is “Why wouldn’t I consent? You are all good, all loving.” Of course, “It is not going to be all good.” He says, “What do you mean?” If an all-good, all-knowing, all-loving being says they’re going to put you into a place, it would never occur to you that they would put you into a place with horrible, terrible evil constantly around you. We have it so good in a civilized world. We have been around for 200,000 or 300,000 years, homo sapiens. 

[Laughing] It was an absolute nightmare for 99% of our existence. Do you want to go back and live 2,000 years ago or 300? It is so horrible and awful. You would never imagine that this could be the plan. “This is how I am going to do it.” Mr. Deity cannot get anyone to agree to this except for the Marquis de Sade.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Dalton: He is cool with it. He is the one person who is okay with it. Mr. Deity decides we’re going to throw in more excuses. We will lower everybody’s intelligence by another 25% or something. Larry says, “Except for Newton?” Mr. Deity says, “Yes, except for Newton.” 

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Dalton: It helped me realize there are more of these conversations. There is a phone call in season 3 taking place during the conquest of Canaan.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Dalton: I think it is Jesus going to throw down the fireballs from Heaven. “We have to kill even more of these people.” People don’t think of these. They are stories that they hear. But when you try to concretize it and try to put a God doing this stuff, it seems more insane. I think all of that helped me focus on more on them. Some episodes are sheer fun. I have a fun idea, which I think is funny. Death, for instance, is just so sick of his job. He wants to quite. People won’t let him. 

Jacobsen: [Laughing]. 

Dalton: He is bitching about how nobody loves him.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Dalton: “What? Didn’t Hitler name a whole bunch of camps after you?” That is the answer to the question. It helped me concretize all those abstract concepts a little better.

Jacobsen: How do you know the stuff on paper? As a journalist, as a writer, the stuff on paper would be funny.

Dalton: In terms of when you’re writing?

Jacobsen: Yes, when you’re writing and looking at the concept proposed or even the dialogue, the premises and the dialogue are funny. Like a Kevin Smith film, it is old film. They are bland in their presentation. Hilarious scriptwriting, it is similar with Mr. Deity. It doesn’t have to be in HD. The writing itself is a funny premise, plot, and dialogue. 

Dalton: You could take it to the paper. It would work on paper. To me, the script is everything. If the script isn’t good, you’re in trouble. Especially with us, I never acted before in my life before we started doing these things. Jimbo had a background in acting and producing. Sean was a professional actor, so was Amy. I could never get to a point where I could rely on my acting chops. The script had to be tight, had to be good. For me, a script is good. If it makes me laugh when I write it, “That is funny.” I don’t really care about anybody else if they like it or not. It is almost one of those things. I am amusing myself. That is really all I care about. It is a little narcissistic. I am confident enough, now. I wasn’t the first season. The first season, every episode, we would shoot it. I would write it. We would rehearse it, then edit it. By the time I edited it, I’d seen it a zillion times. The jokes weren’t funny anymore. I would send it out to everyone in the cast. “What are we thinking? This is horrible. This is embarrassing. We can’t put this out.” They’d write, “It is hysterical. What are you talking about?” By the end of season 1, I realized. “Okay, alright, I will trust. If I liked it on the page, I will, probably, like it once we do it.” We shot the second episode twice. That episode evolved. Sean had a really hard time getting into Jesus, into being Jesus, Jesse/Jesus. The first shoot, it didn’t work out. Then we changed the script a bit too. He told me this later. “You gave me one great bit of direction.” He was having a hard time getting character. I said, “You weren’t my first pick.” Mr. Deity has already been through 25 people who he went through and liked a lot more. They said, “No. This is insane.” You are not quite enough there to get out of this.” 

[Pause]

Jacobsen: What is your favourite episode that you’ve done?

Dalton: In terms of writing, my favourite episode is Mr. Deity and the Really Hard Time. This is in the prequel season, season four. Mr. Deity wants to be The God; he doesn’t want to be a god, which he doesn’t realize isn’t possible because he’s in an omniverse, as we called it back then, with multiple gods and everything. So, they figure out that he must create time, and he has to create everything from nothing if he wants to be capital T capital G God. So, there’s a whole back and forth; it’s Abbott and Costello. To be able to create anything, you must have none of the things that you’re creating, and then you create the thing. Still, to create anything, you must already have an existing pre-existing fabric of time because there’s a moment where it doesn’t exist, and then there’s a moment where it does, and then we can’t figure out how to create time from no time. And then the same thing with nothing; they can’t figure out how to create nothingness, and it’s just this wordplay back and forth between them like, how much time do we need? Some time? And it’s time, time, time; it bounces back and forth and then nothing, something, everything, it’s just a constant. I like the editing and everything, but I also think Mr. Deity and the Evil. That first episode there’s something magical about that first episode of talking about the evils and what they’re going to allow, and it has a punchline that has lasted me this whole time; I still constantly think if I’m ever talking about evil, I must include Celine Dion, sorry, Canadians.

I’ve also included Michael Bublé, but I didn’t know he was Canadian then. So, it’s not a knock against Canadians. I love the way Canadians say the way you said Mr. Day-uh-tee instead of Mr. Dee-uh-tee. The British, the Australians, and the Canadians all say it the way I would love to hear it. I have a good British friend who, every time she says it, I’m like, “Oh, that sounds so good, sounds so much better.”

Jacobsen: Sounds like day and night, like you know Mr. Day-uh-tee is night.

Dalton: Right. There are other things that I like that I like just because they’re goofy and fun. We did an episode on transubstantiation where Mr. Deity doesn’t get that they’re literally eating at Jesus’s flesh because he’s having a good time with it; he thinks it’s hysterical that Jesus is like, “Oh God! Ow…Oww!” He’s being eaten alive, and he thinks it’s just this symbolic thing, and Lucifer tells him, “No, he’s literally being eaten alive.” “What? That’s crazy!” So, there are all kinds of little ones, and I do love the one with death too, which had my friend Gordon Bressack playing Death, who was a great writer, an Emmy-winning writer out here in L. A, and he’s since died, so I kind of love that for sentimental reasons. He was so good in it, so good, and it was so perfect for him. He played himself. He was always griping and unhappy with his situation.

Jacobsen: What comedic influences do you think fed into a comedy oriented around critical thinking on concretizing theology? The abstractions of God talk. 

Dalton: Well, I think the primary one would have to be Woody Allen because I’m a huge Woody Allen fan, and if you read his books, there’s, I think, one thing called God; A Play, and Without Feathers or Side Effects which my girlfriend and I were in an acting class together in my senior year and we did that play. We put on that little play. It’s a short play for our final at the end of the year, and I can’t remember what it’s about. Still, Woody talked about God so much in both his films and his books and so many great lines like “To you, I’m an atheist, to God I’m the loyal opposition.” There are just so many great lines throughout them. If you watch Mr. Deity, you see my three big comedic influences: Woody, Woody, and Bob Hope because Woody’s doing Bob Hope the whole time, and then Bob Newhart is the other. I also grew up watching a lot of MASH and Mary Tyler Moore and all those things, but the God thing is probably mostly the Woody influence.

Jacobsen: It seems as if it came at the right time in American culture where now it is strikingly apparent to people heading into the middle-age years, the path that’s been happening for decades that was starting many decades’ past with regards to the Christian faith in the United States. It’s happening in Canada and Europe. Still, the amount of finance that went into Christian ideology and media and schools and so on, legal efforts to impose on everyone and that decline both in the sheer numbers is reflective not just of the proportion of the population or the total number of Christians in the population, it’s also a reflection of the seriousness with which people take their own beliefs. Even among those left, they attend far less, they take theology less seriously, and those that do are considered oddballs even within their flocks. So, I think Mr. Deity and others in the new atheist movement, say, something like 2005 or 2020, was its big moment. They did important work along with Euro media contributions to normalize it. 

Dalton: Yes, I think so, and almost flipping the script wherein I think a lot of people now… I was born in 1965, just a few years after Madalyn Murray O’Hair got pushed out of public schools here. So, I never had public prayer in school when I was growing up, but that didn’t go anywhere for so long. And now I think once it did, it flipped the script in that so many people used to say here, “Oh, how could you not believe in God?” And now I think we’ve turned it around to where we’ve been so aggressive and so vocal for 15-20 years now that now it’s all about them defending their stuff, which is why you have so many Christian apologists now online, on YouTube trying to salvage what they can salvage. They’re trying to piece together. “We got to keep this together somehow.” Most of them are sincere; they all seem that way. Some of them seem to like it’s a bit of a gift, but there’s enough of them where I think they’re legitimately concerned that people are going to be losing their souls, which is a horrifying idea just in the first place. How do you live with that? 

We have an episode on this we did during the big anti-Wall Street protests, Occupy Wall Street. We had an Occupy Heaven episode where people are upset; they have a bunch of gripes, and one of the gripes is no one there is happy because they all have friends and family and loved ones down there being tortured forever, and they just can’t be happy about it. So, it’s horrifying that people must worry about kids, parents, friends, and loved ones; how will they end up? There’s a lot of concern about that. When I go down to talk to my friends in Seal Beach, my Christian friend, once they can’t get me with actual argumentation because I know my stuff, they always revert to hellfire. That’s their last pitch. “Well, do you want to [10:53]?? Are you going there?” and I’ve chastised them I don’t know how many times about that, and they’ll still go to it every time, but it’s a horrifying thought that there’s a God who’s going to do that just because you didn’t believe the exact right thing. It’s just crazy.

Jacobsen: It reminds me, I was lucky enough to get one interview with James Randy in one of his last years, and I made it a four-part interview; lucky. In that interview, he talked about the roots of religion and the promotion of religion even by governments, basically orienting around a fear of death; fear of death as crucial and hell is eternal torment after death. To quote Randy, he’s talking about people hearing voices in the dead when I mean by the word dead is dead, not dead [11:56] but in the sense of just dead; you stop existing, or you stop existing, and nothing good can ever happen again, either of those; it’s a fear of that. And when you’re saying you’re Christian [12:12] are resorting to that, it adds a qualitative empirical data set to his claim. He’s making a strong point there. 

Dalton: Right. Randy was great, I loved Randy. I have known Randy for almost 30 years. I met him back in the early 90s because I got in quickly after I left religion with the Skeptic Society, Michael Shermer’s group down here, and they used to have lectures every first Sunday of the month at Caltech. Randy was quite frequently there, and I became good friends with Michael. Then I got in, and I used to get to hang out with Randy, Bill Maher, and even Stephen J Gold, which was cool. Randy was brilliant; he was amazing. He’s right; there’s a book I read before I became religious that had a real impact on me, and I didn’t realize its impact until later. It’s called Denial of Death, written by Ernest Becker.

Jacobsen: I’m familiar with the phrase but not with the book because I haven’t read it.

Dalton: Now, the book is kind of a seminal piece of work, and basically, it talks about it in kind of that regard that religion is all about the denial of death and that denial of death is just about pure narcissism about we’re just too important, we can’t imagine that all of this continues without us in some way or that anything continues without us. We must be part of it somehow, and I didn’t realize it at the time, but thinking back on it, it had a real impact on me.

Jacobsen: You’ll recall the Christopher Hitchens line as well as the sad part about death; he was saying this as he had his esophageal cancer; it’s not that you die; it’s that the party goes on without you.

Dalton: It’s not that the party is ending, yeah. The part is going on without you, and everyone will have a great time. Keep on having a great time. To show you the influence of Woody Allen, Denial of Death is a book mentioned in Annie Hall.

Jacobsen: Interesting! That may be where I heard it. 

Dalton: I saw it when I was 14, and that movie greatly impacted my life in many ways. 

Jacobsen: That’s the one where he brings in Marshall McLuhan?

Dalton: Yes, it’s a great scene.

Jacobsen: I’m sorry, you know nothing about me or my work. 

Dalton: Yes [Laughs]

Jacobsen: Yeah, that’s about as much of a Canadian own as we get in that period.

Dalton: Yes, that’s correct. 

Jacobsen: Because, for the most part, people don’t know about Canada.

Dalton: Right, it’s best.

Jacobsen: They notice through that maybe Pierre Trudeau, I’m a Lumberjack, and I’m okay. 

Dalton: Right. Yes absolutely. Although so much of my comedy influences Canadians, I mean, Canadian puts out some of the best comics on the planet; the Canadians and the British, I think, are just topnotch, and so much of my influence growing up because I was a big ass CTV fan when I was a kid. There were a couple of things that I loved. In the house I grew up in, my dad built this room in the back, but it was weird because there were only two ways to get to it: a bathroom and a bedroom. So, there was no way to get through that, and they would put me to bed, and I would sneak out the back of my bedroom and go into that room where there was a TV late at night, and I would watch Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and Fernwood Tonight, which is Canadian, more Canadians.

Jacobsen: Red, Green show.

Dalton: Yes, and then Benny Hill and Monty Python’s Flying Circus; those were my two hours. That was my solid two-hour block of TV before I would go in there at like 10, and I would go to bed at midnight.

Jacobsen: I will tell you that my first introduction to humanism was not formal but through comedy. I was 14; I went to a tiny library, a local community center with a pool and a library tattoo. DVDs were a thing at that point, maybe VHS, and I found the weirdest things happening on this cover, and it was Monty Python at the Hollywood Bowl. 

Dalton: Oh yeah.

Jacobsen: Holy sheet, was that funny? 

Dalton: That’s a great film.

Jacobsen: It’s like a great song. You watch it repeatedly. My first introduction to this zany sense of looking at the world differently than what, at the time, was the dominant culture in Canada. Obviously, for the generations now, it’s so different.

Dalton: The other film that had a huge impact on me; I was in bands, and I was good at the guitar young, so I got in with bands when I was super young, like 13 or 14, where I was playing with people who were 18 to 25. The drummer worked at a movie theatre near us, so we could go in and see any movie we wanted as many times as we wanted. That was the year that Life of Brian came out, and I must have seen Life of Brian five times in the theatre that year because we thought it was so funny. We thought it was so brilliantly funny.

Jacobsen: There’s a rare fact about Canada. We did have a blasphemy law. Ending blasphemy laws has been a campaign for years. It’s been successful in many cases, and it has been reversed in a couple of cases recently. My last point: the only time it was attempted to be used was for one thing, and it was a movie, and it was for Life of Brian. 

Dalton: Wow!

Jacobsen: It was the only time.

Dalton: I did not know that.

Jacobsen: So, there’s an ethical, philosophical, and legal point to be made about the seriousness of comedy in its astuteness about culture. That law is necessarily just on the books. If things jig around in a society, enough people will use it or try to.

Dalton: Yeah, that’s wild.

Jacobsen: And that’s why the work you and others do is so important.

Dalton: Well, I like to think so; I like to think that I’m part of a grand tradition of satire and poking the bear, as they say. I hope I don’t get bit.

Jacobsen: I thank you very much for your time today.

Dalton: Thank you, this is enjoyable.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.