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December 03, 2008, 11:13 PM ET
Prop 8, the Muscial
Jack Black plays Jesus Christ.
What more needs to be said about this three-minute comedic romp?
Everyone seems to have a role in this zany characterization of the fault-line between “yays” and “nays” on California’s recent same-sex marriage vote.
I don’t know how long it took them to put this little piece together, but it is online at Will Ferrell and Adam McKay’s new comedy Web site, Funny or Die, which was created to produce, promote, and publicize freestanding comedy videos. Most of the site’s videos seem to be relatively quickly concocted offerings that comment on contemporary social issues, the more controversial the better.
Marc Shaiman, Tony-award-winning composer of Hairspray, wrote the piece, which includes a song from Jesus himself, a shrimp cocktail in hand, who chides well-dressed Christians for cherry-picking the Bible — choosing to heed certain commands and not others. Why do they covet his “unclean” shrimp even though it is expressly defined as an abomination in Leviticus?
And I spotted so many comedic heavyweights (and legitimate middleweights) hoofing it up and belting tunes out with the rest of the cast, including indie-actor John C. Reilly, Allison Janney (from The West Wing), _SNL’_s Maya Rudolph, Neil Patrick Harris (aka Doogie Howser), Andy Richter (Conan O’Brien’s old sidekick), Jenifer Lewis (most recently from Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns, Rashida Jones (formerly on NBC’s The Office, Darryl Philbin (still on The Office), and many others.
The casting alone makes it worth a quick look.
A lot of viewers will be insulted and offended by the video’s framing of the same-sex marriage debate. I don’t know if the video will do any real and long-term “political” work, but I’d put my money on this wild little video going viral by year’s end.
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