Mia Timpano, selected magazine articles

column: Empty 11 Nov/Dec 2007

Posted in Empty by miatimpano on December 20th, 2007

I like big bibles and I cannot lie

GodTube is the semi-known American Christian video-sharing site that functions on basically the same principles as YouTube and is flawed for exactly the same reason: for delivering eternal shit.

Granted, YouTube may be reasonably all-encompassing, but it ultimately solicits the same kind of suffocatingly tedious cultural bitch fuck as, say, an episode of Funniest Home Videos. (You’ve seen the dramatic squirrel, and you know exactly what I’m talking about.)

I’m guessing that as a species we have never watched such a massive quantity of shit ever. Actually, no, that’s probably a fact; let’s call it a fact.

But where GodTube differs is that it promotes a certain breed of shit peculiar to certain American Christians that I happen to be a really big fan of, for the singular reason that it is so unfathomably bad.

And bad videos are, of course, funnier than good videos, because genuinely bad videos sincerely intend to be good, and watching their failure is bad, and in turn really funny.

But Christian videos — and specifically the kind I’m discussing here (that is, those that enjoy residency in the highest tier of GodTube’s manger) — don’t actually fit into that category. This is weird.

Some of GodTube’s most viewed videos are, of course, just bad. “Funny Church Moments” is just shit, obviously, and short films like “What will you do the next time porn strikes?” (in which a man notices an explicit pop-up, then blows up his computer, the film then literally ends there) seem to exist purely to waste everybody’s time, including presumably His.

No; these are extraneous.

I am referring specifically to extremely popular videos probably best illustrated by “Baby Got Book”, which is a fairly detailed parody of the 1992 Sir Mix-a-Lot song “Baby Got Back”, and can be found with the tags “funny” and “christ”.

The video begins with a man emerging from what appears to be a small hill of bibles, then performing the song in full (and reasonably well) with vaguely amusing Christian lyrics (“I like big bibles and I cannot lie […] I’m tired of heathen guys / Sayin’ they like pocket-size” and so on and so forth in this fashion).

At first, “Baby Got Book” seems so impossibly bad that it is of course funny, but it then rapidly becomes apparent that “Baby” is intended as a parody, and is thus in on its own joke. But is it?

“Baby”, on some level, a very real one, obviously, is a sincere expression of Christian values, and thus occupies a place somewhere between intentionally bad and actually bad (not by virtue of the fact that it is Christian, but by virtue of the fact that is sincere).

And this is a place that (as far as I know) only Christian parody rock and hip-hop can seem to reach. And if this wrong, then I don’t want to be right, ’cause you, you light up my life.

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