Proletarians are funny, apparently. Their low-class vulgarity and profanity makes us laugh because it's an equalizer: However refined we imagine ourselves to be, we recognize ourselves in it. At the same time, lower-class religious devoutness, with its idealistic striving for purity, raises laughs for the opposite reason: We've already seen through its phoniness; to us it's sucker bait for proles. Pull this scene back half a century, and conventional wisdom decrees that it'll seem even funnier: Hopelessly unhip to everything we've learned about ourselves and the world since 1960, the poor schnooks haven't even got a website to click... More >>>