[On TV:] Me estas haciendo enojar.
Usted no me gustaria cuando estoy enojado.
[Hulk roars.]
Ha ha, Ang Lee’s Hulk is the best and anyone who says otherwise is an asshole!
Now to step outside my echo chamber by watching a film I don’t like so much.
But which one?
Hmmm . . . I know!
I’ll ask my off-brand virtual assistant.
Sirli?
[Sirli:] What do you want?
Show me a movie I’ll probably hate.
[Sirli:] How about “The Fool,” a 2018 documentary directed by and starring Ray Comfort?
That sounds perfect.
Cast it to the living room TV, please.
[Sirli:] Casting to living room TV.
I hope you choke on it.
What the hell?
Sirli, pause the video!
The Fool is a
movie featuring an ignorant man with no dignity, made by that ignorant man with no dignity,
about how people knowing about his ignorance and lack of dignity has been really good for
his career.
It’s kind of self-effacing, kind of delusional, and very not good.
In The Fool, Ray Comfort chronicles the last several years of his life after a video clip
of his banana routine went viral and made him the laughing stock of the atheist community.
The banana routine, if you’ve never seen it, is Comfort’s attempt to satirize the
notion that the universe could have come about without God to design and create it.
First, he brings out a Coke can, saying that believing the universe is the result of the
Big Bang and other natural processes is just as absurd as believing that this Coke can
was produced the same way: there was a great explosion in space, a giant rock with some
cola on the surface emerged from the explosion, aluminum slowly grew around the cola, eventually
some paint happened to splash over its surface, randomly forming the patterns that we recognize
as the words “Coca-Cola” and the rest of the text printed on the outside of the
can.
Then he pulls out his banana and explains how the banana has just as many markers of
design as the Coke can, but unlike the Coke can, the banana is not the product of human
ingenuity but the product of nature – of God.
It’s the atheist’s nightmare, Comfort declares.
I’m probably not doing it justice, but if you want to see the banana routine for yourself,
just watch this movie, because it’s in there three or four times.
In this movie that runs just over an hour.
Comfort tells us that for awhile he was really embarrassed by all the negative attention
the banana routine was getting from atheists.
He didn’t understand – he’d been doing that bit in front of Christian audiences for
twenty years, and it always got laughs.
Now all of a sudden Richard Dawkins was dunking on him for it!
Eventually, Comfort decides to lean into his newfound notoriety.
He notices that videos of atheists mocking him are getting hundreds of thousands of views
on YouTube.
He finds that famous atheists are willing to sit down and talk with him, people like
Lawrence Krauss, David Silverman, thunderf00t, and even a few who haven’t been credibly
accused of sexual assault or made harassing women online a second career.
Being “the banana man” is really opening doors for Ray Comfort!
But here we run into the first major flaw in the film.
Yes, becoming famous within the atheist community as “the banana man” made it possible for
Ray Comfort to meet and interview prominent atheists who probably never would have given
him the time of day before.
But it’s hard to see what Comfort is accomplishing as a result of these meetings.
It’s clear what Comfort thinks he’s getting out of it: he’s sharing the gospel with
these atheists and by extension with the atheists in their respective audiences.
But something tells me Comfort isn’t winning too many converts among those atheists.
For one thing, whenever he’s forced to abandon his well practiced evangelical patter, he
reveals himself to be remarkably uninformed about subjects he’s been talking about for
decades.
When he discusses the theory of evolution he invariably gets important things wrong.
For example, in the movie he cites different breeds of dogs as an example of speciation.
That’s not speciation.
He also completely ignores the significance of the fact that the banana – the most important
prop in the routine that forms the basis for this entire movie – is not the result of
natural processes (or God-driven processes, as Comfort would have us believe), but is
the product of selective breeding by humans.
Wild bananas have none of the attractive and useful adaptations that Comfort draws attention
to in his routine.
And by the way, that’s not just something I happen to know – that’s in the movie!
Ray Comfort includes this excellent rebuttal to his banana routine in his movie, and doesn’t
even attempt to respond!
There’s even one scene where Lawrence Krauss, the skeevy little shit, explains about the
banana while Comfort is sitting right next to him, and Comfort ignores it and immediately
changes the subject.
This isn’t just about the banana routine itself being a poorly informed, unconvincing
argument and a muddled-at-best piece of satire – this is about a documentarian undermining
his credibility in a movie he wrote, directed, and narrated.
If you want to share someone’s rebuttal to your argument in your movie, great!
Good on you.
But you should at least have a response, an explanation for why you aren’t persuaded
by the rebuttal.
If you don’t, just leave it out!
Whatever you do, don’t include a scene of someone making that rebuttal to your face,
then you moving on with the conversation like you didn’t even hear it.
If you’re content to be that willfully ignorant or intellectually dishonest, that’s your
business.
But why would you exhibit that ignorance or dishonesty in a movie you’re making to persuade
others to your point of view?
This is perhaps the fatal flaw of the film – and, it must be said, of all of Ray Comfort’s
work which I have encountered: there is a massive disconnect between the story Ray Comfort
thinks he’s telling, and the story he’s actually telling.
Ray Comfort thinks he’s telling an inspiring story of how an evangelist can absorb the
mockery of unbelievers and use it to spread the message of the gospel to the unsaved.
But his film is obviously pitched at people who already agree with him on matters of faith,
and casually dismissive of atheists in general (he repeatedly expresses surprise at atheists
displaying insight or showing him the slightest courtesy, for example).
Ray Comfort thinks he’s presenting himself as a humble servant, a man willing to put
his own ego aside to carry out God’s good work.
But in the film he seems clueless and sad.
The guy has been a punchline among atheists for years now, but he’s apparently decided
that being more famous is something to celebrate, even if that fame comes in the form of widespread
ridicule.
Throughout the film, Comfort attempts to show his humility and eagerness to share the gospel,
only to come across as desperate and self-deluded.
The closest thing to a plot in The Fool involves Comfort’s protracted attempt to persuade
Penn Jillette to submit to an on-camera interview with him.
Not only does Comfort fail in his quest, it’s obvious that Penn Jillette refused to allow
his voice or image to appear in the film at all – whenever he appears in the movie,
either in archival clips or footage shot following Comfort’s interview with Krauss, where Jillette
was also present, Jillette’s image is blurred out and his voice is muted.
Once again, I’m left wondering why any filmmaker, regardless of their point of view, regardless
of their purpose for making a particular film, would do something like this.
If Ray Comfort wanted to interview Penn Jillette on camera, that’s fine.
But Penn Jillette obviously refused to allow Ray Comfort to even show his face in this
movie.
So why put Penn Jillette in the movie at all?
Honestly, despite its prominence in the film, the quest to interview Penn Jillette feels
pretty off-topic anyway.
If Comfort wanted to make a film about how he’s supposedly benefitted from becoming
known as the banana man, why not try to get an interview with Richard Dawkins, who is
probably the one person most responsible for popularizing the banana man meme?
That way, even if he fails, at least the quest itself makes sense within the context of the
film.
Instead, The Fool is about Ray Comfort going viral for a bit of weak, intellectually dubious
stand-up comedy, trying to leverage that newfound fame to get a random well known atheist to
be in his movie, completely failing, and taking a victory lap anyway.
As such, the movie feels kind of pointless.
It’s also stupendously boring.
A big chunk of the film is spent just watching Ray Comfort do his thing, stick a microphone
in someone’s face and try to trick them into agreeing with one of the points in his
evangelical sales pitch.
It doesn’t have anything to do with the main subject of the film, it’s just kinda
there, filling up time.
All that gratutious street preaching footage does serve a purpose, however.
It sets up the tasteless and repugnant ending of the movie.
One of the people Comfort is shown preaching to in the movie is this guy, Jurgen Ankenbrand,
who Comfort found in Huntington Beach.
Comfort makes a determined and somewhat testy effort to convince Jurgen to give his live
to Christ, but Jurgen remains unconvinced.
“Well,” Ray says, “I’ll leave the ball in your court.
Maybe tonight you’ll suffer a minor heart attack and you’ll think about this and realize
you need to get right with God before you die.”
That’s shitty enough on its own.
“Sure, you disagree with me now, but maybe tonight you’ll find yourself on the brink
of death and you’ll realize I was right” is a pretty lousy thing to say to someone
under most circumstances.
But then, the film cuts to a news article reporting the death of that same man, Jurgen
Ankenbrand, in a traffic accident some time later.
Pretty crass, right?
I mean, the guy’s dead.
He’s actually dead.
But Ray’s not done yet.
It gets worse.
From the article reporting Jurgen’s death, we dissolve to Ray Comfort preaching on a
street corner.
From there, the camera pulls back to an empty bench – the same bench where Jurgen sat
when Comfort was preaching at him.
It’s as if Comfort is saying “it was too late for Jurgen, but hopefully it won’t
be too late for the people I’m preaching to now, including you.”
Then we cut to Comfort sitting on the same bench.
He gives us the whole “Jurgen didn’t think he was gonna die when he did, but he did,
and the same thing could happen to you, so convert to my religion right now” pitch.
Then he cuts to a few beauty shots of himself preaching, scored by uplifting music.
Then he cuts back to himself and starts talking about how humiliating the whole banana man
thing was for him.
He starts talking about how bad he had it for being made fun of as the banana man, thirty
seconds after talking about a person who died, while sitting in the very same spot where
that dead person once sat!
“You should get right with God now, just in case you die unexpectedly like poor Jurgen.
But enough about him, back to those mean banana jokes people told about me . . .”
How does he expect to save anyone else’s soul when he doesn’t seem to have one himself?
The purpose of this video is to review The Fool as a film, not to respond to the arguments
made by Ray Comfort about evolution or the existence of God.
As this movie points out, I’ve already responded to those arguments at length in the “An
Atheist Reads Ray Comfort” series I did a few years ago.
But in doing a review like this, it’s difficult to separate Ray Comfort the person from the
film he made, because the film is such a reflection of him.
Ray Comfort the person is ignorant, either seriously self-deluded or deeply dishonest,
and shameless.
His film, The Fool, shares all of those qualities.
Through his enthusiastic embrace of all the attention coming his way thanks to “banana
man,” Comfort shows himself to be at best a clueless doofus, and at worst an opportunistic
starfucker.
In that, unfortunately, he has something in common with many prominent atheists, especially
here on YouTube, who seem to regard having a larger audience as an absolute good, no
matter who that audience consists of.
Ray Comfort, in his own way, is a troll.
He plays at being interested in honest discussion and debate, but all he really wants is your
attention.
The more of it he gets, the more he wins.
The only way to beat him is not to talk to him.
I don’t know, but perhaps that’s why Penn Jillette refused to allow the use of his voice
and image in the film – he didn’t want to become an unwitting accomplice in Comfort’s
grift.
No one involved with the production of this film ever contacted me about using my image.
It’s fine – my presence in the film is fleeting and incidental and not worth getting
worked up about.
I am listed in the credits under “Special Thanks,” which is fine.
It would have been nicer if someone had written me an email before putting clips from my videos
in the movie.
Given the way my content is used, I don’t think they needed my permission.
But it would have been nice to be asked.
I would’ve said no.
So.
Now to the ultimate question.
This time it’s easy, because I have someone else here who knows the answer.
Sirli?
Why did I watch The Fool?
[Sirli:] You watched The Fool because you asked me to show you a movie you would hate.
Okay, but that was just for the opening bit of the video.
Why did I really watch it?
[Sirli:] Because Eli Bosnick told you that you were in it.
Right!
I remember, Eli did message me to tell me I was in it.
Sirli, create a new reminder.
[Sirli:] Ready.
Just put, “Don’t listen to Eli.”
[Sirli:] How often would you like to be reminded?
Every day.