![]() As an editor, I have to think along those lines. And we know there’s a sizable portion of the internet that would love to dogpile on us if we tell a joke that can get misinterpreted. Green: Do people ever pitch headlines that are too offensive for you to publish? But most of us are in Southern California. We’ve got a large audience in Texas and the South too. Green: It sounds like your audience is more likely to be the red dot in a sea of blue than the red dot in deep-red territory. In a lot of areas, being the conservative is punk rock, you know?įor them, it’s like, “You guys are writing comedy that doesn’t hate me.” It’s like they found their underground cabal of secret comedians who agree with them. Mann: Gen Z humor sucks, so I’m cool to be called “Boomer humor.” And every time I go and do a speaking engagement, there are a lot of college students who are maybe the only conservative in their class. Green: Are you proud of that, or a little ashamed? We got the Boomer-humor market locked down. Mann: I’m always amazed when we get emails from overseas missionaries who are underground and can’t reveal where they are, being like, “Hey, you guys are keeping us sane.” The Boomers love us. Green: Who is the audience for The Babylon Bee? He’s saying what we all are thinking, and yet nobody’s really put it into words. “I'll pray for you” just becomes this nicety. The Lord bless you.” You wonder if they’re being real or fake. That always bugged me-people who were like, “Yes, brother, I’ll pray for you. It’s an unspoken truth in Christian circles that everybody has this veneer of spirituality at church. Mann: A lot of good comedy has a kernel of truth in it. But there’s something about a good joke where, even if only a few people get it, it just connects with their soul. I was like, “I have to get involved with these guys.” There was an op-ed from a Christian who says, “There’s a fifteen, maybe twenty percent chance I’ll remember to pray for you, brother.” It probably didn’t even do well on social media. Kyle Mann: I remember the day The Babylon Bee launched. Our conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Įmma Green: Do you remember the first Babylon Bee story you ever read? “Just being completely honest and vulnerable with you, there’s a level where you have to stop yourself and say, ‘This isn’t good for my soul,’” he told me. ![]() I wanted to understand whether Mann sees his jokes as part of a crusade against the left or as something else-and how he reconciles mocking people with the tenets of his faith. In his new book, The Babylon Bee Guide to Wokeness, co-authored with Joel Berry, The Bee’s managing editor, Mann includes a cartoon of a church with its steeple replaced by a raised fist, a symbol of Black Power and the Black Lives Matter movement. Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts ![]() Listen to Emma Green’s interview with Kyle Mann on The Experiment, a podcast about people navigating our country’s contradictions. Read: The conservatives dreading-and preparing for-civil war Christian humor is a big part of what drew Mann to the site: As a young man, he left the megachurch in which he was raised and moved toward more theologically conservative circles-”my rebellious teen stage,” as he put it. Although political humor drives much of The Bee’s web traffic, the publication’s signature hits focus on what the writers see as shallowness in the evangelical world. ![]() He had a high-pressure job in construction sales before working at The Bee he first got involved with the site by cold-pitching a joke. Mann came to the comedy world almost by accident. For conservative students, he told me, “It’s like they found their underground cabal of secret comedians who agree with them.” Kyle Mann, the website’s editor in chief, sometimes gives talks on college campuses. The Babylon Bee, an online satire publication that launched in 2016, has become a popular destination for Christians disaffected with megachurch culture and right-wingers who crave clever commentary about the hypocritical left.
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