Maybe you have to take organized religion seriously in order to make jokes about it. If you can only see it as a bunch of guys running around wearing funny outfits and reciting mumbo-jumbo, then it loses its mystery, and that makes it useless as a target for satire.
Take the Catholic church, for example. Like a lot of people who were raised within its rituals and traditions, I can easily find humor in it. I laughed at "Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?" and "Sister Mary Ignatius Explains it All for You," and some of my favorite films are the dark comedies of Luis Bunuel, that anarchistic old anti-clericist. I also like the way Woody Allen applies comic logic to vast theological questions. The success of such works - so different in any other way - is that they spring from the deep impulses of people to whom Catholicism does have significance.
But now look at "The Pope Must Die," a comedy based on the premise that the Vatican is controlled by
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