Religion: His & His

Satirizing the clergy is invariably a risky business, and to avoid trouble, cartoonists seem to have laid down a simple ground rule: clergymen, monks and nuns will be rotund, curious and comic. Within these limitations, only a few artists have managed to poke fun at clerics without being cloyingly cute. One of the best is the New Statesman's "Phelix," who in a new book, entitled Top Sacred, was delighting Londoners last week with a wry, rueful but gentle look at life on the Inside.

Phelix transfers the commonplaces of everyday life within monastic walls. Towels in the washroom (whose door is marked "Monks") are monogrammed "His" and "His." A sign cautions a priest in the confessional: "Do Not Sound Too Surprised." Monks sulkily scratch on a wall that "Brother Anthony is a Protestant" and complacently wear campaign buttons that proclaim: "I Like God." Others summon up courage to ask their prior: "Please, can Gilbert come out to pray?"

Unlike his cartoon characters, Hugh Burnett, 36, the man behind the pen of Phelix, cannot say that "some of my best friends are monks." A BBC TV producer as well as a cartoonist, Burnett has visited a monastery only once. Explaining his preoccupation with monastic humor, Burnett says: "We all live in various cells, they in theirs, we in ours, and we all try to work out our separate solutions. But there is something odd in the way a man who is isolated looks at things. Are they locked in or are we locked out?"