Comedy of Terrors

Stand-up comics are the suicide bombers of the cultural world. They act alone, using stripped-down devices — a mike, and maybe a glass of water or a barstool. Their weapon, language, is decidedly low-tech, so they rely on the element of surprise to startle unsuspecting crowds. "If a joke is set up properly, and detonates properly," says Irish comedian Abie Philbin Bowman, the effect is revelatory: "If you and your audience see something in a new way, and the explosion is joy and laughter, that's the most rewarding thing in the world, apart from sex."

Bowman, 26, a rising star on the Irish stand-up scene, has been setting off comic explosions for 18 months now with Jesus: The Guantánamo Years. In the one-man routine, Bowman is Jesus, who, at the behest of his aging dad, returns to earth for a comeback tour. Since he's a bearded Palestinian willing to die as a martyr, the messiah is stopped at U.S. Immigration and shipped off to Guantánamo Bay. He finds himself trapped on an island that's become a maximum-security prison, designed by the people who brought the world Kentucky Fried Chicken: "Tiny battery-size cages, guarded by ignorant teenagers ... and characterized by a profound feeling of despair."

The show is an unsettling weave of smart-ass wit and surreal situations from the age of terror. A joke involving communion and oral sex shares a platform with the calculation that al-Qaeda would have to blow up 580 planes a year to compete with the tobacco industry for casualties. This month, an audio version of the show, which has shocked Christian conservatives and delighted fans from Edinburgh to Lahore, was launched on iTunes. E-audiences might miss the comedian's crown of thorns and Gitmo-orange jumpsuit, but that's not dire, as the show, he says, is "all ideas." He also has a new show, Eco-Friendly Jihad, premiering this month in Galway, Ireland, about an environmentalist who becomes so frustrated with the West's inability to cut carbon emissions that she joins al-Qaeda.

Bowman, who is working on a graduate degree in peace studies by day, sees comedy as akin to a Gandhian exercise in passive resistance. It's a kind of intellectual sit-in — "a nonviolent act that can cause a change in public awareness." An atheist whose skepticism of organized religion was honed growing up during Ireland's Troubles, Bowman nonetheless claims his Guantánamo show is deeply Christian. It stands up "for American values, and for Christian values," he says. "Guantánamo Bay is profoundly un-Christian. I'm simply doing what Jesus did during his life: going around from place to place, and speaking up for what he believed in."

Last November, Bowman played at a festival in Lahore during Pakistan's six-week state of emergency. He knew better than to tackle either President Pervez Musharraf or the Prophet Muhammad onstage, but found his show resonated with an audience used to seeing their countrymen locked up under antiterror laws. Back in Ireland, he's rankled a few Christian conservatives who have picketed his show, calling it blasphemous. One elected official of Northern Ireland's loyalist Democratic Unionist Party, angered by the comparison between Jesus' martyrdom and al-Qaeda suicide bombers, urged a boycott; and in a heated BBC radio debate, Bowman quipped how weird it was to have someone from the Orange Order — a Protestant fraternity — "criticizing [me] for dressing up in orange and talking about Jesus."

But Bowman also has a big Christian fan base. He's been invited to stage the show in various American churches; in Boston, seven Protestant ministers came backstage to congratulate him on its "profoundly Christian message." "A lot of Christians are so resentful that Bush is hijacking the language of Jesus to do these awful things," he says. "I'm fairly sure that telling jokes about God isn't as blasphemous as torturing his children." For an age-of-terror comic like Bowman, the best jokes make for nervous laughter.