The End Times Comedy Show

A Novel

Thor Ramsey

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN:
  9781666797732
• Print ISBN:
  9781666737813
  9781666797725

Los Angeles, circa 1998, Sam Seitz is a mildly successful comedian with five Tonight Show appearances who is actively trying to lose his religion so that he might "pursue the mindless goal of becoming famous for the sake of fame, without hindrance, setting aside the truth that so easily besets" him. Coming from a family of the most famous evangelicals in the country, apostatizing is no small task. After all, his family has been called "the Kennedys of the evangelical world." For the first time in his life he feels like unbelief is within reach, until he notices that Jesus is following him. Literally. Not to mention the demons he starts seeing, but they might be with the drug dealer who happens to be his stripper girlfriend's ex-boyfriend. And let's not leave out the night God tells him in a dream that he only has twenty-four hours to live. Thus begins his quest to find a way to reverse this proclamation, but hopefully one that doesn't involve repentance, since he's trying to deconvert and all. The End Times Comedy Show is a satire of the evangelical landscape that is filled with kindness, faith, and warmth for its characters. Blending magical realism and dark humor, Ramsey takes the theological subject of "crucified with Christ" to parabolic and hilarious extremes, all while avoiding heresy.

Part 1

Roman Numeral Number One

I met her at a strip club.

Thursday night at the Spearmint Rhino, masquerading as a gentleman, I sat there, front row, bar side, waving dollar bills at Paradise Lost in the middle of my descent into the underbelly of exposed bellies when one of the dancers looked down at me and said, “Hey, I know you.”

Having appeared on The Tonight Show six times by this point in my life, which happened to be in 1998, occasionally someone recognized me. This was always a big moment for me, so I always took time to enjoy it while aping humility. Lingering for a moment of anticipation, I said, “Maybe you’ve seen me on television.”

“No,” she said. “You used to be my Sunday School teacher.”

Yeah, my deconversion wasn’t going well.

And this was before Jesus started stalking me, literally, but that comes later as does the dream where God gives me twenty-four hours to live (see page 64), not that you want to skip ahead because—and this is something I owe to my evangelical upbringing—context, context, context. The point being, my own personal apocalypse only makes sense if I begin here, in a defensive posture, where I simply responded to her accusation by saying, “I don’t think so.”

Unabashed, she knelt down to look me in the eyes. Everyone wants to see into someone else’s soul. Sensuality is driven by more than just a desire for titillation. Strip bars are a cry for help.

“Yeah,” she said. “It was you.”

“I think I’d remember you.”

“It was a couple summers. In Chicago.”

And I knew then she was telling the truth, my head nodding back to confirm that before I adopted la-la land as my home, I was originally from chi-town.

“Guilty,” I said.

“Yes you are,” she said, her face remaining expressionless.

“Nice to know I made a difference.”

She just looked at me, not understanding I was joking, which I took as a bad sign. So, I asked, “How old were you then?”

“Fifteen,” she said. “You were old.”

“I couldn’t have been more than twenty.”

“Yeah, like I said—old.”

Sugar, her real name, after a song by the Archies (yeah, the comic book characters who had their own Saturday morning cartoon show and a hit song that apparently inspired teen mothers) exerted a physical pull on my person from the very beginning and not just because she was naked. Though she didn’t give me her full name at the time, her middle name was Spice, because her mother was also influenced by nursery rhymes, being that her memories of childhood were not that distant when she was pregnant. Her full name was Sugar Spice Valentine, which ironically sounded like a stripper’s stage name.

Our Sunday School history together was cloudy to me, because it had been over a decade since I had set foot in a church. Memories of her at church didn’t surface because there was no prior relationship other than teacher to student, which thankfully curtailed some of the creepiness, as much as that could be done for a Sunday School reunion in a strip club. Now here she was in her mid-twenties, a magnet to my body.

From the very beginning, I knew this girl would ruin me—not that I wasn’t already doing a bang-up job myself. This I can assure you: she wasn’t just any stripper, but the visible image of Rita Hayworth, a World War II pinup, a revival of sensuality masquerading as innocence, La Dolce Vita teasing me in person, a body that evoked pain, sparking an ache inside me that screamed if I couldn't get close to this girl I would die. In the depths of my soul, I felt I would leave my home and landsmen to follow this woman around the world, a willing stowaway in her ship of fools.

“You’re the kind of woman I would cross the ocean for.”

It sounded dumb when said out loud.

She looked at me (precisely as Bill Hicks described) like a dog that’s just been shown a card trick.

“That’s a weird thing to say,” she said.

Under normal circumstances, I would have abandoned the entire conversation after such a bad start, but the chemistry between us was so intense that I asked her if she felt what I felt. She asked me what I meant by that and I could only think of that most unimaginative and clinical description for lovers: chemistry. There was a powerful current flowing through the ope...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Part 1: Roman Numeral Number One
• Part 2: Follow Your Paranoid Dreams
• Part 3: 32
• Part 4: Once You Survive Death