Rise, and Be Healed!

During my last two years of college, one of the things my roommate (the other cartoonist for the campus weekly) and I enjoyed most on Sunday mornings was bong hits and coffee for breakfast while watching the local TV evangelists for cheap laffs — TV evangelists were funny back then — while waiting for the local Sunday morning Tarzan Film Festival for even more cheaper laffs (a lot of local channels were running Tarzan movies on late Sunday mornings back then; what was the deal with that?).

The biggest hit around our dorm was a guy with a pompadour a mile high and a pastel blue suit (that looked like he’d stolen it from the local news anchorman) who broadcast out of Pulaski, VA — my bud and I went to Radford College, in the city (for down there) of Radford, VA, just across the river and down the road a piece — who used to “heal” people on the air, usually wheelchair-bound, deaf, mute, and gullible (interesting, he never did have any blind people on that program). He’d gibber a bunch of phrases strung together as if on heroin, top it off with a little “in Jesus’ name, out, thou (insert affliction), OUT!”, and he’d smack some deaf/mute kid in the forehead and push him back onto the deacons. They’d stand the poor sucker back up, and the preacher would snap his fingers around the kid’s ears and say “say ‘thank you, Jesus’”, and the kid would offer up some barely-intelligible groaning and the preacher would exclaim, “ohh, isn’t it wonderful?”; the audience would burst into applause and “amens” and my roommate and I would laugh so hard we shot bongwater out of our noses…

…all in the cause of satirical and artistic inspiration, of course.

So, after a few months of this, I finally start wondering… why is it always the forehead? No matter what the affliction — not just deafness, but paralysis, arthritic limbs, asthma — Pompadour Boy would always smack his marks… uh, faithful …on the friggin’ forehead! Here, in another early Yipster Times piece, I imagine the day that Reverend Pastel is challenged to heal hemorrhoids on his program. A cheap gag, I know, but I learned early on that good execution can often save a really lame gag. It sure did here; I mean, it did get into the Yipster Times.

medium-res jpg image, 258k; high-res tiff image, 387k