In the UK, Hicks was acclaimed as the stand-up who might define the Nineties but back in the US he felt stuck. “Today he would be a mad prophet of the airwaves,” comedy manager Jimmy Miller says in Cynthia True’s Hicks biography American Scream. “He’d be on HBO, interviewing people, saying whatever’s on his mind. But back then the comedy business just hadn’t matured. They didn’t know what to do with him.” Miller said that in 2002. Twenty years on, Hicks, who died of cancer in 1994, wouldn’t need an HBO deal; he would be hosting a podcast.

Stand-ups played a foundational role in the podcast industry. In 2009, just as the format was becoming mainstream, Marc Maron launched the interview show WTF and Joe Rogan recorded the first episode of what became The Joe Rogan Experience. Two early podcast networks, Earwolf and Nerdist, were established by comedians; Nerdist’s Chris Hardwick compared podcasting to the comedy LP boom of the Sixties.

The symbiosis of comedy and podcasting isn’t hard to understand. Stand-ups love to hear themselves talk and a rambling chat is a much more congenial vehicle than the intense, time-consuming labour of writing and honing a tight one hour of killer material. With a successful podcast, a comedian can circumvent the usual gatekeepers and build a cultishly loyal fanbase without even having to leave the house or — and this is crucial — worry about being funny. What do you call a comedian who doesn’t make people laugh? A podcaster. Ba dum tss.

While old-fashioned one-liners and wry observations are doing just fine, many of the innovations in comedy are in the realm I call post-funny. Some of the most acclaimed comedian-fronted projects of recent years — including Master of None, Feel Good and Bo Burnham: Inside — see laughter as a secondary concern. The Closer, Dave Chappelle’s final Netflix special, is a prickly monologue about cancel culture and why he’s not actually transphobic, with occasional jokes. Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette was a Netflix sensation in 2018 precisely because Gadsby deconstructed her duty to make people laugh: “I must quit comedy. Because the only way I can tell my truth and put tension in the room is with anger.”

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Comedians increasingly want to be philosophers. (No philosophers want to be comedians, except perhaps Slavoj Žižek.) This can make them rather pompous. Over the weekend, Whitney Cummings tweeted: “Comedians did not sign up to be your hero. It’s our job to be irreverent and dangerous, to question authority and take you through a spooky mental haunted house so you can arrive at your own conclusions.” To which Marc Maron replied: “Maybe add ‘to be funny’ to the list.”

The first great philosopher-comic was Lenny Bruce. In Comedy at the Edge, Richard Zoglin describes the evolution of stand-up comedy between the Forties and the Seventies as “a long march from joke-telling to truth-telling”, with Lenny Bruce as its gung-ho general. Starting in 1953, he was not alone in reinventing comedy but he established a new template for the stand-up: raw, authentic, discomfitingly honest, ferociously intolerant of hypocrisy and cant and sometimes messy. Comedians in that mould couldn’t just make people laugh; they had to offer a point of view. “With Bruce a smile is not an end in itself, it is invariably a means,” wrote the critic Kenneth Tynan.

As Kliph Nesteroff explains in The Comedians, some critics didn’t consider what Bruce was doing to be comedy at all. Time complained that he “merely shouts angrily and tastelessly at the world”, while the Los Angeles Times deplored his “soaring, if uncertain, egotism rooted in the eroded soil of unlettered knowledge, snippets of cliché liberalism, borrowed erudition, and a conviction he has a Messianic message”. Bruce, who died of a drug overdose in 1966, claimed for comedians the radical freedom not to be funny all the time.

At that time, only three kinds of people enjoyed the privilege of speaking their minds to an audience for an hour: politicians, preachers and comedians. In fact, the priest delivering Bruce’s eulogy said “he was in a sense an evangelist, on a street corner”. After Bruce’s death, the baton of comedian as social critic passed to the likes of Richard Pryor (“the Picasso of our profession,” according to Jerry Seinfeld) and George Carlin, whose aphorisms now circulate, like Orwell’s or Gandhi’s, in the form of earnest Twitter memes.

These pioneers cast a long shadow. A 2017 Rolling Stone list of the best stand-ups of all time was topped by Pryor, Carlin and Bruce, with others in the same tradition — Louis CK, Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle — close behind. At number 13 was Bill Hicks. “To me, the comic is the guy who says ‘Wait a minute’ as the consensus forms,” Hicks told the New Yorker in 1993. “He’s the antithesis of the mob mentality.”

The politics of this brand of comedy are, more often than not, libertarian. Comics want the freedom to say whatever they like as long as it’s funny so have often ended up on the frontlines of the battle for free speech. Bruce was twice tried on obscenity charges, while Carlin was arrested for disturbing the peace when he performed his celebrated routine ‘Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television’ in 1972. When an English vicar complained of blasphemy in Bill Hicks’s 1992 show Revelations, he replied: “This is about freedom and freedom of speech and words can’t hurt you.”

The culture has changed somewhat since then. In comedy, at least, there are now more taboos on the Left than on the Right and the spectre of cancel culture is to someone like Chappelle what the NYPD was to Lenny Bruce, minus the court cases. In The Closer, Chappelle expresses the comedian’s licence to say anything in a less noble form than Hicks: “Comedians have a responsibility to speak recklessly. Sometimes the funniest thing to say is mean. Remember, I’m not saying it to be mean: I’m saying it because it’s funny.”

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This licence is immensely powerful. Take Jimmy Carr’s Roma Holocaust joke, for example. In the context of his recent Netflix special, it’s still, I think, grotesquely misjudged — but Carr goes on to talk about the forgotten victims of the Nazis and why he made the joke. It clearly didn’t shock the audience in the room, nor the huge number of people who watched the special during its first six weeks. It only became scandalous when a 40-second clip went viral on TikTok and Twitter: the land of no context.

Even in a stand-up environment, though, Chappelle’s disclaimer isn’t enough. I don’t buy the popular binary division between comedy that “punches up” (good) and the kind that “punches down” (bad). Comedy doesn’t cleave so neatly, and nor does society. But I’m equally unconvinced by the “just jokes” defence.

For one thing, it’s not the case that anything goes. No major comedian currently delivers the kind of racist jokes that were commonplace in the Seventies, however deftly constructed they might be. (Carr celebrates Black Lives Matter in his Netflix show before getting laughs out of the Roma.) For another, it’s inconsistently applied. Ricky Gervais has arguably replaced Richard Dawkins as Britain’s most famous atheist and on that issue he wants to be taken seriously. Increasingly, comedians want to say whatever they like even when they’re not being funny.

You can see this double standard at work in Jon Stewart’s famous appearance on CNN’s Crossfire in 2004. I agreed with Stewart that Crossfire was a toxic travesty of debate but notice how he positioned himself. When Crossfire co-host Tucker Carlson criticised him for asking politicians soft questions, Stewart replied that he’s on Comedy Central: “The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls.” But when Carlson complained, “I thought you were going to be funny, come on, be funny,” Stewart said, “No, I’m not going to be your monkey.” Depending on the moment, he is Schrödinger’s comedian: just a funnyman but also not just a funnyman.

Rogan uses this trick, too. He would not be interviewing politicians, authors and epidemiologists if he were only about the laughs, but he keeps his comedian’s licence in his back pocket in case of emergency. Last April, Dr Anthony Fauci criticised him for advising young, healthy people not to get vaccinated. In his self-deprecating response, Rogan said: “I’m not a doctor, I’m a fucking moron and I’m a cage fighting commentator who’s a dirty stand-up comedian who just told you I’m drunk most of the time and I do testosterone and I smoke a lot of weed. I’m not a respected source of information, even for me.”

This is very convenient. Rogan is half a conspiracy theorist: he has the curiosity but not the commitment. To his credit, he sometimes admits to being wrong. But he has that particular blend of scepticism (towards mainstream expertise) and credulity (towards anybody challenging it), so he becomes a conduit for false information, even when he’s not explicitly endorsing it. In the case of the present Spotify controversy, whether Rogan himself is an anti-vaxxer (he claims he isn’t) is a moot point if he is sympathetically conversing with vaccine sceptics to an audience of millions.

Russell Brand, too, has been described as “a powerful voice for anti-vaxxers”. He’s been on a journey. In 2013, Brand abruptly transformed himself from verbose dandy lothario into revolutionary seer in a Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman in which he urged people not to vote. His ensuing book, Revolution, was a peculiar mix of rehab memoir, New Age mysticism and solid policy proposals from Left-wing thinkers such as David Graeber and Thomas Piketty, liberally salted with self-deprecation: “I’m not Noam Chomsky, you’ve probably noticed; I’m happy to be Norman Wisdom.”

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During the pandemic, Brand’s obsession with political alienation and challenging official narratives has led him a long way from Piketty. The breathlessly clickbaity titles of his YouTube videos are often indistinguishable from those of the conservative guests he gently interviews on a regular basis: “Why The Left Can’t Handle Donald Trump”, “Vaccine Gold Rush: Do You Trust Gates?”, “They’re Eliminating FREE THOUGHT!! Billionaires’ Plan To CONTROL The Internet”, the latter bearing the hashtag #GeorgeSoros.

Brand claims that he is “breaking down the news, providing you with information you won’t get in mainstream media”. Is it true? It doesn’t matter. “What do I know?” he says in a recent video defending Rogan. “What could I claim to know? I’ve never been to university or higher education of any kind, except for showing-off school.” To his fans, of course, this makes him all the more reliable: one of them, not one of Them. That video is called “The Truth”.

Comedians should be free to switch lanes, but when Al Franken runs for the US Senate, or David Baddiel writes Jews Don’t Count, they aren’t doing so as comedians and they are making a choice. Comedians who express political opinions through the discipline of stand-up (a discipline which inevitably tests and sharpens those opinions) are also making a choice. Just as a musician has more freedom in a protest song than in an essay, or a film-maker more liberty in a drama based on a true story than in a documentary, the criteria are relatively clear. Rogan and Brand raise an interesting question: does the privilege of comedy apply even when you’re not doing comedy?

I do wonder if Hicks, with his nascent taste for conspiracy theories and spiritual self-discovery, would have wound up in a similar role. 70 years after Lenny Bruce’s comedy revolution, Rogan and Brand represent a very modern, very online mutation which is both post-funny and post-truth-telling. Rather than establishing a point of view and crafting it into a routine, they offer a muddy, non-committal version of “anything goes” in which misinformation is simply another interesting idea for the open-minded to consider and pushback is establishment intolerance of free speech.

By hedging their bets, they have achieved a freedom that Carlin and Hicks could only have dreamt of. If you say they should clarify their own positions, or take responsibility for the opinions they promote, well, they say, they’re comedians, not intellectuals. Why so serious?

When you’re writing about religion, people tend to confess a lot of crimes to you. Some have done their time; others have a heavy weight on their souls. A former boxer, crook and ten-out-of-ten sinner — ten commandments, that is — Uncle John soon came clean. “I plotted a couple of murders, love,” he confided in me, our bond sealed as we faced down Arctic winds together. “Never went through with them, but I had murder in my heart, so in God’s eyes, I broke it.”

But Uncle John was born again on 16 January 1994 and has been spreading the word ever since. He spends his weekends pacing pavements, sporting Ugg boots and a worn bible covered completely in black gaffer tape, offering whomever will have him a kind ear — and a dire warning about the End Times.

His 37-year-old nephew, Bill Boswell, told me he thought his uncle “was punched in the head too many times when he said that he’d got saved”. But then Bill, too, was born again: his life changed forever on 15 May 2005 at 7:45pm; now he is the breathless preacher and leader of the Dartford branch. And while he always has a twinkle in his eye, Bill is deadly serious. His conversion wasn’t merely personal — he believes there’s something to the fact that the Spirit is moving in the Gypsy community. “God is calling His people now. It’s the most vague and most precise answer I can give,” he told me.

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This emphasis on the Holy Spirit is a hallmark of Pentecostalism. Exact figures are hard to come by, but it’s thought that the UK is home to around 3 million Pentecostals — including, by some estimates, up to 40% of British Gypsies. (It should be said that the Dartford boys refer to themselves as Gypsies: a word that has been reclaimed with pride.) Light and Life alone, with 33 congregations in Britain and a total of 20,000 followers, claims it is home to 10% of the nation’s Gypsy population.

Pentecostalism is, in short, “Evangelicalism plus”: after accepting Jesus as Lord and Saviour, believers are filled with the Holy Spirit. This often involves speaking in tongues. The faith is defined by direct experience of — and personal interaction with — the presence of God, and all the miracles that come with it: success in matters of the mind, body, spirit and wallet. Pentecostalism is also notable for its lack of overarching authority, and its ability to look and sound like any local culture. Among the Gypsies, it often manifests as a mystical view of the world, and an embrace of what we might call “traditional values”. Music is central to worship.

Far from outliers, these Gypsies are part of a global movement. Pentecostalism is probably the fastest growing religion on earth. With 600 million followers worldwide, and counting, it’s estimated that by 2050, one in 10 — or one billion people — will be Pentecostal. In 1980, 6% of Christians were Pentecostal; now, over a quarter of the world’s 2 billion are part of the faith.

The appeal is, in many ways, obvious. From its earliest days, Pentecostalism has been the faith of the downtrodden — not that of the rich white Westerners with which it is so commonly associated: the red-faced, hellfire televangelist and his soft-focus wife. The denomination came into being in Los Angeles in 1906, led by the son of freed slaves; it spoke to the “negroes, poor, lowly, ignorant and despised,” as one early observer put it. Then seen as the bastard child of Evangelical Christianity, Pentecostals are now a force to be reckoned with no matter where you look, rapidly converting existing Christian believers, and taking hold among many peoples in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.

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But, with considerable competition, Britain’s Gypsies appear to be among the fastest Pentecostalising groups on earth — along with many of their Romani cousins in mainland Europe. Up to a third of the 12 million Gypsies, Roma and Travellers across Europe are Pentecostal or have at least attended a Spirit-led church. Light and Life’s evangelicals mightn’t always do things by the book, but in two years of travelling the world exploring this fascinating and rapidly growing movement, they are the most of the book people I have encountered.

Recently, Bill invited me to return to Dartford for a meal and some music, in a church that was packed to the gills with young families on a wet Wednesday night. He likens the Gypsy conversion to the parable of the Great Banquet, told in the Gospel of Luke: no one turns up to a feast, so a servant is sent out to invite “the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame”. The blessings of the Kingdom of God are available to all who will come and believe. The Gypsies, Bill believes, have gone hungry for too long, and it’s time for them to pull up a chair at the table.

Over roast potatoes and lemonade, Bill’s wife Becky — a fellow gorja but very much part of the culture she married into — believes there’s a reason why Pentecostalism is speaking so strongly to the world’s marginalised peoples: “we have the humility to submit ourselves before God.”

Recent history plays a strong part in explaining the mass conversion, too. An unwanted, stateless people no matter where they landed, Gypsies know all too well that, when events take over, they need someone in their corner. Indeed, they are often forgotten as victims of the Holocaust alongside the Jewish people; as Bill puts it, “it seems like whenever they get persecuted, we go through it at the same time.”

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In this context, the Spirit coming to their people immediately after World War II, in France, is significant. In 1950, in the Normandy region, a poor Gypsy woman named Madame Duvil-Reinhart turned to a Pentecostal church for help: one of her sons was dying from an acute illness. The doctors had told her to give up on him and focus on her other children. The church didn’t, though, and prayed for the boy until he miraculously healed. The entire family converted on the spot.

They ultimately formed a church called Vie et Lumière (Life and Light) — and, in the 1980s, set sail to convert their British cousins (Bill jokes that the English opted to call their church Light and Life, because “the French say everything backwards”). They’re looking to save anyone they can — hence Uncle John and the lads eyeing even my wretched soul — but during those long, cold days of street evangelism, I could see that the Gypsy lads have a soft spot for people they see their former selves in: the homeless; the bleary-eyed, hopeless men emerging from betting shops. They would lend them a patient ear, say a prayer for their souls, and buy them a sandwich and a warm drink if it helped.

Light and Life set the most store in saving their people. After all, as one churchgoer lamented to me, they were the last group to hear the good news. The appeal of the faith for Gypsies, then, is similar to its appeal to North Korean defectors, and increasing numbers of Latinos in the United States, among other groups: Pentecostalism affords marginalised communities a kind of spiritual citizenship — an acceptable way of being an outsider.

Yet Becky believes there’s much more going on than people turning to God at a time of crisis. “There’s rich Gypsies. There’s poor Gypsies. There’s people with healthy families and all the things that the world has to offer — but many still feel there’s a void, an emptiness in there,” she told me. “Coming to Jesus is just as powerful to them as it is to people who have hit rock bottom.”

Pentecostal conversion is a way of navigating both this life and the next — or, as a friend put it to me, it offers solution and absolution. Church is a place where Gypsies can belong, and a place where they can practice their culture away from the council signs hastily erected to stop people parking their caravans, the screaming tabloid headlines about your people’s “free-for-all”, the pub bans on your lot coming in for a drink. “God has made us more civilised than we were,” Bill once told me. “Gypsy culture used to be travelling, running to and fro. Now, once most of our people become saved, they stay put.”

Salvation is also a form of assimilation: this is what I’ve learned from spending time with the Light and Life Gypsies, and a host of other disparate peoples around the world. For all the raucous positivity of the Light and Life worshipers, I can’t help but feel that their practice has seen a retreat of the Gypsy culture to inside the church walls. With God’s help, they’re now “acceptable” in modern Britain.