John Tesh's Funny Business
John Tesh is something of a pop culture Renaissance man. The longtime television reporter and personality reached household name status as the host for Entertainment Tonight from 1986-96, but he's perhaps best known now as a composer and musician, playing in concert halls, arenas and churches around the country. A Christian, Tesh is the host of the radio show Intelligence For Your Life Radio, the author of an inspirational memoir titled Intelligence for Your Life, and an advice dispenser on his website, tesh.com, where he offers thoughts on everything from family to finances.
As it turns out, the guy's pretty funny, too.
So it's perhaps fitting that Tesh was selected to host a cleaned-up comedy series. Proud of fact that they're known for not telling dirty jokes, Thou Shalt Laugh 4 boasts six comics performing before an enthusiastic audience at the Bay Area Fellowship church in Corpus Christi, Texas.
Tesh recently talked with me by phone about that show, the entertainment industry, and why he and his wife get ejected from comedy clubs in New York City.
Paul Asay: For some people, the idea of clean comedy is kind of an oxymoron, isn't it? I mean, there's a school of thought that the edgier the comedy is, the funnier it's naturally going to be—that you need to shock people in order to make people laugh. Do you think there's an element of truth to that?
John Tesh: I don't know. My wife [actress Connie Sellecca] is a big comedy fan—you want her in your audience when you're doing a comedy show. Well, not in my audience 'cause she doesn't think I'm funny—but when we go to New York, we go to every comedy club we can find. But if somebody gets up there, especially a woman, and starts dropping the f-bomb left and right and starts talking about her body parts or something, my wife will stand up and go, "Why do you have to be so disgusting?" And then the audience will applaud and the comic will go, "Who are you?" We usually get thrown out, but sometimes they [the comics] don't understand they can be funny without the f-bomb.
We live in one of those times when, for some reason, people think that it's [cool to be] shocking for some reason. I know exactly what it is, I grew up in local news and it was up on our wall in the news room: "If it bleeds, it leads." It's a metaphor, a car crash for real life. We're always trying to find somebody's life who's in a car. And that's always what sells, unfortunately. But I thought these guys [the comics in Thou Shalt Laugh] pulled it off, didn't you? I thought they did a great job.
Asay: Oh yeah, they were pretty hilarious—the best maybe I've seen in the series.
Tesh: The funniest thing for me was hanging out with these guys. I'm just sitting in the green room with Dana [Daniels] and Joe [Wong] and Isaac [Witty] and Michael Jr., and they're all working on material together … funny. Most of these guys don't get together like that because they're all doing 3,500 gigs a year. And the camaraderie was cool; it was like, "Let's go be funny in front of all these families."
Asay: Is it Christian comedy? Or would it be more fair to classify it as clean comedy?
Tesh: It's like me becoming a New Age piano player. I don't know what the heck that is. Maybe Thou Shalt Laugh wasn't the best title. I've always wanted to do one called, Crazy Clean Comedy. I think that's what this is. I hope the title doesn't turn people away who aren't Christians. There's no preaching in there. A lot of these comedians are making fun of themselves as Christians.
Asay: And when you're able to laugh at yourself, you can sometimes disarm stereotypes that Christians have gathered over the years.
Tesh: Most people think of Christians as the televangelist who's screaming at you. I grew up in a house with two Baptist preachers, and when I got into college, I went crazy. And then I came out on the other side. I met my wife 17 years ago and she goes, "Hey, if you like me, you might like my church" and I go, "No, I completed that whole program." But it started a journey for me: There was no dogma, it was just a relationship with God.
Asay: You've been in the entertainment business for, what, 20, 25 years?
Tesh: It's actually much longer than that because I started in 1972 when I was at a campus radio station at NC State and then I ended up being (disc jockey) Rick Dees' news guy in '73 in Raleigh, so what is that, 36 years?
For most people my life started when I was hosting Entertainment Tonight. But I worked in local news as an anchor and reporter in Orlando and Raleigh and Nashville and then New York City for 12 years. So I'm an old thing.
Asay: How has the industry changed since you've been around it? Or has it changed?
Tesh: I think it has changed dramatically. I just finished reading this book Tribes [by Seth Godin], and in this book, he talks about why it's so different. As human beings we are very much into creating or joining our own tribes, nowadays. It can be a church or synagogue, whatever, but also those tribes include everybody who watches 24 or Curb Your Enthusiasm. When I grew up, everybody was talking about The Ed Sullivan Show and the guy who spun the plates. Nowadays [because entertainment is so segmented], people talk about stuff and you have no idea what they're talking about. It's so much different now. Even when I was doing ET, we didn't have to worry about competition, so we didn't make deals with celebrities where it was like, "I'll come talk to only you if you put me on for 17 minutes." Those are the kinds of deals that are made these days.
Asay: This is my final question: Why is it important for Christians to laugh? And, maybe as an extension of that, why is it important for us to sometimes be able to laugh at ourselves?
Tesh: I think if you don't laugh at yourself then you're committing one of the sins that's right there in the Bible and that's pride. Pride goes right there before the fall. I think it's important to take—whether you're a Muslim, a Jew or a Christian—it's important to take your faith seriously. The bad rub for Christians has been, you go to church and they say, "Spread the gospel" and we sometimes take that to mean the Crusades and, "If you don't like it, I'm gonna kill you." That's not what we're about.