Saturday Night Live is known for its topical humor, but the weekend before last, it sparked debate by wading into theological controversy. In what Hero Complex suggested was the “most blasphemous skit in ‘SNL’ history,” the show drew fire for airing a skit that satirized Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained by using a premise that is possibly even more controversial than Tarantino’s original: What if Jesus Christ rose from the dead…To exact revenge? As a thumping big-budget soundtrack rocks in the background, a voiceover touts the film as “A less violent ‘Passion of the Christ’” and quips “He’s risen from the dead … and he’s preaching anything but forgiveness.”

The studio audience seemed to love the skit, but, as happens with many of SNL’s forays into religious satire, the skit sparked a firestorm of criticism from conservative Christians. Twitter and SNL’s website immediately lit up with complaints about the segment, with commenters decrying it as “blasphemous,” “offensive,” and “just wrong.” The Catholic League was also quick to weigh in, calling the skit “vicious” and “uncharacteristically bloody”. Conservative televangelist Pat Robertson, for his part, reviled the whole thing “anti-Christian bigotry that is just disgusting.”

But there is something peculiar about the outcry over the “DJesus Uncrossed”: Most of the complaints aren’t emanating from the progressive Christian pacifists. Instead, much of the criticism is coming from hyper-conservative Christian circles, a world that, oddly enough, includes voices that preach a vision of Jesus eerily similar to SNL’s gun-toting Messiah.

Though the image of Jesus mowing down victims with a machine gun horrifies many Christians—and rightfully so—others, like Patheos blogger David R. Henson, have pointed out that hidden in SNL’s bloody humor is a powerful satire of an overly-violent, hyper-masculine subculture that has begun to influence not just our popular culture, also multiple strains of Christian theology. Influential mega-pastor Mark Driscoll, for example, has become famous for saying that he believes in a Jesus who has a “commitment to make someone bleed.” He reportedly refuses to believe in a “hippie, diaper, halo Christ” because, as he puts it, “I cannot worship a guy I can beat up.” Meanwhile, churches across America have started creating “Fight Club” groups for men, and several Christian communities are even basing services around Mixed Martial Arts fighting.
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Jack Jenkins is a writer and researcher for the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative at the Center for American Progress.

Joe Biden’s 2016 campaign for President is getting a bump, at least among television-watching good-government nerds, next week. As the New York Times reports, he’s making a surprise appearance on Parks and Recreation:

With the race won, a guest appearance by Mr. Biden on the NBC comedy “Parks and Recreation,” filmed way back in July, can finally be revealed. Everything about the scene, which the executive producer of the show, Michael Schur, labeled a “scenelet,” had been under strict secrecy. The show was warned that if any word leaked out before the election, some provision might have to be made to give the Republican vice-presidential nominee, Representative Paul Ryan, a similar cameo.

“It was all very byzantine and complicated,” Mr. Schur said. “There seem to be all kinds of specific rules, which I never fully understood. But we decided to err on the side of caution.”

Parks and Recreation got something of an early jump on the Biden-mania sweeping the memo-o-sphere. “What is your ideal man?” Leslie Knope’s best friend Ann asked her back in the show’s second season. “He has the brains of George Clooney in the body of Joe Biden,” Leslie responded promptly. But the show is hardly alone in its love for Biden. One of the things that will be delightfully odd to watch about a Biden run for president is that he’ll be one of the first candidates who is heavily defined by pop culture jokes before he officially throws his hat in the ring.

That process may have begun in 1991, when Kevin Nealon played him on Saturday Night Live during a cold open about Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings:

The riff on Biden as somewhat oversexed and socially inappropriate became the foundation of The Onion’s portrayal of the Vice President as a Trans-Am-washing, Summer-of-’87-remembering, Dave and Busters evictee. The image of Biden as a bro is all over Gifs of him with animated sunglasses descending on his face or fistbumping actor Kal Penn. It’s a raunchier ideal than the man himself, of course–Biden is famously devoted to his family–but it’s appealingly winking, and it’s schtick that makes his gaffes look minor. What’s sticking your foot in your mouth in comparison to asking Clarence Thomas for sex advice or hightailing it to Mexico for a while?

Biden’s done more family-friendly fare, too–he made a cameo on the third season of kids’ geography game show Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego to tell host Greg Lee that: “I just wanted to let you know that I proposed a Congressional resolution naming you ‘The Best Detective of the Year’…But some people were more comfortable with ‘Best Detective of the Month’…And a few preferred ‘Best Detective of the Work Week.’ Then someone suggested ‘best’ is an awfully strong word, so we decided to name you ‘The Somewhat-Notable Detective of the Next 12 Minutes.’ Congratulations, Greg.”

Biden may have a reputation for being something of a goof. But his laid-back response to his media portrayals–there’s some suggestion that he’s aware of and enjoys The Onion articles–and his willingness to do television is smart. The combination of a hunger for indication of candidates’ true selves, the ease with which memes, a la the Tumblr Texts From Hillary, can be blown up quickly, and the rise of political humor as a form of commentary as significant as serious news, future candidates for president are going to have to be comfortable skipping deftly from policy talk to self-satire. Biden may find himself challenged by a younger generation in 2016, but when it comes to handling political comedy, he’s an old hand.

My favorite bit of Louis C.K.’s stint hosting Saturday Night Live was, I think not very surprisingly, the sketch where he recreated his FX show as if it were Abraham Lincoln living through awkward sex, stand-up comedy, and race relations in contemporary New York:

But I thought there were two particularly astute things about it, both of which are reasonable critiques of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, about which much more to come later in the week. The opening of the sketch gets at something Lincoln only deals with glancingly: Lincoln’s distance from the people he was freeing–the halting confession “I just don’t have any black friends.”
–and the question of what would happen both to freemen themselves and to the national economy after the passage of the 13th Amendment. “You’re all emancipated. It’s good, right?” Lincoln asks a freeman at a coffee bar in the first scene, trolling for complements. Now of course, slavery was absolutely terrible, but the failures of Reconstruction and the rise of the sharecropping system and other elements of economic apartheid continue to resonate today. Emancipation and the amendment were the beginning of a process that’s still ongoing to help people who were tools of the American economy become full participants in its labors and rewards, and it’s sly to work that in there.

In keeping with the sketch’s resonance for contemporary politics, C.K.’s summary of Lincoln’s dealings with slaveowners could apply to almost any political debate in which reason has fled the stage. “They’re like ‘Oh, but I like owning people,’” Lincoln/Louis explains in a monologue. “Oh, yeah , no, no, I get it. I totally get that. You gotta act like you’re kind of cool with it. ‘If I could own a couple of dudes, I’d love to own a couple of dudes.’…You have to act like this is a 50-50 issue. ‘You know, I just kinda think that owning a person is not cool, you stupid dick.’” I understand the need to compromise in the legislative process, to massage egoes and to make people feel respected. But it’s worth considering what we can do before things get to that point to knock some ideas out of the range of positions that deserve a fair hearing and emotional credence.

It’s true Lindsay Lohan was not exceptionally good on Saturday Night Live this weekend, though the Real Housewives of Disney sketch was brilliant and Kristen Wiig should definitely play a dissolute princess again at some point:

But the main thing the furor over her appearance on the show made me think about was why the question of whether Lohan could—and should—be working again is even close to as heated as discussions about Chris Brown and Charlie Sheen. Vulture wants to know why she keeps getting chances in the industry (and totally mischaracterizes her performance and character in Prairie Home Companion, for the record). Gawker treats the question of whether she was good on the show as a Zen koan in need of extensive contemplation.

Lindsay Lohan has absolutely had some issues. She appears to have had substantial problems with substance abuse. She stole some jewelry and was punished for her. She apparently behaved somewhat badly on the set of her movie Georgia Rule—Jane Fonda, who has not had such a hot streak picking projects herself lately, complained about Lohan. She’s potentially a lesbian in a climate that can be pretty limiting to the career prospects of gay women. She also has a notoriously dysfunctional family, who have placed obligations on her ranging from having to support her mother to dealing with her father who’s done everything from condemn Lohan’s relationship with Samantha Ronson to be arrested for battering his girlfriend. That’s quite a bit to put up with, but Hollywood’s had quite a nice little streak of rehabilitating women with similar issues. Britney Spears has a steady boyfriend, a resurrected career, and custody of her kids bad. Nicole Richie’s overcome both eating and substance issues to launch a successful jewelry line and have a couple of deeply adorable munchkins. Paris Hilton, the most notorious of a generation of Hollywood party girls, has quieted down. Given the extent of Lohan’s talent and the trajectory of her peers, it’s totally reasonable that she’d be given subsequent chances.

Charlie Sheen has also had some issues. Unlike Lohan, however, the harm he’s done is as much to other people as it is himself. He’s got substance abuse issues he’s been treated for repeatedly. He’s also shot, strangled, and thrown a woman to the ground. And if it’s true that he’s been largely professional and together when he’s on the job, throwing a months-long temper tantrum about his current and former employer and getting a $25 million settlement is at least as costly and distracting as anything Lohan ever did. And Sheen’s talent-based glory days are at least as far from his present as Lohan’s are from hers—maybe even further. It’s pretty bizarre that doing harm to yourself makes you a pathetic object of condemnation but doing harm to others earns you supporters who are eager to forgive you or regard you as a badass.

The bridge is yours.

-Carmen Sandiego, Latina role model.

-In a Don Henley v. Frank Ocean fight, I know which side I’m on.

-Warners v. Hotfile and takedown notices.

-This HBO series about war photographers sounds pretty great.

-I really hope Lindsay Lohan is okay. I miss her:

When Chris Hayes tweeted that Darrell Hammond’s interview with Terry Gross was “almost too much to bear,” I honestly thought he might be exaggerating. But he’s right. Hammond’s incredibly brave and forthright about what it’s like to live as a survivor of what sounds like insanely traumatic abuse and to work at a very high level while struggling with the mental illness caused by that abuse. And his description of his cutting is precise and painful — and should put to lie the idea that something that’s all too often dismissed as overdramatic acting out by teenage girls is either minor or confined to women:

HAMMOND: I don’t know if I can describe it any better than that. I mean, I was disoriented and frightened, and I was feeling every single thing that happened to me – you know, when I was in the kitchen once with my mother. And I’m not a doctor, so I can’t describe what flashbacks are as well as, perhaps, they can, but it is like you’re living it again.

So if you make a small cut, it creates a new and more manageable crisis than the one that currently has you lying on the…

GROSS: Let me stop there. You’re talking about cutting yourself …

HAMMOND: Yeah.

GROSS: ..with a razor.

HAMMOND: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: So I interrupted you. You’re saying it does what?

HAMMOND: Well, it creates a smaller, more manageable crisis than the one that has you gripping the carpet.

GROSS: So like, the physical pain distracts you from the mental agony?

HAMMOND: I think so. I think that might be a fair assessment of it, yeah.

GROSS: So you take out a razor and start cutting your…

HAMMOND: I don’t start. It’s just a little (makes noise) – just enough to, you know, draw red and create a crisis that’s manageable, you know.

GROSS: So are you concerned at that moment, what if I bleed onstage?

HAMMOND: No, I mean…

GROSS: In the practical realm.

HAMMOND: No, at that point, I’ve been doing that since I was 19 years old. So I’m pretty good at managing it.

GROSS: So that you don’t really show blood?

HAMMOND: Not through my clothes. I mean, it’s easily bandaged.