By HUGO RIFKIND - TIMES
Added: Sat, 06 Nov 2010 12:45:31 UTC

As Richard Dawkins has so often shown us, strident atheists can often sound quite nasty. How is it, then, that the musical comedian Tim Minchin can pen a jaunty ditty about clerical child abuse called Pope Song — the first verse has 35 words, 22 of which are variations of an unprintable F-word, and the rest of which are largely “the”, “Pope”, “is” and “a” — and still come across as altogether pretty friendly?

“Hmm,” Minchin says. “Richard is one of the smartest people in the world. But he’s not a nice ... he doesn’t have the gift of ... hmm. He’s not charming. I mean, he can be, but he doesn’t owe us his charm. Whereas everything I do is about charming people into being OK with what I say. So if you’re going to say, you know, ‘f the motherfing Pope’, then you do it with a grand piano. And an orchestra.”

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TAGGED: ATHEISM, HUMOR, RICHARD DAWKINS