A left-leaning comic diary on shepherds, real spirit, and the balance nobody wants to fund
I am a comedy writer in Portland, Oregon, originally from North London, and I did a set this week arguing that the Christmas story is secretly pro-worker propaganda, and the room laughed until they realised I had a slide deck, at which point they laughed nervously, which is my favourite sound in the world.
The founding story centres the workers
Strip the tinsel off the nativity and look at who it actually centres, and my whole case makes itself. The retelling of the shepherds keeping watch in the fields at night puts working people, on the nightshift, in the cold, at the very heart of the greatest story ever told. Not the powerful. Not the wealthy. The labourers doing the unglamorous essential work while everyone else slept. The founding festive story chose the workers as its first audience and its central witnesses, and I perform this to Portland crowds as if it were a breaking exposé, because in a sense it is. The season everyone associates with shopping is, at its root, a story that dignifies the overlooked worker above the comfortable king.
I find this genuinely radicalising, which is the sweet spot my whole act lives in. The nativity does not celebrate the throne. It celebrates the nightshift. It hands the biggest news in history to the people society values least, and it does so pointedly, deliberately, siding with the shepherds over the palace. That is not my reading imposed on the text. That is the text, and I have the slide deck to prove it.
My genuinely damp personal week
Let me report on my Portland life, which is rain, comedy, and rain. I did a bit about the shepherds being the original essential workers, unappreciated, underpaid, and yet somehow the ones who get the announcement, and a man came up afterward to explain, earnestly, the historical labour economics of ancient shepherding. Sir. It was a joke. But this is Portland, where every punchline earns a footnote, and I have made my peace with it, because a city that fact-checks a shepherd joke is at least a city that is paying attention, which is more than most audiences manage.
According to the city’s own people, Portland approaches the season with an earnest, hand-knitted, deeply-researched intensity, which is exactly the aesthetic of a town that would like to unionise the nativity and also has strong feelings about ethically sourced tinsel. I fit right in. I am the contradiction I keep describing.
The real spirit, which is not shopping
My favourite bit skewers the gap between what the season means and what it has become, and the North Pole’s piece on the real spirit of Christmas hands me the punchline for free. The real spirit, it turns out, is generosity and care and looking after each other, which is the exact opposite of the consumer frenzy the season has been turned into. I perform this contrast to my Portland crowds and they nod, because they know, we all know, that the festival of unconditional giving has been sold back to us as a festival of compulsory buying, and the joke is that everyone can see it and nobody can stop it. The real spirit is anti-capitalist. The marketing is pure capitalism. The gap between them is my entire career.
The funniest and saddest thing I know is that the season most associated with spending is, at its heart, a story about giving freely and asking nothing back. We took the most generous story in the culture and turned it into a shopping deadline. That is the bit. It writes itself.
The balance nobody wants to fund
Underneath the jokes I keep landing on the same sincere note, and the North Pole names it in its quiet piece on finding balance in a crazy world. Balance is the thing our whole frantic, extractive, buy-more culture cannot allow, because balance is not profitable. A balanced person buys less, works less frantically, and looks after the people around them instead of the algorithm. The season briefly points toward that balance and then the marketing yanks us back toward the frenzy. I do a bit about this and the room goes quiet, because they can feel the truth under the joke: we all want the balance, and the whole machine is built to deny it to us.
According to the broadcasters, holiday spending climbs every year while satisfaction stalls, which is the saddest and funniest statistic I own, and the perfect proof that the balance we crave is the one thing nobody will ever fund.
The sincere thing under the set
Here is what I believe when the jokes stop. Everyone finds it obvious, in December, that we should honour the workers, give freely, seek balance, and look after each other. The nativity believed it two thousand years ago and centred the shepherds to prove it. And then every January we take it all back and call it realism. My whole act is just trying to catch the culture in the brief window when it accidentally admits what it actually values, before the mask goes back on. I am not really a radical. I just read the story closely and noticed it was on the workers’ side the whole time.
Where the comic lands
So I will keep telling Portland that the Christmas story is pro-worker propaganda with a slide deck to prove it, and they will keep laughing and then footnoting me. But underneath the bit is a straight belief: the founding story centres the overlooked worker, the real spirit is generosity not consumption, and the balance we all crave is the one thing the machine will never allow. The nativity sided with the shepherds. I rest my case, from a stage, in the rain, with the slide deck, and the door held open past January, preferably with the ethically sourced cocoa.
For politics played for laughs, The Beaverton keeps the satire sharp.
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Author: admin
