TBT: Man of the Cloth

This was originally posted in June 2009. We’re now over 25 years. One of the videos has changed. The feelings have not.

I’ve had a major crush on Rowan Atkinson for over 20 years. It took Critter sharing the following video, however, to make me realize something.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RB1N3hW4hXg

This guy has played a hell of a lot of priests. There’s the famous turn in Four Weddings and a Funeral, of course. Less famous, for some unknown reason, is the beautiful black comedy Keeping Mum. Priests in both.

None of them are alike: competent and incompetent, confident and timid, sincerely religious and…not. Indeed, the one thing they have in common is that they’re funny, which makes me less than surprised that he had this to say about an anti-religious-defamation law proposed in Britain in 2004:

To criticize a person for their race is manifestly irrational and ridiculous, but to criticize their religion, that is a right. That is a freedom. The freedom to criticize ideas, any ideas – even if they are sincerely held beliefs – is one of the fundamental freedoms of society. A law which attempts to say you can criticize and ridicule ideas as long as they are not religious ideas is a very peculiar law indeed.

Yeah, that crush isn’t going away any time soon.

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TBT: Man of the Cloth
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2 thoughts on “TBT: Man of the Cloth

  1. 2

    Keeping Mum is one of my all time favourites. Everyone in it is superb but Rowan Atkinson’s speech at the conference is both funny and poigniant. Especially when understanding the subtext of what he is saying.

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