God Tastes Like Chicken: An interview with John Murdock

Well, it’s been a while since my last article, so I wanted to give you guys something special, so here goes:

“Organized religion is perfect for comedy because the absurdity curve is delicious”

--John Murdock, comedian, erotic balloonatuer, and host of the monthly variety show/revival God Tastes Like Chicken.

Folks, this is gonna be a fun one. :)

Earlier this week I sat down for an interview with John Murdock. For those of you unfamiliar with him, John has been performing in and around the NYC area for the last 11 years. He’s been employed making balloons of, shall we say, a questionable nature at the drag restaurant Lucky Cheng’s for the last three years, and it was here the he began his blasphemous revival show God Tastes like Chicken. From there the show moved from venue to venue, until a year and a half ago it found its way to the Under St. Mark’s Theater, where it combined some of the best of the acts from Penny’s Open Mike with the improv group that has always been the main focus of the show.

If Penny Pollack “sparkles” and Joe Yoga “smolders” then I’d say John Murdock “simmers”; like the red-hot coals at the bottom of a dying campfire, the man positively radiates a quiet intensity as he talks to me about his monthly kersplosion of blasphemy-driven performance art.

“It’s more of a revival service now,” says John. “My sermon is always a thread for the show, and that is definitively religious material. There’s a communion of chicken’s blood (Kool Aid), a Jim Jones Experience; the pageantry of religion, whether it be the silly outfits, it just lends itself to mockery.”

After experiencing a show last month filled with confessionals, acrobatic drag queens, dance contests, comedy-improv involving a men’s room floor, robes, and chicken masks, I can see exactly what John is talking about. However, this show isn’t merely fun and games; God Tastes Like Chicken has a serious and profound message for the viewer, which Mr. Murdock was good enough to elaborate on:

“If you get into it, for two thousand years [religion] has been protected by itself; I mean, there wouldn’t be Christianity, there wouldn’t be Islam, without the fact that they would kill you; for two thousand years it was spread by the sword. And then for a while you had people like Voltaire, who were able to speak up because they had the protection of kings, and even then they were constantly moving around to avoid the church. This is really the first age when people really have the freedom to question religion. For years Christianity has been enforced by war, it’s been enforced by suppression, it’s been enforced by brainwashing children, it’s been enforced by the threat of hell. I mean, when you get right down to it, that’s violence. You put that message into the mind of a child and then you say ‘free will.’ I mean, you can’t say “Love thy neighbor,” and in the same book say ‘stone the homosexuals,’ it’s a mess of contradictions. I believe in freedom of speech across the board, but the arguments can be made now, and should.”

Recently, a certain former child star has also earned the ire of the Great Chicken in the Sky, mainly for his current political activities, which have become quite the wellspring of material for John Murdock’s weekly sermons.

“Kirk Cameron is a godsend. I mean, he just snapped, and now he’s a religious fundamentalist. But what he’s doing now is, he went to all the colleges with the idea of handing out Darwin’s Origin of the Species, but with a fifty-page creationist insert talking about ‘Darwin led to Nazism,’ and fictitious pseudo-scientific attacks on the theory of evolution itself. People act like this isn’t a problem, but look, we’ve got this world where we just had a Christian fundamentalist, George W. Bush, who believes in Armageddon, facing off against an Islamic fundamentalist, Osama Bin Laden. One seeking nuclear weapons, one with them: it’s horrifying. You can talk about the weaknesses in the theory of evolution, and there’re things we don’t get yet, but it’s a pretty strong theory. Look at Microbiology, I mean that’s evolution. Viruses, bacteria, they mutate, and we have to stay on the cutting edge of this, that’s how we protect ourselves, and if you have people who are studying in these sciences who don’t believe [in evolution], we fall behind and we are less safe. Creationists make our country weaker, and more vulnerable. I mean, who loves creationists more than America’s enemies? The more ignorant we are, the easier we are to push out of the way. Society has got to evolve, starting with accepting the theory of evolution.”

But beyond simply sermonizing his audience, John Murdock is, at his heart, an entertainer:

“I love the Lower East Side, you get these raw performances that you never get anywhere else. People who take risks. People who are damn talented but have taken the stranger road, and I enjoy it, I enjoy the people that get up there. Not everyone who takes the stage in God Tastes Like Chicken is going to talk about religion. You get musicians, Mike Milazzo, Joe Yoga; you get performers like Kelly Dwyer and Scout Durwood, Penny gets up. Sometime Penny does religion, sometimes she does her dark beauty, and that to me is Lower East Side—it’s still alive. People taking risks. It does tie together in the end. I mean, you have to evolve, you have to grow, and that involves taking risks, and that’s what I want.”

God Tastes Like Chicken involves a massive, rotating cast of varied performers; John isn’t really looking to cast any specific kind of artist per se, he’s more interested in how a specific performer approaches their medium:

“I’m not just looking for comics who go for the cheap joke, I’m looking for comics like Molly Knefel, John Knefel—they delve deep, and are profoundly funny and hilarious, and they have a point of view. To them there is a craft, there is an art…they’re comedians rather than comics, and that’s beautiful. It’s this group of people—Paulina Princess of Power, Skinny Bitch Jesus, Molly, John, Scout, Mike Milazzo, Joe Yoga, all of them on one stage giving you as many perspectives and as many flavors of the art as you can handle.”

So there you have it, folks, the third member of (A)muse Collective. John Murdock: driven, passionate, and brimming with the kind of artistic intensity that is sure to make New York’s Lower East Side continue to blaze as a beacon of artistic innovation. I’ll leave you with a few wonderful gems from our interview, and if you haven’t already left to go check it out, head to the next God Tastes Like Chicken Revival. I’ll be the guy in the chicken mask dancing to Dropkick Murphys' “Drink and Fight”.

“‘Blessed are the meek?’ That’s disgusting. Screw the meek, and screw anyone who tells you to be meek. The meek are sheep, and sheep get fleeced.”

“Chances are, when I die, the entity that is me is going to be gone, so make your heaven on earth now.”

“…And seriously, Kirk Cameron, you should have just come out of the closet, bro. Then you could be a well adjusted gay man like Neil Patrick Harris.”

--John Murdock

For More info: God Tastes Like Chicken runs the first thursday of every month @ Under St. Marks Theater (93 St. Marks Place, Between 1st Ave and Ave A) or follow Mr. Murdock on facebook.