(from muddywaterzine.com )

God’s Comic, which, though very wordy and fiendishly clever, is Elvis at his biting, sarcastic, truthful best. Rolling Stone reviewer David Wild called it, “a song that Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht would be proud to call their own,” high praise indeed.

The narrator who starts the song, (there will be another narrator later) is a bawdy, drunken comedian whose character is a priest, a kind of Falstaffian servant of the Lord.

Whether or not this is a broad critique of the Catholic Church and their sometimes dubious representatives of Christ on earth, (priests start their day every day drinking wine at mass, after all) we get the picture. A drunken clown priest, which gives the listener a pretty clear idea of Costello’s feelings for the institution.

As big a fan I am of Elvis Costello, never seen this video. Totally awesome.