State of Clay
“Orel, love gets in the way of the important things in life, like going to sleep or being left alone.”
I really don’t want to have to open every G.O.T.H.S. essay with this sentence over the next four years, but: look, we all know what JD Vance said. He was getting interviewed on Fox News and explained that it was totally fine to be Catholic and deport thousands of people to a concentration camp on Cuba because of the early church fathers’ Ordo Amoris, “I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way—that you love your family and then you love your neighbor and then you love your community and then you love your fellow citizens and your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” This is not an essay explaining to you that “Aquinas and Augustine did not, in fact, think it was okay to execute mass deportations because the correct order of caring about things puts immigrants as last priority,” because you already knew that. You already knew it! If you want that essay, Frederick Bauerschmidt and Maureen Sweeney already wrote it at Church Life Journal this week, but it remains the editorial position of G.O.T.H.S. that we do not assume that JD Vance is speaking with conviction or integrity. Engaging with the theological substance of his arguments is almost always going to be a waste of time, especially when the argument is “being Christian has taught me that love is finite and must be carefully rationed”.
This is also not an essay touching on Vance’s earlier comments accusing the Catholic bishops of only caring about immigration so they can siphon grant money off of the federal government; Timothy Dolan called those comments “scurrilous” and “very nasty”, and this is also not an essay explaining that Dolan is getting exactly what he has been actively and enthusiastically signing up for over the past decade. Dolan sold his soul to get power and respect and he didn’t end up with power or respect, that is a very old story, one that any idiot can grasp if they watch the mid-budget 2000 Harold Ramis romcom Bedazzled, starring Academy Award winner Brendan Fraser as a lonely nerd who sells his soul for power and respect, and Glamour Magazine Award for Entrepreneurship winner Elizabeth Hurley as the Sexy Lady Devil. That Dolan was somehow unable to grasp any of that or bail out of his infernal partnership after years of opportunities to bail out of the partnership is his problem to solve, not mine.
This is, instead, an essay about what I heard when JD Vance attempted to explain the Ordo Amoris, when he laid out the exact order in which he decided to focus on, prioritize, and love things. All I heard was “Orel, I could never love you more. People only have a certain amount of love within them, and I’m afraid I have to divide mine up between at least a dozen people.” I heard those specific two sentences, which are lines of dialogue from the pilot of one of the greatest television programs ever made. I heard Clay Puppington.
Here’s a fun fact for you about G.O.T.H.S.: in five-plus years of essays, none of these pieces, ever, have gotten more hits than this one-off post I wrote on Medium back in 2019 about a claymation Adult Swim series that never made it to fifty episodes. I’m fine with that1, because the essay is pretty good, and the series it describes is among the greatest television shows I’ve seen in my life, Moral Orel, which ran from 2005-2009 (plus a one-off special in 2012), was animated with jaw-dropping skill by Shadowmachine Films (who, more recently, animated Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio adaptation), and was created by Dino Stamatopoulos (who wrote for basically every series that shaped my sense of humor, including Mr. Show, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Tom Goes to the Mayor, The Late Show with David Letterman, and Community). I'm not going to re-state my six-year-old essay, you can read it if you like, but I will give you a very brief introduction to the series: Orel Puppington is an innocent eight-year-old evangelical Christian boy, living in the heavily Christian town of Moralton, where going to church on Sundays is at the center of the social life. Every week during the first season, Orel would hear a sermon, misinterpret it horribly, and spend a few days doing horrible things - smoking crack, selling his own urine as a sports drink, getting his penis pierced - until his father, Clay Puppington, would put a stop to things and explain to Orel what Christianity really wanted him to do, and it was usually something even more ignorant and absurd. The entire series was done in a Davey and Goliath-style claymation that never broke its cheerful and paternal tone. Since its cancellation, the series has held on to a rabid cult following of which I am a member. If you want to watch it and live in the States, you can stream it on Max right now.
Moral Orel never had a big viewership - again, it got cancelled after 41 eleven-minute episodes - but it won critical acclaim and awards for its animation, and the themes explored, though absurd, obviously had resonance in Bush-era America. My 2019 essay took the lessons from Moral Orel and compared them to the even more absurd abuses of religion during the first Trump term, like state officials explaining that Roy Moore could prey on teenagers because Mary was a teenage mom herself, or that we needed to keep capital punishment on the books because capital punishment was good enough for Jesus since He of course got killed by it Himself. Far as I can tell, those state officials said these things without irony or cynicism; just like the characters in the series, they saw the words and applied the flattest possible interpretation and used that as a justification for their political choices. I don't think that's what Vance was doing in his recent interviews; he seems a little smarter than that (not a lot smarter, but a little smarter). He is not an average citizen of Moralton, he's a lot closer to the show's most developed character, who is also the show's villain.
Orel’s father Clay - voiced virtuosically by Scott Adsit of 30 Rock2 - starts the show as the cornerstone of the first season’s ironclad structure. The season one episodes are all laid out exactly the same way: Orel goes to church, he hears the sermon, he walks into a situation, he applies the sermon’s words in the wrong way, absurdly horrible things happen, and then Clay swoops in and says “young man, we need to talk about this in my study!” Clay then spanks Orel with his belt and gives him a lecture on the real lesson of the sermon, usually expressed through a “lost commandment” that he probably made up: “thou shalt be ashamed of thy natural anatomy”, “thou shalt be loyal to all thy friends at the same time”, or just “GET IT RIGHT!” He finishes his lecture by saying “alright son, let’s eat!”, stands up, his pants fall down because he had taken his belt off, roll credits. Adsit’s voice acting3, again, is incredible: he’s so good at speaking in that fifties-sitcom-dad tone, at sounding like he’s teaching a heartfelt lesson, even as the writers gave him increasingly dark and insane lessons to teach. And you definitely can line up Clay’s “lost commandments” from season one against JD Vance’s new and improved Ordo Amoris and say “ah, see, he doesn’t get it, he’s just like this cartoon character”, and Vance is a lot like this cartoon character. But if you’ve seen Moral Orel, you know what happens to Clay after season one.
As I said in my original essay: Moral Orel is one of the only series ever, and probably the only animated series, that got cancelled because it was too sad. In a 2008 interview with AV Club, Scott Adsit spoke at length about Adult Swim’s decision to cancel a series that network executive Mike Lazzo once called “a masterpiece of American humor”:
“I think if America knew about Morel Orel, they might be ready for it. But I think Adult Swim was very good to us, and Lazzo's the one who put the axe down on it, but only because it was depressing him to read the scripts. He got back season three, and he tells us it's his favorite thing he's ever put on Cartoon Network. It just doesn't suit the audience that Adult Swim has. That's why we got cancelled.”
Here’s what happened in the story. Season two of Moral Orel expanded beyond the repetitive structure of season one, with entire episodes focused on ancillary characters struggling under the strictures of Moralton; Adsit compared it to The Simpsons’ storylines expanding throughout Springfield. Clay, who we knew from the early episodes had a warped understanding of his faith, was slowly revealed to be a depressed and abusive alcoholic, trapped in a loveless marriage and an amorphous “dead-end job” that he keeps grumbling about. He delivered perfect deadpan punchlines in season one, and then became a far darker and more developed character than the show’s audience, and certainly Adult Swim executives, had anticipated.
In the season two finale, Clay takes Orel on a hunting trip, gets drunk off his ass, rants at his son about how miserable and blighted his life is, ends up shooting Orel in the leg, and completely forgets about it. The episode is a twenty-two minute descent into Hell. The final season of the show replaced the ironically sunny music cues with Mountain Goats tracks and dealt with the aftermath of the shooting; I would hesitate to even call the third season a “comedy” series, and the topics that the hilarious clay puppets cover in these final episodes include child abuse, drug abuse, rape, abortion, infidelity, and lots and lots of alcoholism. It is also some of the most moving television I've ever seen. Clay, the guy who shot his son with a hunting rifle, remains a villain for the rest of the series, but we come to see him as increasingly tragic and pathetic as we come to the series finale. There's evil in him, but ultimately this is a small, sad man who never got anything he thought he deserved, and grew to realize it was because he was never really as good as he thought he was. In one of the final episodes of the series, “Sacrifice”, he goes on a drunken rant in a bar about his pathetic life:
“Day in, day out, being there, with that face. Not knowing what to say. Not caring anymore. Not even knowing that you'll probably only care about her when it's finally too late. Forgetting about all those desperate, those desperate years you spent alone. Your barren years, where no woman would even consider resting her tired head on your shakey little shoulder. And stinking of belly semen. Why even wipe? And then when you finally get one of these, [fake trumpet fanfare], coveted pieces of tail that have been built up as the grand trophy in your nothing life! You tried desperately to keep it. Not to protect it, but to hoard it. To keep it away from the other wolves and jackals circling your territory. And you realize... all too soon... that you're not good enough! That maybe there was a jerkoff called Darwin after all, and that you never acknowledged his existence because you knew deep inside that you were really what you feared you were. Weak, and passive, and ultimately broken by the ones who were made the fittest. And that through your weaknesess you built up a poison that poisoned others around you, that you love. And the only true justice was to let those dominant jackals feed on you, survive off you…”
Towards the end of this rant, the other barflies - including, hilariously, the pastor - threaten to punch Clay in the face. Clay holds out his face, waiting for the hit, but the other guys realize that he's not worth the trouble and just depart the bar in silence.
Now, I'm not going to ascribe any of that above rant to JD Vance’s motives. I have no reason to believe that Vance is an alcoholic, or is stuck in a loveless marriage, or has Clay's weird Oedipal hangups, or Clay’s closeted sexual proclivities (although he probably did fuck that couch). Even though Vance is the kind of guy who would yell at his seven-year-old son to “shut the hell up about Pokemon” so he could talk to Donald Trump, I have no reason to believe he really mistreats his family in any way. There is one thing he definitely does have in common with Clay: a stinking dead-end job in the same field. We learn, in a darkly funny season three side storyline, that Clay's job that he hates so much…is being the mayor of Moralton.
There's this guy. He's from a small town in the middle of nowhere, and he hates it, and his whole adult life is built upon the resentment he has for everyone in his hometown. He's a smooth talker, but the things he says are all unsettling, ominous, and eventually, just horrifying. It turns out he's proudly cruel and ignorant, and to justify his cruelty and his ignorance he leans on a religion he doesn't really understand and has never bothered to think about seriously. In his political career, he just jumps on whatever causes whip up the largest angry mob, as his attempts to grow his political power become more desperate, to the point where he just says our loss “what am I supposed to care about EVERYONE”. Still, he's ultimately a tragic figure, somebody who sold his soul and just learned that it wasn't even worth it, and the more time you spend with him, the more you realize he's not evil incarnate, he's not a mastermind, he's just hollow, a sad little piece of clay. I'm talking about the television character and not the sitting Vice President, but I suppose there are some parallels.
Anyways, check out Moral Orel, it's really good. It remains a prescient satire of religion in American society, the animation and voice acting are unparalleled, the jokes are shocking but wickedly funny, the emotional depth of the serious episodes still astonish me, there's a recurring joke where everyone in Moralton is terrified of Catholics, and when I watch it, I do occasionally feel a little bit of hope. See, Orel does outgrow Moralton, he does find people who love him and take care of him, he does do good when nobody else in his town will, he does question his faith and learn from other faiths, he does - as we see in the finale - grow up and raise a loving family of his own, even after a childhood in the world’s most hateful small town.
The episode where Clay delivers that drunken monologue we looked at earlier, that episode is set on Easter Sunday. At the beginning of the episode, Reverend Putty - someone else who starts to grow up and understand his faith better over the course of the series - wants to deliver a sermon on hope, but he looks out over his congregation and sees everyone pushed past their breaking points after three seasons of misery, including innocent little Orel. So he improvises this instead, and it's enough to shock Orel out of that misery, and sometimes when an important person says something horribly stupid about Catholicism and I feel like I'm just staring into nothingness, I think about it:
“Happy Easter. By the look of all your pathetic mugs, I'd say you all had as good a week as I had. Well, if you remember last week's sermon, I ended it with a little cliff-hanger: What was in the tomb when Mary Magdalene and company checked it out? Nothing. Nothing was in the tomb. Now, usually nothing is a downer - one big goose egg. Well, this time, the goose laid a golden egg, people. Nothing meant hope for everyone. So the next time you look and see nothing, have a little hope, will you? For me. Amen.”
I never really figured out why the essay found such a large audience, although it’s possible someone put it on Reddit a few years ago. Moral Orel, of course, still maintains an active subreddit even though the final post-cancellation special aired thirteen years ago.
Another great comedian who provided voice acting for the series was Jay Johnston, also of Mr. Show and The Sarah Silverman Program. That guy is a riot in everything he does - go ahead and google “Jay Johnston riot” to learn more!
He also wrote for the series.