“It’s a pleasure to find out that you’re so interested in so many different things and at such a deep level,” Maher told Allen. “You’re kind of like [Jay] Leno, like a lot deeper than you let the public see.”
Returning to the topic of the Apostle Paul, Allen shared that he was a philosophy major and said that Paul was a Stoic, a Greek philosopher. While Paul was not in fact a Greek philosopher, he did interact with Stoic ideas, such as in Acts 17.
“He wants to include the pagans into the Jewish religion,” said Allen, “because…we shouldn’t have murdered this guy Jesus…he was telling the truth.”
So Paul stopped being a “prosecutor,” Allen said, and decided to be a “Jew all the way.” The result was that people tried to kill him.
“Several times he goes, ‘The problem you’re going to have with that is I’m also a Roman citizen,’” said Allen. The actor went on to state that he is “still studying” Paul’s teaching that the law reveals our sin to us.
Allen explained that he was significantly impacted by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, implying that, because of Wittgenstein, Allen came to question if communication was truly possible.
He described Wittgenstein’s ideas as follows: “I really don’t know that the words I’m saying to you are—if I was in your brain, I’d go, ‘What the f*** are you thinking?’ And I was getting very depressed about this because I don’t really know if anybody knows what anybody’s—we’re lucky that we’re even getting through stop lights.”
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“Then I’m on stage one night,” he said, “and a brilliant light hit me. I go, ‘Bulls***. Bulls***. I make a living making people laugh because I know exactly, they know exactly what I f***ing mean.’”
“The reason they laugh at my standup is because they know exactly what I mean,” said Allen.
Maher agreed. “That’s the one great thing about standup or, if you could look at it the other way, a terrible thing, is that you can’t buy even one minute of their love if you’re not really doing it,” he said. “Like, no matter how big a star you are, you can’t fake laughter. You can do it for a minute. A crowd will be so excited to see a star walk out that they’ll give you a minute of just nervous laughter. After that, you are on your own.”
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