Richard Burnish presents "The Ark" - Jesus Chatline 2.0, minus Steven Chilton (may he rest in peace)

millais

millais

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For damn near ten years, Richard Burnish (author of the Neon Bible and co-host of the Jesus Chatline) has been teasing us with his promised return, from brief social media posts to non-sequitur videos and even a cryptic ARG that didn't really go anywhere. In his absence, a slew of godawful third-rate knockoffs and imitators have tried but failed to replicate the legendary success of the Jesus Chatline formula. And in that time, it must be recognized that former co-host Steven Chilton, aka Tee Rucker, aka Jay Wolkow tried to keep the flame alive with a succession of decent web shows before he fell ill with cancer and sadly passed away.

But now the King's taken back the throne with an all new streaming show, the canonical successor to the Jesus Chatline: "The Ark".

Already Richard has blessed us with one stream, and the next one is scheduled for this weekend.

Time will tell if it's a worthy successor to the Jesus Chatline of old, but it's still very early days and there's definitely some good potential. For this kind of show format, the show is definitely only as good as its callers, so we will have to see what kind of community can be rebuilt from the old Jesus Chatline crowd. Rumor has it that for the first show, the phone lines were overloaded by a deluge of callers, so many of the old time fan-favorite callers like Leroy Sinclair, Randall Baby Stevens, and others were unable to make it through.

But it's a good start. The slickly produced stream bumper alone had me cracking up, and I'm sure there's much more in the way of that kind of classic content in store for the future.

In case you need to brush up on your Jesus Chatline lore: https://neonbible.wikia.org/wiki/Jesus_Chatline

The short of it is that a decade ago, two Canadian audio-visual producers put together a decently popular stream in which they play a pair of unscrupulous, internet-illerate Californian televangelists whose rink-a-dink public access TV show gets incessantly prank called by trolls from /b/. Something similar in age and format to :ghost:'s classic 2008 - 2012 TCR's Radio Graffiti, but very much it's own unique thing. In its heyday, the show spawned a lot of viral highlight compilations that distill the best calls and moments if you want to get caught up quickly on some of the regular characters and lore. For me, a lot of the humor comes from the hosts trying not to break character when confronted by especially funny trolls and from the hosts dunking on shitty cringe callers or fedora-tipping a-logs who think they are actually getting one up on some amoral Christian swindlers. To this day, one of my favorite moments from the old show is one serious of calls where an angry Muslim tries to get into a serious theological debate with the hosts about the holy trinity, while they calmly string him along with intentionally nonsensical rebuttals to get him angrier and angrier. Once in a while to spice things up, they would also do special streams or one-off episodes with absolutely absurd premises to flex their audio-visual editing skill and give callers more material to work with.
 
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JC.png

It just works.
 
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I remember a part of the old show where someone had called in sounding demonic asking for help.
So he was praying for him loudly whilst the caller yelled and screamed.
Fucking classic.
 
MrWhoDat said:
I remember a part of the old show where someone had called in sounding demonic asking for help.
So he was praying for him loudly whilst the caller yelled and screamed.
Fucking classic.
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Yeah, lots of good memories and classic moments; hopefully the new show will live up to the reputation of its predecessor. I'm pretty sure that Richard's return is not just a nostalgia-fueled cash grab like what real internet swindlers would try to do, even though he has set up a Patreon. He had already been planning a return around the time of the cryptic ARG, but I suspect that in addition to whatever IRL delays and complications, Steven/Jay's death forced him to wait until a respectable interval of time had passed so that people wouldn't accuse him of trying to profit from the increased attention brought about by the death of his friend.

Supposedly he was always camera shy and not too keen on being a public figure, so I hope he's doing this for the fans. And if it is being crowdfunded, maybe that will just increase the already legendary production value of the various stream bumpers and short vids/advertisements.
 
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Richard Burnish? That really brings me back to the year 2013. I only heard of the Jesus Chatline, after it already went off the air, but it was classic internet fun.

I hope this new show will be a success and i hope his friend Steven Shilton will also make an appearance.
 
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Pedosnake said:
Richard Burnish? That really brings me back to the year 2013. I only heard of the Jesus Chatline, after it already went off the air, but it was classic internet fun.

I hope this new show will be a success and i hope his friend Steven Shilton will also make an appearance.
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i'm not 100% sure how they will handle Steven's conspicuous absence, since a great part of the old show was the dynamic between the two co-hosts. Already in the first stream, some asshole tried to troll about Steven/Jay's IRL death in 2018, which was a real downer, and this forced Richard to give some brief eulogizing remarks about Steven/Jay. It may just end up like Jay's various successor web shows where anybody who called in mentioning the former co-host got immediately hung up on, though in that case it was because Jay's successor shows were supposed to exist outside the Jesus Chatline canon or take place before it.

Another staple of Richard and especially Steven's shows was the participation of in-studio guest hosts, producers, and chat moderators, who I could see filling in for the co-host dynamic in the new show.
 
I had never heard of the Jesus Chatline or the Neon Bible before, and to be honest I probably would have ignored it if I had, assuming it was an obnoxious atheist edgelord holdover from the 90s that had overstayed its cultural relevancy. (I mean, I'm not sure the religious right has ever been less relevant in my lifetime than it is now.)

But I absolutely love these streams. Maybe it's my annoyance with the few examples of apocalyptic religiosity I've seen as a reaction to the virus in my area, but this feels a lot more topical than I would have guessed, and somehow it doesn't feel as mean-spirited as you might assume it would. Good satire is not easy to pull off, but this definitely qualifies on multiple levels.

Yesterday's stream, with the host and a caller both trying (and failing) to stay in character... perfection.
 
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frozenrunner said:
I had never heard of the Jesus Chatline or the Neon Bible before, and to be honest I probably would have ignored it if I had, assuming it was an obnoxious atheist edgelord holdover from the 90s that had overstayed its cultural relevancy. (I mean, I'm not sure the religious right has ever been less relevant in my lifetime than it is now.)

But I absolutely love these streams. Maybe it's my annoyance with the few examples of apocalyptic religiosity I've seen as a reaction to the virus in my area, but this feels a lot more topical than I would have guessed, and somehow it doesn't feel as mean-spirited as you might assume it would. Good satire is not easy to pull off, but this definitely qualifies on multiple levels.

Yesterday's stream, with the host and a caller both trying (and failing) to stay in character... perfection.
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It's yet to manifest in the new series (give it time), but a lot of the appeal of the old Jesus Chatline show was derived from recurring callers playing absurd or amusing personalities or characters with ongoing stories or sagas. The host and even the ostensibly religious subject matter of the show just exists as canvas or framework on which the troll callers can build the lolz. There's actually a whole subgenre of online streaming and broadcasting that is built around this premise (Ghost's Radio Graffiti :ghost: and Tony Gagardo's TonyTalk, just to name two). When done right, like the old Jesus Chatline or 2008-2012 era Radio Graffiti or present day TonyTalk, this show format has the effect of turning into something like a live sitcom, with every broadcast being its own episode with recurring characters and ongoing plot lines. There's usually some element of the host playing dumb or faking rage or reactions to calls or whatever, but it's all in service of giving the troll/prank callers something to work with.

I guess Richard's character could superficially be taken to be a jab at evangelical televangelists, but there's much more in there to unpack. It's also making fun of internet-illiterate boomers, internet e-beggars/swindlers/grifters, shitty public access TV shows, and hip youth pastors who are definitely not squares. A composite lolcow, if you will.

If you like what you see, you may want to watch some of the highlight compilation vids from the old show. They are truly classics of internet humor. If you start on the most popular compilation vids at this guy's playlist, I think the algorithm will start feeding you the rest: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLm0sSWgZMM89X95ih3vFHSomgynhqdsQr

And here's a link to what I consider to be one of the most underrated moments from the old show, a series of calls in which Richard hilariously trolls an angry Muslim caller who thinks the show is real and is trying to debate him on Christian theology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsjTal3KuKM
This particular incident apparently went viral on the Muslim interwebs back in the day, as you can see from the endless reuploads of the vid with translated Arabic subtitles by Muslim channels. They obviously could not detect the humorous trolling or it was otherwise lost in translation, as they assume that Richard got BTFO'ed by that Muslim caller's FACTS and LOGIC: https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=richard+burnish+muslim&FORM=HDRSC3

Also just for the record, here's the link to the poorly advertised stream from Sunday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXJrFJAonSM

Apparently Richard is making announcements for scheduled shows on his Instagram, and people have not yet caught on to it.
 
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I wish way more people knew about The Ark. Even though the quality of the callers is, per episode, a crapshoot (an inevitable issue with a call-in show), the amount of work and talent that goes into these broadcasts is amazing. The fake commercials, the original music written for the show, the obvious forethought put into making audience interaction as fun and rewarding as possible... it may not yet hit the highs of the original Jesus Chatline, but it's pretty damn impressive. And very funny, of course.

If you don't have time to watch the streams (they're pretty long), this YouTube channel does a good job cutting together some of the highlights from each one.


I do sort of wish Richard had someone on camera to interact with in the studio, though. Not a replacement for Steven, and definitely not Chad (we should never see or hear him), but maybe an occasional guest co-host. Maybe someone from a different show on the same public access channel could show up as as a crossover collaboration or something.
 
frozenrunner said:
I do sort of wish Richard had someone on camera to interact with in the studio, though. Not a replacement for Steven, and definitely not Chad (we should never see or hear him), but maybe an occasional guest co-host. Maybe someone from a different show on the same public access channel could show up as as a crossover collaboration or something.
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In the old show, Chad appeared on screen as a co-host during the 1980s prequel episode (aka "Christ Show"), and he called in a few times during other episodes about how his wife got blacked during a Church of the Neon Bible homo-detox session that was too effective. For the new show, Richard's website says that they have a female intern purportedly helping out behind the scenes, so that's another possibility for a co-host, though she has only been mentioned in passing once or twice on the show. Someone recently called to ask if Richard's dad might make a return appearance, and this was not explicitly ruled out. I suspect that Richard may be building up to a co-host reveal, similar to how on "Haulin' Ass", Steven/Tee would make a special event out of guest appearances like Bob Croft.

Also, we finally have a clean upload of the "It's Just Faith" song. I already like this one better than "Richard's Plan".
 
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So apparently tomorrow's stream is entitled "Last Show," and the thumbnail is a picture of Richard walking away from the camera and waving.


This could be a troll job on the audience, but I thought something strange was happening with the "time travel" stream two weeks ago. It felt like something you would do to round out the show and the Jesus Chatline, not a random one-off. And last week's stream ended with the "firing" of Chad and Richard declaring he was done with the show altogether.

Maybe "Richard" has decided the show's brand of humor is too dangerous as the woketards sperg out around the Western world, and he wants a shot at a real life, raising kids or something. Maybe he doesn't feel the experiment has been all that successful, and he's bored with it. Or maybe he's conning us... but I fear not.
 
I'm hopeful that this isn't actually the end of Richard's return, as it feels like he was just hitting his stride with the last few streams. And I think he promised us at least a 120 day run when first coming back, and we're only about 2 months in.

Another thing to remember is that in the old show, it was almost a running joke that they would decide to just shut down the show every few streams due to the rising frequency of prank calls, and on their return they would pretend to be harder and more resilient than ever to give the trolls more fodder for their calls.

I don't think RL stuff would have an impact on how he's running the show. He only does one stream every other week and he's in Winnipeg, which I assume is not an exactly a hotbed for this rioting business.
 
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Well, turns out the show's not over, and I'm very glad that the Ark is moving from strength to strength. First with the long awaited return of Leroy Sinclair on yesterday's "last" show, and now today's Father's Day episode is producing some high caliber calls too. That "Hazuki" call was fucking brilliant. Ranks right up there with the best of the Jesus Chatline calls, imo; meta-pranked both Richard and the viewers.
 
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Richard blesses us with a clean copy of the Montclair Prayer song. The guy he has commissioned to all this music is pretty good. All clever send-ups of the Christian rock/pop genre, while including funny jokes related to the lore and events of the show, and being musically listenable at the same time.
 
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In Sunday's stream, Richard flexed his old ARG skills with this small website you can explore (this link skips the log-in page, password "I<3ToScalp")

Several years ago, Richard's return was going to revolve around a cryptic ARG puzzle project called "To Hell and Back", but the whole thing was scrapped due to Jay's death (and possibly because most people had a hard time deciphering the solutions to the first few phases of the ARG). At the time we speculated that it would involve Richard Burnish's supernatural adventures in the afterlife, but it never got developed far enough for us to find out.

On the norwayhouse website, I like the Native textile patterns being used as menu icons and tiled borders; when I first noticed that I cracked up. I find it most amusing that they've spun an entire mythology and conflict out of Leroy Sinclair's Native backstory and Richard's distrust of "those people". This has evolved far past the original JCL-era beef arising from Richard's "impersonation" of Leroy and the subsequent argument over appropriate compensation
 
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