A woman has died after "plunging about 45 feet from a bungee-like amusement ride" at a Christian festival in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. The initial news report, which I read in an am New York newspaper while working on topical jokes for my comedy show last night, ended with, "A prayer service was held at 7 p.m. and the music festival resumed about 7:30 p.m." Wouldn't want to stop the party. Er, praise.

Obviously, you can't write jokes about someone's tragic death, however ironic the death might turn out to be. You write jokes about Lindsay Lohan, you write jokes about militants in Pakistan. But this? The Christians went right back to their music festival after a fatal malfunction of a Christian bungee amusement?

I did some research. The ride is called the "Air Glory." Sounds like what the basketball team at Oral Roberts University wears when they play other, more heathenish teams. Here is a picture:

From the CNN article:

Air Glory makes "grown men scream like little girls," according to the Lifest Web site, which says the ride begins by launching two to three people almost 100 feet in the air.

I grew up in Virginia Beach, home of the Christian Coalition, playground of Pat Robertson and Regent University. In my upper-middle-class white high school, Christian youth group was, in fact, for the cool kids. There was loud acoustic Jesus music, and then the cool kids hooked up. In a Jesusly manner.

And thus I spent my teen years fighting -- when I was not utterly baffled by -- the impulse to twist every normal human emotion and vicissitude of adolescence into some evangelical conversion experience.

Carnival rides that "make grown men scream like little girls" prompt exactly the sort of normal emotions (well, "normal" in the sense of being biologically predictable, in that you kind of get a thrill out of tricking your body into thinking it's going to die) that Christ has nothing at all to do with.

Just saying.