Anthony Edwards / Staff Photo
Comedian Rabbi Robert Alper poses for a picture with his dog Barney at his Dorset home.
By Patrick McArdle
Correspondent
DORSET — If it sounds like the beginning of a classic joke, that’s appropriate: After an international competition, a local rabbi has been named the first “honorary comedic adviser to the pope.”
Rabbi Bob Alper, a well-known rabbi and stand-up comic, entered the “Joke with the Pope” contest with a joke he had written, joining a field of funny people including Bill Murray, Jimmy Fallon, Brooke Shields, Conan O’Brien and Al Roker. The Pontifical Mission Societies chose Alper’s joke over those told by his more famous competitors.
“My wife and I have been married for over 46 years and our lives are totally in synch. For example, at the same time I got a hearing aid, she stopped mumbling,” Alper said in the winning joke.
Through donations made to the Joke with the Pope campaign, donations of $10,000 each will go to charities that provide housing in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, help children in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and feed people in Nairobi, Kenya.
For the contest, which took place before Pope Francis’ recent visit to the United States, people were encouraged to donate a joke to the website, “Joke with the Pope,” and name one of three charities they hoped it would benefit. The contest was successful enough to fund donations to all three charities.
The Rev. Andrew Small, national director of the Pontifical Mission Societies, said the jokes were monitored as they came in. A lot of the jokes, which numbered in the thousands and came from almost 50 countries, were repeats or delivered by funny children. Alper’s joke was “well-delivered, short, very funny and sort of wholesome,” Small said.
“The fact that it was very much about the family was something else that we liked. We asked ourselves, ‘If he’s going to be the comedic adviser to the pope, then he’s going to have to give him some comedy that we think the pope would use.’ There’s no point in being an adviser if the person you’re advising does not listen. We thought it was just the kind of thing that the pope might listen to and even incorporate into his own act,” Small said with a laugh.
Alper, who has been a stand-up comedian for about 30 years, only performs material that would be appropriate for all audiences but said he thought the joke might also have been chosen because it’s slightly self-deprecating and not mean-spirited.
Alper said he learned about the contest from Rosalie Fox, a Dorset resident, but didn’t think he wanted to enter. Fox urged him one more time and Alper consented, despite believing his chances of winning were small.
“I figured there were going to be thousands of entries. I’m not going to win it and I have more important things to do like mow the grass,” he said.
Despite his low expectations, Alper recorded and sent in a joke he had recently written. “It actually was my newest joke because I got a hearing aid in June,” the 70-year-old Alper said. “My wife and I were driving to Cape Cod and I was having a pretty easy time of it because I could hear every word she said.”
Alper said he worked on the joke and put it through the process of “edit and edit and edit” to make it succinct and with just the right words. He knew it would work when it “killed” in Cape Cod. Winning the contest over longtime professionals like Murray and O’Brien was exciting and professionally validating, Alper said.
Alper said when he first posted the story to Facebook, many people didn’t believe it was true. Now the story has appeared all over the world.
Many of the stories have made the point that the winner for a joke made to the head of the Catholic Church is a rabbi. But Alper has already embraced other cultures through his career, performing as recently as last year with one stand-up who was Muslim while a second was the pastor of a Christian church, making him very comfortable with people of other faiths.
“(Winning the contest) is especially meaningful because of who this pope is. I think, just as humans beings, we share a lot of values. I would like to think I share some of his values, which are admirable, and one of his values is the importance of humor,” Alper said.
For now, Alper said he would love to see his new title open new doors, especially to Catholic audiences, who might want to know more about a stand-up who was singled out as having the right stuff to make a pope laugh.
Small said it was also important to remember that the contest had brought attention to the pope’s missionary charitable work that he said “spans more than half the territory of the globe, if you can imagine.”
Winning the contest could mean big things. Alper said he will get two tickets to ‘‘The Tonight Show,’’ although the dates haven’t been set, and he’s hopeful that he could do more than sit in the audience. He said he would also like a chance to meet Pope Francis, even if it meant buying his own ticket to Rome.
Small said the pope hasn’t heard the joke yet, but he said Alper would be getting a certificate for his honorary title early next month. Alper will probably perform, which Small said should work out well. It was only after Alper was chosen that the judges learned he had a background in stand-up comedy.
Small said an audience with the pope might be in Alper’s future.
“There’s a possibility. We’ll see how we might present (Alper) and see if we can’t get some kind of an introduction, which is never easy, to the Holy Father himself. But God works in mysterious ways,” he said.
Now that the pope’s humor adviser is a Vermonter, Small said the people at the Pontifical Mission Societies would “certainly be advocating” for the pontiff to visit Vermont the next time he’s in the U.S.
“I know Bishop (Christopher) Coyne, who’s a relatively new bishop up there, would certainly long to take him walking through the rolling green hills of Vermont,” he said.
Alper has some appearances coming up in Albany but he said this is the season when venues will be setting up future bookings. His scheduled appearances can be found at www.bobalper.com.
patrick.mcardle @rutlandherald.com
