Dale Alan Cooper, Self-Styled "Impressionist for Christ" Self-Released the Single Saddest Comedy Album of All Time
Dale Alan Cooper, a terrifyingly sincere young Bible student, impressionist, and evangelist who billed himself a “Dependable American Christian” as well as an “Impressionist for Christ,” had two primary goals for his 1974 album A Time to Laugh. First and foremost, he wanted to strengthen the faith of the devout and bring lost souls to Christ.
A distant second, Cooper wanted to make people laugh with impressions of famous folks like John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Tiny Tim, and William F. Buckley.
In A Time to Laugh, Cooper is consequently a poignant combination of hack impressionist chasing cheap laughs and fire-and-brimstone preacher trying to save his flock from eternal damnation.
He’s consequently operating at cross purposes. He wants to entertain the nice Christians in the audience, but not to the point where they forget about the agony they will endure unless they emulate Christ in word and deed.
A Time to Laugh is outsider art. It’s transcendent accidental anti-comedy that predicts seemingly the entirety of Neil Hamburger’s shtick, particularly Laugh Out Lord, which cynically combined comedy and Christianity, and Left for Dead in Malaysia, where Hamburger is performing for a crowd that doesn’t speak English, and wouldn’t laugh even if they did.
In Left for Dead in Malaysia, the indifference of the audience becomes a character in and of itself just as the most compelling presence on A Time to Laugh is not Cooper but rather a baby that starts crying early on side A, can be heard throughout side A, then makes a triumphant reappearance on side B.
Cooper has a sad, desperate, weirdly angry energy that silently but powerfully implores, Jeb Bush style, please laugh and please believe.
When the baby cannot be heard I started worrying about it. Was it okay? Was it having stomach problems? Why didn’t its parents take it home? Why did the parents even take it to the show to begin with?
It’s not an encouraging sign when a comedy record begins by assuring audiences that God wants us to laugh.
In a hypnotically clunky bit of oration, Charles Burgin, a minister from Louisville, Kentucky, kicks things off with an appropriately godly introduction in which he stiffly announces, “Sacred scriptures, the book of Ecclesiastes, in chapter three, the writer informs us, ‘to everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven, a time to weep and a time to laugh.’ This is the reason for, and the purpose of, this record album: to provide YOU an opportunity to laugh.”
The minister drones on, “Our speaker on this album is a young man gifted with a rare talent indeed—the talent of voice imitation, known today as impersonation. Dale Alan Cooper is a Christian and a member of the Southland Christian Church of Louisville, Kentucky, and a student at Louisville Bible College of Louisville, Kentucky.
“Dale Cooper feels that God gave him this talent, which he therefore must use for the glory of God and the winning of the souls of man. Dale owes all credit to the Lord, and shares what is in his heart through this medium of impersonation. Dale feels he can implant the message of Christ through the voices of the many widely known celebrities he imitates. Dale feels a Christian should have a joy in his heart and find a time to laugh. And now, ladies and gentlemen, we present Dale Alan Cooper, an impressionist for Christ, in A Time to Laugh.”
A Time to Laugh might not have been recorded in a church, but Cooper’s heartbreaking act transforms whatever building it was taped in into a Cathedral of Sadness all the same.
It’s an even worse sign that neither the audience, nor the impressionist, nor the stern, dour man of the Lord introducing him seem to genuinely believe that laughter isn’t inherently wicked and heretical.
The halting, stilted, hypnotically clumsy rhythms of Cooper’s performance consequently seem attributable to his inexperience, youth, and lack of talent, but also to a dogged fear that attempting to make people chuckle at a Paul Lynde impersonation is inherently sinful and will pave the road to hell.
Cooper does not introduce himself. Instead, he laughs the titular creepy laugh, then announces, “I’m Alfred Hitchcock,” as the prelude to his first extended bit, which imagines the legendary Master of Suspense directing a star-studded war movie called The Monster with a cast made up of the most imitated men in Hollywood history, including John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Walter Brennan.
Cooper, a college student in 1974, has the frame of reference of someone who grew up during the Great Depression.
Cooper’s John Wayne talks so slowly and deliberately that he seems to be suffering some manner of mental impairment. Jimmy Stewart stutters adorably, and Cary Grant yells, “Judy, Judy, Judy!” Kirk Douglas is feral and sub-verbal; William F. Buckley is effete and erudite; and his Mark Twain consists mostly of yelling loudly for emphasis at the end of each sentence.
The impressionist for Christ’s take on the most famous people in the world is often weirdly off-brand. In his muddled telling, Boris Karloff is Dr. Frankenstein instead of his monster and John Wayne is reborn as a slow-talking simpleton tossing out Henny Youngman one-liners like, “My folks moved a lot but somehow I always found them.”
Cooper is weirdly invisible here. He’s always either clumsily attempting to channel the voices and ways of the rich and famous or clumsily copying the cadences and affectations of preachers and evangelists.
Dale Alan Cooper is missing. Yet, at the same time A Time for Laughter is agonizingly personal and utterly revealing all the same. It’s one thing to bomb at an open-mic night in a way that will be seen and instantly forgotten by a small group of people.
It’s another to document your prodigious creative and personal shortcomings for posterity by recording an entire album of your faith-and-impression-based comedy stylings.
At the end of side A, Cooper crossbreeds his soul-consuming passion for bad religion and even worse comedy by putting the words of the Lord into the mouths of the famous folks he’s unconvincingly portraying.
Despite his introduction, the audience does not, in fact, seem to know whether it is appropriate to laugh at the earnest young man and his material, even if he has explicitly given them permission to do so.
So, they listen in awkward silence while Cooper reads holy words in the familiar tones of John F. Kennedy or Richard Burton.
The humor ostensibly comes from the incongruous juxtaposition of secular celeb shenanigans and righteous words, but judging by the egregious lack of laughter, the audience apparently worries that there’s something sacrilegious about laughing at God’s words no matter how “humorously” they’re delivered.
The scariest thing about side A of A Time to Laugh is that it’s the fun half. Cooper is at least trying to make us laugh. On side B he does a painful routine imagining Paul Lynde as Adam, Flip Wilson’s Geraldine as Eve, and William F. Buckley as the snake that tempted Eve that plays like a parody of hack comedy.
In his hippest bit, Cooper imagines David Brinkley interviewing Henry Fonda about the perils of drug use, something he might have some familiarity with, being the father of a pair of countercultural icons, only for the elderly movie star to comically misunderstand the newsman’s slang.
After that tepid bit of milquetoast drug humor, Cooper stops attempting comedy and lays in with the God rap something heavy. First, he brings out a friend from Bible College who plays a pair of gloomy country gospel songs on an acoustic guitar that may be nothing special in another context, but here meld music and Christianity in a manner so organic that they render Cooper’s bizarre tonal shifts even more jarring by comparison.
The God Cooper is serving is not a shiny, happy populist Jesus who loves you. He’s an angry, Old Testament deity full of wrath and righteous indignation. It is therefore particularly strange for him to be the driving force behind what is ostensibly an evening of comedy and fun.
Cooper isn’t one of those preachers who feels the need to be funny, or warm, or even remotely sympathetic. Instead, he’s a glowering scold for Christ who rails against false prophets and false teachers and the sinful, lustful degenerates who have constructed “homosexual churches” in blasphemous defiance of God’s will.
Unless, “As we find Paul warns Timothy in second Timothy four, three, ‘For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine but after their own lust shall they heap to themselves teachers and having itching ears and they shall turn away, their ears from the truth and shall turn to fables,’” is your idea of a top-notch zinger, Cooper’s sermon is defiantly not just devoid of a single identifiable joke; it lacks even a single moment of levity.
If there are good gags or solid bits to be found in the Bible, Cooper has not discovered them. His sermon is a stone-cold bummer, with much, if not most, of the material stolen from the New Testament. It’s all doom and gloom time once Cooper puts his Tiny Tim and Bill Cosby impressions into cold storage, so that he can remind listeners that under an unrelenting sun, Jesus had nails pounded into the palms of his hands to ensure humanity’s eternal salvation.
It’s as if Cooper is punishing the audience for the ungodly nature of his comedy and comedy in general.
Cooper earnestly closes A Time to Laugh by dedicating the album to “the Lord Jesus Christ, the son of the living God. And I pray and I ask every Christian to pray with me that this record will strengthen other Christians and also influence people to accept Jesus Christ.”
He failed. Oh, sweet Jesus did he ever fail.
Rumor has it that A Time to Laugh is so bad that a group of devout Christians listened to it once and became militant atheists. They figured that if Cooper was truly God’s instrument on Earth, then He must be a half-mad supreme being with nothing but contempt for the flesh puppets he unleashed upon this poor planet.
A Time to Laugh barely exists. It sold almost nothing. Almost no information exists about it online.
Cooper’s fusion of hack comedy and old-time religion is about as palatable and tasty as a lukewarm corn tortilla with half a bottle of Ativan and a Spider-Man Funko Pop folded inside. Separately those ingredients might all serve useful purposes and have their place in this world. Combined, they make no sense and violently refuse to congeal into something edible, let alone tasty. The same is true of Cooper’s third-rate comedy and dour preaching.
Who wants to be lectured on how the world and the afterworld works by a Bible College student who’s probably never gotten so much as a hand job?
Peter John-Byrnes, the friend who alerted me to this wonderful obscurity’s existence, did some online sleuthing and discerned that Cooper is still alive and serving the Lord, albeit in a more traditional sense as a pastor serving up scripture without a side order of guffaws and Richard Nixon impersonations.
Cooper seems to have retired the shtick a long time ago, but I wonder if he’s ever preaching and feels a Flip Wilson impression coming on and wonders wistfully, if only for a bittersweet moment, about the wacky, hacky, tacky road not traveled.
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