The trailer for a pro-abstinence Christian comedy called The Waiting Game, featuring a brief cameo by Ted Haggard, was recently released by a Colorado Springs production company.
A numberofsites picked up on the unusual premise; even as the market for Christian movies grows, most of them are dramatic family films like Fireproof, The Grace Card, Jumping the Broom and even Justin Bieber’s Never Say Never… not the likes of bro-comedies 40 Year Old Virgin or The Hangover. (Though many evangelicals will see raunchy movies too, even if they won’t admit it….)
“There hasn’t been a Christian comedy movie before,” said Rich Praytor, the founder and CEO of Onslaught Media, so his company struggles to make a pro-abstinence movie that’s funny and entertaining without writing jokes that ridicule adult virgins. It’s going to be very hard to strike that balance.
In the clip released Tuesday, Haggard, the evangelical leader who got caught up in a gay sex scandal back in 2006, advises the sexually frustrated lead character to think twice before stepping out on his wife.
“We saw the first Hangover, and they had Mike Tyson in it even though he was a convicted rapist,” said Praytor, still in the middle of raising the film’s $2 million budget. “We thought we could get some media attention if Haggard made fun of himself in just a cameo appearance.”
Emphasis mine. Umm. Yeah. Since that one movie featured that rapist, it's totally cool to use a homophobic hypocrite to get press...
