THE HEM OF HIS GARMENT

An audience with the Pope.

- DAVID SEDARIS

If you were to say to me, “You can be in a room with either Chris Rock or the Pope,” I’d say, “Chris Rock, please.” Nothing against the Pope, but he’s never made me laugh. Neither has he come up with a viable solution to America’s gun problem the way Chris Rock has, saying that the firearms themselves can be unregulated but that every bullet should cost five thousand dollars.

“O.K.,” you’d continue. “Julia Louis-Dreyfus or the Pope?”

“Oh, no question,” I’d tell you. “The cursing on ‘Veep’ amounted to poetry, so Julia Louis-Dreyfus.”

“Stephen Merchant or—”

“Stephen Merchant.”

The same goes for Stephen Colbert, Mike Birbiglia, Tig Notaro, Conan O’Brien, Whoopi Goldberg, Jimmy Fallon, Ramy Youssef, and Jim Gaffigan—most of whom I know or have met at one time or another.

The crazy thing is that I didn’t have to choose between any of the above and the Pope. For reasons I will never quite understand, I got to be in a room with all of them—plus a hundred or so others who had also been summoned, without much advance notice, to the Vatican on a late-spring morning in June, when Rome was hot but not so hot that all you could talk about was how hot it was.

Like everyone I spoke to the night before our papal audience, when, minus Jimmy Fallon, the American contingent gathered for dinner, I’d initially thought that my invitation—which was sent by e-mail—was spam. “Right,” I said to the screen of my laptop. “Nice try, Russia.” I didn’t click on the attachment until Stephen Colbert assured me that it was legitimate, and that the Pope really did want to meet with comics and humorists from around the world in three days’ time, and at six-forty-five in the morning. The invitation made it sound like there’d be a dialogue, as if the Pope had questions or needed to ask us a favor, something along the lines of “Do you think you could maybe give the pedophilia stuff a rest?”