‘The Good Lord Bird’ finds an important place for comedy

Written by Perrin Smith, Photo courtesy of Showtime

There are far too many historical figures who have their stories told on the silver screen with a tone and mood that’s downright dreary. Far too often, figures like Abraham Lincoln in “Lincoln,” or Queen Elizabeth II in “The Crown,” have their lives adapted so as to place them on a pedestal so high, so hard to reach, they begin to feel like they were never really human at all.

Maybe that position is deserved. Maybe their stories are told better, more accurately, when the subject matter in question is approached with a sense of brooding seriousness. But sometimes, as is the case with John Brown in “The Good Lord Bird,” a biographical story is told the best when it finds a home in the unique place between reality and comedy.

“The Good Lord Bird,” created by, starring, produced and partially penned by Ethan Hawke, is a Showtime series that’s been running for a few weeks now. It focuses on John Brown (Hawke), the famed abolitionist and leader of the raid on Harpers Ferry, and his adventures with Onion/Henry Shackleford (Joshua Caleb Johnson), a fictional enslaved person, as they journey around America and Canada in the lead-up to Brown’s legendary raid — a raid that’s very rarely discussed in history classrooms today.

Brown, as adapted here from the novel by James McBride, is a gun-toting, rumble-voiced, wild-haired man who goes from town to town in his effort to gain support for the upcoming raid. His efforts, as he states in the show, are to fight violence with violence. To give pro-slavery white men a taste of their medicine.

“I bet you never jumped off a train before, huh? Isn’t that fun?” Brown asks Shackleford.

Here, Brown is a man who is willing to say goofy things. Things nobody else would say. His bizarre, wild sense of conversation sets him apart in a way that draws more good attention to him.

He’s willing to draw weapons at a church while expecting a Federal Agent to arrest him. He lays his revolvers out on the pulpit, able to give a speech one moment but ready to shoot and grab a knife from his pocket the next. He’s wild, sudden and always endearing.

Johnson, and his portrayal of Shackleford, adds an often serious but never too serious tone to the show. In one scene, he lashes out at Brown for his inability to see his own hypocrisy — that it’s almost always white men talking about Black issues. He allows the show to get to a much-needed point of gravity that gives the message underneath time to flourish.

The comedy typically doesn’t take away from the importance of the topics at hand, nor the people whose stories are being told. In most cases, it adds to them. The brief levity offers the chance for the audience to catch its breath and continue to learn about the very true, very rarely discussed events that feel very important, especially today.

But the comedy allows for John Brown, and his mission, to come to the surface. It’s not bogged down in the detail-accurate minutiae of “The Crown” or “Lincoln.” Instead, Brown appears as a human — not a god. He’s got problems. He can make mistakes. And his story, told this way, makes an important moment of history not only educational but enjoyable.