Tony Kushner is worried that the human race is heading toward extinction. He’s worried that humanity may have descended to a level of desperation and delusion from which it may never return. But the man is not above making a joke.

At an appearance Saturday morning at the Shaw Festival’s Court House Theater in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., the Pulitzer-winning playwright and screenwriter referred to his latest play, tongue-in- cheekly titled “The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism,” as “a perfectly shaped, 16-word phrase in English that’s guaranteed to give Michele Bachmann a heart attack.”

He compared the emotional jolt that comes from seeing a well-performed George Bernard Shaw play to taking poppers or ecstasy. And he explained that he could never write Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush into any of his plays because they are, as he sees them, “just id fragments, mixed in with platitudes and jellybeans.”

“Provocateur” doesn’t quite do justice to Kushner’s approach to his work as a playwright or his latter-day career as a sought-after leftist public intellectual. And those jokes, on their own, don’t serve to demonstrate why Kushner deserves to be in the lineage of playwrights that extends from Ibsen and Shaw to Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and beyond.

What makes Kushner such a vital figure is his employment of that lacerating humor in the service of a message we all need desperately to hear—one deeply informed by decades of voracious reading in political theory and philosophy and a grasp of history that few working writers possess.

That potent marriage of humor with political urgency is what made “Angels in America,” Kushner’s two-part play about AIDS and the Reagan era, one of the most powerful and popular pieces of American theater in the past half-century. In “Angels,” Kushner, like Shaw before him, gives some of the most eloquent speeches and arguments to the characters with which he himself would vehemently disagree in real life.

In a conversation with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Eleanor Wachtel that ranged from the appeal of agnosticism to the fading prospect of a working class revolution, Kushner’s speech took on the aspect and tone of some of his characters. Like a conversational Coltrane, he stated his theme and launched off into stunning intellectual flights of fancy that seemed to surprise even himself, always managing to return gracefully to the topic at hand.

Perhaps the most important lesson Kushner offered was about what we should expect out of great plays.

“You don’t get very far if you approach the plays expecting political illumination,” Kushner said of Shaw’s work. Later, he added, “If you’re paying close attention and really trying to follow the argument, you will at some point be spun off into a place where there’s no such thing as argument. . . . You will at some point leave rational thought, and you will go into a realm of music or a place of imagery and feeling.”

It’s something you find in Shaw, whose plays often become unmoored from their arguments and spin off into some other realm while somehow maintaining a grasp on the lurid or the humorous. It’s in O’Neill, whose plays swirl with a magical sensibility and in Miller’s work, in which seemingly earth-bound stories take on cosmic significance. We saw it locally with Road Less Traveled Theatre’s recent production of Stephen Adly Guirgis’ stunning play “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot.”

And the true power of all this great work lies, as Kushner both understands and embodies, in its potential to challenge what we thought we knew.

“I find when I see a really great production of Shaw or see a great actor doing Shaw, I become a lot less confident of my own opinions,” Kushner said. “And I’m a very opinionated person.”

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