The city of Nineveh. Nice digs.

Jonah arrives in Nineveh and relays Big G’s divine message: He is displeased, and Nineveh will be overthrown in forty days. Here's the odd part: the Ninevites watch Jonah — a filthy, seafood-reeking lunatic ambling around their city yelling about impending doom — yet don’t once try to give him change or politely ignore him. Did homeless people not exist in 780 BC? Evidently not. Either that or they did exist, but in 780 BC “crazy homeless guy” and “prophet of the Lord” were so indistinguishable it was just safer to assume anyone with a brain disease who smelled like shit and didn’t own property was a direct conduit to Jesus.

Whatever their reasoning, the Ninevites immediately pronounce Jonah’s message the "real deal", declaring a citywide fast and donning sackcloth. Upon hearing Jonah’s proclamation, even the King of Nineveh immediately disrobes, covers himself in sackcloth and — I love this — sits down in the mud. I don’t care what time period you’re living in, that’s hilarious.

God sees Nineveh’s penitence and decides not to blast Nineveh to ashes after all, meaning that Jonah’s prophecy doesn’t actually come to pass — which, in the ion-storm-in-Star Trek logic of the Old Testament, means Jonah must have been telling the truth. I guess it’d be hard to complain if you were a Ninevite and after forty days your city wasn’t ground under the Lord’s bootheel. Still, tell me you wouldn’t feel a little stupid, sitting around in the dirt wearing a sack of potatoes for pants.

Afterwards, Jonah and the Lord share a smoke on the outskirts of the city, leaning against a tree and discussing the events of the day. Jonah, enormous prick that he is, gets angry at God for allowing the unchosen Ninevites not only to worship Him, but, you know, live.

“Have you any right to be angry?” the Lord justifiably replies, all “Oh, I have to explain myself to you now, is that it?” To His credit, Big G doesn’t even smite Jonah on the spot, cover his balls with leprosy or have him swallowed up by a humongous clam or anything — a move that would have seemed pretty reasonable given some of His past actions. (This is the same dude who got so mad once He threatened to kill every fish on the planet, remember.) Rather than smiting jonah, God does the other thing that God does best: explains his point through a clumsy metaphor a five-year-old could understand.

(I’m starting to empathize a little with God at this point, actually. At first He struck me as a bit of an attention whore, always threatening people with death if they didn’t worship Him. Now that I’ve gotten a taste of the pigheaded stupidity He had to deal with on a day-to-day basis I’m not so quick to judge. Seriously, it’s like trying to get a class full of special needs students to drink their juice boxes and take a nap. After the fifteenth time someone starts choking on their mattress or peeing in the hamster cage I’d break out the fucking NyQuil too.)

God sits thick-as-a-shitbrick Jonah down in the desert and makes a vine grow out of nowhere, so that it gives him shade. Jonah claps and hoots like an idiot at this, because Whee! Shade! But the next morning (evidently Jonah was content to sit under a vine for an entire day), God sends a worm that chews on the vine until it withers. Now shadeless, Jonah sits miserably while Big G brings the scorching heat and skin-flaying wind, crockpotting his prophet till the meat falls off the bone.

“There,” says God. “Are you ready to use your big people voice now, Jonah?”

“Guess so,” mumbles Jonah, putting his hands in his pockets and digging his foot into the sand.

God spells out his Lord of the Flies-level metaphor for the six people on the planet who haven't figured it out yet, of which Jonah counts for fully three. “Dig it: you were happy when the vine gave you shade, even though you didn’t plant it or help it grow. You were sad when it died, even though you just sat there like an idiot and didn’t tend to it."

Jonah nods. Nope. This is all so flying over his head.

"I created the vine," says the Lord. "I tended to it. I killed it. It was my call, because it was my vine. I don’t care if it gave you shade. I don’t care if you hated the vine. I don’t care if you called it Jessica and wanted to marry it. It’s not your call.”

“I don’t follow,” says Jonah. "You're saying you shouldn't have spared Nineveh and I was right?"

God sighs and grabs the bridge of his nose. “Pretend the vine is the city of Nineveh.”

“Give me the Cliff’s Notes,” says Jonah, cutting to the chase.

“You’re not God,” says God, grabbing Jonah by the ears like his skull was a big vase. “Don’t you ever fucking question my judgment in front of people again, or the next time I send a whale, you won’t be sitting in its belly. You’ll be bent over a rock while it rapes you with its big whale dick until I tell it to stop. You hear me, you insufferable prick?”

Jonah finally gets it. The end.

God: “Holy crap, I am huge pissed at those Ninevites. Seriously. Jonah, go tell those idiots to screw their heads on straight.”

Jonah: “Hmm. Naw, I think I’ll pass.”

[God throws Jonah in a whale for three days]

God: “Are you God?”

Jonah: [sniffling] “No, sir.”

God: “You’re damn right you’re not.”

[they make out]