Taking conservative comedy seriously

February 5, 2007

Townhall’s Doug Giles noted in his newest column that when it comes to comedy, “Mr. and Mrs. Conservative, you must bow and kiss the Left’s ring. They slay us. You can count on one hand how many conservatives are making a semi-distinct blip on the comedic scene.” In the kind of piece one can only find at Townhall, Giles explores why the left is funnier than the right.

Why can’t conservatives get their comedic act together? The liberals, on a 24/7 basis, are tossing us soft balls that we should be driving out of the park in a humorous, prime time, way. It’s so easy it’s stupid. All we have to do is just read the crap that the left does, out loud, and it’s hilarious. We don’t even have to be that imaginative and try to develop quips, as they provide an endless supply of ammunition. We couldn’t make up the stuff they do even if we wanted to — no one on the planet is that creative.

The secular left is an amalgam of mayhem, a veritable Star Wars bar scene, a rogue gallery of freaks, geeks, nuts, sluts, slick politco’s and skanky ho’s — and we’re letting them walk without skewering the living day lights out of them.

What’s wrong with us? We’ve become nicer than Christ.

Yes, this really is his explanation. He went on to say conservative comics are “politically correct,” “too nice,” and unwilling to “deliver the dig.” Much of Giles’ piece seems vaguely tongue-in-cheek — it helps underscore the point about the right having a problem with humor — but on the point that mean ol’ liberals are funnier because conservatives are too polite, Giles did not appear to be kidding.

Now, it seems to me that those on the right who try to be funny fall short because they’re vicious and hateful. Limbaugh, for example, thinks it’s funny to make fun of someone suffering from Parkinson’s disease. At the 2004 RNC, Republican activists thought it’d be funny to mock U.S. troops injured in battle. “Nicer than Christ”? Um, no.

Nevertheless, Giles implores the conservative movement to take comedy seriously.

Conservatives, obviously, don’t think comedy is important. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report don’t have The Factor numbers. Thus, they don’t seem to be as important as O’Reilly, or Rush or Hannity in an immediate sense. And they’re not. However, Steve and John do have the ear of millions of 18-35 year olds, who will, uh . . . hello, be at the wheel driving this nation a few short years from now. That’s kinda significant.

The Right is foolish and stupid to not be knocking themselves out to compete for the belly laughs of this demographic. Blowing off this bunch that’s not listening to conservative talk radio, watching Bill [O’Reilly], or logging on to TownHall.com is to diss a crowd that will, in short order, be influencing our nation after you take the big dirt nap, conservative mom and dad.

It appears that Giles’ concerns have become more widespread. Indeed, Fox News is reportedly poised to launch a new late-night talk show called “Red Eye,” hosted by former UK Maxim editor Greg Gutfeld. Here’s the cutting-edge humor viewers can look forward to.

In a clip of “Red Eye” that was leaked online, Gutfield leads a discussion about Sen. Joe Biden’s (D-DE) racially-insensitive claim that Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) is “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean.” In the clip, Gutfield calls Biden “my favorite person in the world,” and asks, “Isn’t [Biden] saying what every liberal is thinking,” that “Obama is acceptable because he’s…a non-threatening black man.”

Also, panelists on the show rejected the notion that Obama is the first “clean” mainstream African-American. “Well, I think Oprah’s clean,” one said. “She does douche,” said another. He added, “I was told I was allowed to say the D-word,” suggesting the comment had been cleared by Fox officials.

Hilarious, isn’t it?

Giles concluded, “One of the reasons why some young people no likey conservatives is because no one is making them look at the Left and then laugh their butts off at them.”

Keep trying, Giles. Keep trying.

Conservatives, (well, nearly all great artists in history are politically liberal) are so bereft of creativity it’s downright pathetic.

I guess their best defense is to just dismiss art and creativity as a whole.

  • Conservatives are pretty funny. I read an article about Purity Balls yesterday that had me lmao.

    You’re right, CB, they’re too mean-spirited to be funny. They practice self-defecating humour.

  • Until conservatives are capable of making fun of themselves (as liberals are want to do), they will have a difficult time finding an audience in the comedy world. The truth of the matter is that all the good jokes you could make about liberals and Democrats have already been made by liberals and Democrats. Anything the right would do to compete would just look pathetic in comparison.

  • What the writer fails to recognize is that people like Colbert and Stewart did not set out to be political comedians, they set out to be comedians and happened upon politically oriented forums to practice their art.

    The Fox News show and other right-wing comedians that are sure to follow given the success of the Daily Show and Colbert Report are destined largely to fail because they will start with the premise that whatever they do has to be “conservative,” rather than funny.

    The “left-wing” comedians are so successful because they are comedians first.

  • Nicknaming Karl Rove “turd blossom” was the greatest conservative comedic moment of the past decade. Other than that conservative comedy is a bust. Dennis Miller used to be funny, then he fell to the dark side. I guess comedy and creativity can’t survive in a toxic environment of pure conservatism.

    Conservatives just don’t get irony, and neither does Giles. To wit, Giles say that the right should just point out what the left does and laugh at it, then says,”we couldn’t make up the stuff they do even if we wanted to — no one on the planet is that creative.” If no one on the planet is that creative then why does the left keep thinking this stuff up? Pegged my irony meter.

  • Why strain to be intentionally funny when, like the right, you can so much more easily be unintentionally funny?

  • The problem for conservatives is that the essence of comedy is that it is true, and relatable.

    There is nothing “True” or “Relatable” (well, relatable if you earn 100 million a year, maybe) in the entire Conservative agenda.

  • Wow – i can’t believe that no one has mentioned how funny the Wingnuts think Ann Coulter is. They love her “wit.”
    So let’s see:
    Rush Limbaugh
    Ann Coulter
    Dennis Miller

    Whos says the Right Winger are not funny? Well, if you mean funny like “this milk smells funny,” I do. I really think they are vomit-inducing funny. Way funny.

  • JC nails it. They are too busy taking themselves seriously and worrying someone might be laughing at them to do teh funny.

    It doesn’t help that a lot of those yahoos think they hear God whispering in their ears. “No time to laugh, must save the fetuses and check under the bed for gay terrorist commies!”

  • I read somewhere that there’s going to be a new right-wing version of The Daily Show that will feature Limbaugh and Coulter as Bush and Cheney on the first show.

    The laughs just write themselves, don’t they?

    Now where’d I put that stomach pump…..

  • Bush called into the Limbaugh show not long after the latter’s comments about Michael J. Fox… Bush did not ask Rush to apologize, but at around the same time couldn’t hammer Kerry enough about his taken-out-of-context comments about poor people ending up in the military…

  • I’m not sure if the conservative comedy problem is with their comics, or their audience. Even a D level comic will tell you that if you have to explain the joke, it’s just not funny.

  • Well, for starters, comedy takes talent, and the words “conservative” and “talent” do not exist together in the same universe. The best they can come up with are guys like Dennis Miller, who was a third-rate hack back in his liberal days.

    Being funny is a defense mechanism one learns growing up, an ability to defuse situations so the old man doesn’t smack you down the stairs or the playground bully doesn’t stick your head in the pitcher’s mound. But conserervatives never do this. They learn to be a vicious thug from dear ol’ dad, they are the playground bully (or aspire to that role) – see James Dobson, Tony Perkins, et al. So they are never going to be “funny” and their version of “humor” is the “laugh at and put down” variety, rather than “laugh with” variety, as shown in the example above from the Fox show (which is being created by the two far right thugs who created “24” BTW), and also shown in Dipshit Giles’ “creative typing” on the subject.

    Face it, talent means intelligence, and they’re all sub-lemur morons – at best!

  • I always thought the reason that people like Limbaugh get such high ratings is because he is so funny.

    I was just listening to him today rant for a lomg time on global warming. I actually heard the first part of his first hour and the first part of his second hour.

    I can’t figure out how he can be serious when he complains the scientists can’t predict when the climate will get warmer. He said he won’t believe them until they get more specific.

    @@@@@@@@@
    Of course, IF global warming contributed to the hot weather last summer or earlier this year then it added significantly less than 1 degree. So when New York was 15 degrees above normal you could attribute at most 5% of the strange weather to global warming. Almost all of the heat wave was due to the heat wave.

    Now that we have cold weather, global warming still isn’t noticable.

    I can predict that the weather on August 5, 2007 will be warmer than the weather on February 5, 2008 in virtually the entire country.

    The big question is can you predict that the weather on August 5, 2107 will be warmer than the weather in August 5, 2007. Believe it or not, the odds are not that good that the day in 2107 will be warmer than 2007.

    4 degrees centigrade warmer on average doesn’t tell you much about any specific day.

  • Cons dont do comedy for the sake of laughter but it is used as a tool or a cover to subtly expose the misguided feelings of hatred and ignorance that plagues their far right wing base ……

    One example ..

    While it would have been funny for a conservative to make fun of John Kerry windsurfing during the 2004 election season……CONS chose to make fun of his military surface with purple heart bandages…..huh????

    I think these two comments by Nobody and JC above are the essense of why CONS will never make it in the comedy game

    The “left-wing” comedians are so successful because they are comedians first.

    Until conservatives are capable of making fun of themselves (as liberals are want to do), they will have a difficult time finding an audience in the comedy world

    Truer words could not be spoken…..

  • The Faux TDS is an utter comedic dog. Most of the humor falls under the category of “Lookit! Libs R dum.”

    As for Greg Gutfield. I’ve read his attempted blogs at Huffpo and he’s an utter self centered twat. The real problem with him is that he tries too damn hard to be funny and it comes across as not funny or fun. He usually gets pummeled by most of the readers and sniffs when they get his goat.

    The real problem is that comedy, in particular satire, is the domain of the powerless stratas of society (sort of like guerrilla warfare.) If the powerful or those who are tools of the state (aka Rush) use it then it generates the same laughs as a man stomping on puppies (which is to say none, unless you’re psychotic.)

    About the only mildly right wing comedy that made me laugh was a scene from BBC’s Coupling. Two of the characters had a debate on who was the “rebel” alliance between the British Tories and Labour.

    “Come the revolution, Sally? You’re in power!”
    “We’re the rebel alliance and you’re the evil empire!”

  • The Right can’t do comedy because comedy is subversive. Not in a political sense, although certainly it can be. But in the sense that it invites its audience to challenge its most basic assumptions. Here’s an example: “Airplane!” In addition to lampooning a particular movie genre (or six) it skewers the way we use everyday language. (“I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley.”) Which is one of the reasons it is so much better than its imitators, which merely parody movies.

    Challenging assumptions is the opposite of what the right-wing does. Indeed, they survive by promulgating assumptions — frequently invalid ones — and discouraging challenge on any level. Any political viewpoint that would insist a man who cannot navigate a simple sentence in his native tongue is an inspiring leader is constitutionally incapable of the kind of thinking needed to create real humor.

    Also the right does not get that the Daily Show and the Colbert Report appeal to people who are already in on the joke. That joke is the right-wing itself, to a large degree.

  • I’d say what he’s missing is that the Daily Show find things that are ironic, silly, hypocritical, and stupid, and make fun of them. They also focus on real issues in many cases. They can also laugh at themselves (as Stewart and Colbert often do) and don’t take themselves too seriously.

    Conservative humor is apparently about finding people TO make fun of, and its done by people who take themselves way too seriously. It’s shallow, brittle, and mean-spirited.

  • come on, the president was very funny when he did that whole “no WMDs under there” thing. i sure laughed.

  • If we’re lucky, this will get some wingers to say some really unappealing stuff as they “loosen up” and break out from the “political correctness” that he thinks has been stifling them for so long. I say, give the man a megaphone. Then wait a few weeks for the gaffes to fly.

  • Republicans don’t do irony and they don’t do nuance, hence they don’t do modern “comedy” and the don’t understand it. For them mocking, meaness = funny. Most of America can only tolerate that in small doeses. Too much of that and they start thowing things or turning the station.

  • “Also, panelists on the show rejected the notion that Obama is the first “clean” mainstream African-American. “Well, I think Oprah’s clean,” one said. “She does douche,” said another. He added, “I was told I was allowed to say the D-word,” suggesting the comment had been cleared by Fox officials.”

    If this is any glimpse of the comedy we can look forward to, I can not wait. I mean this is amazingly funny, not cause it’s actually funny, but because it is so offensive, the conservatives are going to go ballistic.

    This is going to be a conservative train wreck and we are going to get to see it from every angle in super slow motion.

    This will make John & Steve look like amatuers.

  • Yeah, I’m sure it’ll quickly boil down to weekly appearances from Larry the Cable Guy. I wish he’d just finish whatever it was he is trying to get done and go away.

  • The only genuinely funny conservative I know of is PJ O Rourke. Dennis Miller could occasionally be funny when he had is own show on CNBC, but he was canned.

    But, it nothing compared to Cobert & Stewart,,

    Besides, C & S do make fun of liberals, too, sometimes. (David Cross sometimes appears on Cobert as a stereotypical liberal)

    Most of the humor from the right tends to be unintentional, anyway.

  • I’ll chime in with Roddy McCorley and ET; as the Phoenician observed, two major divisions of humor are subversion (or “category displacement”) and cruelty.

    “Liberal” humor tends to employ both categories, with the best examples employing both simultaneously. But for some reason, “conservative” humor usually just wallows in cruelty.

    If all they can do is mock, laugh at how stoopid the liberals are, they’ll never find the level of success that masters of subversion Stewart and Colbert have.

  • I’ll paraphrase one of the tributes to Molly Ivins that seems relevant here: when you use satire to attack the prosperous and powerful, it can be brave as well as funny. When you use satire to kick the downtrodden, as Limbaugh does, it’s just twisted and cruel. The Right can aspire to “humor” that basically spits contempt, the same way that sadistic torturers might laugh at a victim’s pain (hmm…), but they have no claim on comedy that isn’t cruel.

  • From The Brand New Monty Python Papperbook

    Deep down, let’s face it, all of us hate foreigners. It’s quite natural when one lives in such a beautiful and perfect country as our own to hate and loathe those greasy-haired swivelling toadies from Europe and beyond. What worries me is that sometimes this hatred is so deep down that many of us forget about it, and instead of hitting Frenchmen and letting Dagos’ tyres down, we are buying garlic-smelling French cars and eating filthy chunks of Wop dough in stinking Pizza parlours. Now I’m not saying that we should go out and burn down the nearest Eye-tie, Chink, Froggie or Pakki restaurant – I think the army should be doing that – but if we are going to keep this lovely country of ours beautiful, clean and deeply religious, we must remember that the Young Bigots Club is only a phone call away. They will come round at a moment’s notice and tread on packets of Gauloises and throw Grundig equipment down the lavatory. Remember, Tolerance is a great British virtue – let’s not waste it on Yids, Polacks, Wops, Krauts and Arabs. Col. Sir Harry McWhirter M.C.C.,
    Chairman The Bloody Bigots Club 1937-93

    News from our branches:

    ASCOT: a very successful Young Bigots’ Evening was held in the back room of the Duck and Prime Minister. A letter of abuse was sent to M. Pompidou, and a local hairdresser was burned.

    The CHELTENHAM branch of the Young Wives’ Prejudice Club had a very successful outing to the Knorr-Swiss Factory. They did over £4,000-worth of damage.

    ESHER Town Hall was packed last Thursday for an illustrated talk by our local organiser, Mrs. Ursula Fforbes-Hhitler on ‘Putting the Boot in on Wops’, and our FRINTON branch have collected over 6,000 dead dogs for our Bulgarian Food Hampers. Well done.

    HOLIDAYS

    If you must go to the continent, here are some of the places to visit:
    The British Embassy, 35 rue du Faubourg St. Honore, Paris 8e
    The British Embassy, Friedrich Ebert Allee 77, BONN
    The British Embassy, Via Conte Rosso 25, ROME
    The British Consulate, Herengracht 460, AMSTERDAM
    The British Chamber of Commerce, Mesrytiyet Caddessi No. 34, Tepbasi Beyoghi, ISTANBUL

    Some useful terms of abuse to help you get the worst out of the countries you visit:

    ITALIANS etc: Greaseballs. Dagos. Wops. Candles. Spaghetti-eaters. Ice-cream salesmen. Eye-ties.

    EGYPTIANS: Gippos. Yellowbellies. Anti-yids. Sphinctas.

    FRENCH: Froggies. Bloody French. (N.B. The French are very easily insulted by the British. Almost anything will do.)

    GERMANS: Krauts Boche. Sausage-eaters. Square-heads. (N.B. The Germans are an appallingly insensitive nation and therefore extremely hard to insult. Try setting fire to them or calling their Mercedes Volkswagens.)

    COLOURED PEOPLE: Best not to even talk to them.

  • I have only two words for anyone trying to claim conservatives can do comedy: Mallard Fillmore.

  • What I wonder is how the left will react when a democrat is elected president and becomes cannon fodder for both Stewart and Colbert, who both have brilliant writers and comedic timing. A comedian is only as good as the material, and being in a Republican controlled government era, the current administration is the “viagra joke” of the day. Talk to me in 3 years leftys, I want to hear you take the jokes….

  • “What I wonder is how the left will react when a democrat is elected president and becomes cannon fodder for both Stewart and Colbert,…”

    But that’s the point, Comicjeenyus: the left will laugh just as loud because liberals are capable of laughing at themselves. Conservatives rage at anything that isn’t pro-conservative. The right will never make it in comedy if they refuse to recognize their own absurdities.

  • I think a little John Stuart Mill is in order here:

    In a letter to the Conservative MP, Sir John Pakington (March, 1866):

    I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.

    http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRmill.htm

  • Ron White is conservative and he is funny. Larry the Cable is kind of a hack, but he had one funny line that went something like, “If the Dixie Chicks are going to say that(something about Southerners and country singers’ strong support of the war and not wanting to hear opposing views) then they might as well just go into a trailer park and tell all those people Wal-Mart sucks.

    Stewart and Colbert are talented, clever, and have pretty original viewpoints generally. As does Bill Maher and George Carlin sometimes. But lots of political comedy I’ve heard in comedy clubs from both right and left viewpoints suck because it comes across more like preaching or just stating your opinion than actual comedy.

    But their is underlying conservative influence in the comedy world that is in many of the parts of the country where there are comedy clubs or comedy shows held it is very conservative and dirty and edgy type material won’t work.

    A conservative topic family values eg. jokes about marriage and kids are generally ones I see go over best.

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