Dr. Saunders’ post of yesterday, and its lively and interesting comment thread, got me thinking about Rush Limbaugh. He has this terribly remunerative set-up where he says something so obviously offensive to liberals (and just as obviously not that big a deal to conservatives) that liberals must respond. And that serves to reinforce the cult of Limbaughian bravery (that guy’s not afraid to say what everyone thinks), which intensifies his following and his cred.
His defenders in the comment thread say what Rush’s defenders say: he’s making a joke. (I believe one thought it an unsuccessful joke and one thought it a successful one, but that’s really neither here nor there.) To really understand Rush, you have to understand he’s a humorist.
Which got me thinking…where is the Right’s Daily Show? Or Colbert Report? Or Onion?
Both Jon Stewart and Rush Limbaugh are part humorist and part polemicist. But Stewart has much more emphasis on the humor and Limbaugh has much more emphasis on the polemics. The Left sucks at polemics. Air America was supposed to be the Left’s version of Limbaugh, which managed to galvanize only the parents of the broadcasters. Whenever there’s a left/right crossfire situation on TV, you can expect the Left side to be cringe-inducing at best (I’m looking at you, Katrina Vanden Heuvel).
But, contra the assertion that liberals have no sense of humor, the Right (broadcast-wise) isn’t very funny. An attempt at a conservative Daily Show was a major flop. Most right-wing broadcasters don’t even attempt that much humor. Rush comes closest. And the percentage of time he spends making jokes (as opposed to simply asserting his beliefs) is waaaaaaay lower than the percentage of time Jon Stewart spends on his joke to bald assertion ratio. And, while it may be partially because their political sympathies align more with mine, Stewart, Colbert, and the Onion all seem far genuinely funnier. Stewart, et al. do have their conservative fans. I don’t know a single liberal who genuinely, non-ironically enjoys Rush.
So why is that? I have a few thoughts. Stewart, Colbert, and the Onion tend to represent the moderates of their side, not the most extreme. One does not get the sense they are PETA-loving radicals who will spit on you for drinking bottled water. They are not rewarded for pissing off conservatives in the way that Limbaugh is rewarded for pissing off liberals. So they need not be as polemical; they can be ironic.
Their targets are often apolitical, while Limbaugh’s targets are always political. Limbaugh, Stewart, and Colbert all attack the media. But Limbaugh attacks it for being liberal, Stewart and Colbert attack it for being crappy. Onion articles often have nothing to do with politics, neither do a lot of sketches on Colbert and Stewart. Limbaugh sometimes attacks specific people on his side, but usually for being insufficiently conservative. Stewart, Colbert, and the Onion will also tweak not just the actors but the pieties of their own side more. You do feel less force-fed.
Right wing, I think you can do this! You just need to do it right.
I don’t know if you caught the that Fox News’s attempt to create a conservative counterpart to the Daily Show. It was gawdawful, but instructive.
The Daily Show operates from a profoundly moral point of view (as does all good satire). It operates–with John Stewart as our stand-in–from a posture of sputtering incomprehension at the hypocrisy and dis-ingenuity it finds in our culture, our politics, and–most pointedly–our media. And it is willing to turn its guns on its own “side” as well.
The Fox Show, in contrast, confined its humor to contemptuous ridicule of the left. Not from any real moral or ethical standpoint, really, but as tribal “othering” of the other side (if I did the link right, you can see this). This is not satire, and doesn’t lead to insight.
Well, I did hose the link, but it works anyway…
I think you’re right that it’s not just political moderation. They are indeed trying to achieve moral ends more than political ones, and that comes across.
Bullies never did understand humor. “Can’t you take a joke” is a symptom of that. The rightwing authoritarians will never have a daily show, because they don’t see that as humor.
Not to say that a liberal couldn’t write a right wing daily show… but nobody would buy it.
You can be preachy, or you can be funny. With very rare exceptions, it’s a mutually exclusive choice.
But why can’t conservatives be funny about politics/ideology without it being preachy? Liberals can do this.
Personally, I think it goes back to Colbert’s ‘reality has a liberal bias’ thing: liberals can be funny without being preachy because reality and evidence is on their side. They can often appeal to just the basic facts of the situation to make fun of conservatives, or simply focus on some specific conservative argument/claim to reveal – without argument! – just how crazy some of this stuff is. Conservatives, on the other hand, can only appeal to their ideology to make fun of liberals, hence, conservative humor is almost definitionally preachy.
(Full disclosure: I’m a liberal. I also think that conservatism has gone completely insane.)
My theory is that it’s because they cannot help themselves but to intentionaly set out to create “conservative humor.” They don’t set out to create “humor.” They are reacting to “humor that is liberal” because they see it as an effective medium through which liberal ideas are disseminated. So their motive is to preach, not to entertain; entertainment is the medium through which they will preach. Their idea is to imitate another person’s idea rather than to come up with one of their own — Fox’s Half-Hour News Hour was an intentional parody of the Daily Show and SNL’s Weekend Report — and since part of what makes something funny is its novelty and unexpectedness, it loses some of its punch.
When you come across something that is funny (or otherwise entertaining) and discover a conservative message in it, you will find nine times out of ten that its creator’s primary and overriding goal was to entertain, not to preach; that the creator was not reacting to something else.
There are exceptions, of course. And examples on the other side, both of readily-lampooned lefist looniness, and humorless idealogues on a moral mission so importance that their senses of humor are forsaken like so much ballast.
It’s not Preaching. It is Discipline. The Right wants to use humor to control behavior.
They don’t set out to create “humor.” They are reacting to “humor that is liberal” because they see it as an effective medium through which liberal ideas are disseminated.
I agree with that. In fact, I see this phenomenon as being pretty pervasive in conservative political tactics, and I think it’s one of the primary reasons conservatism has become so desperate and bankrupt at the political level. Conservative politics has become increasingly dominated by people who’s only purpose is to defeat liberals. So they try to employ liberal ‘tactics’ to beat liberals at their own game. I think that creates and fosters divisiveness between the two ideologies which can only be sustained by reinforcing fundamental differences which are often constructed by conservatives (Rush comes to mind here). And since the movement is defined by being different than liberals , the strategy has resulted in driving conservatism off the rails of content. All in an effort to win elections.
Yes I agree with Burt here. Keep in mind the left does fall into this trap as well. Consider all the movies they rolled out on the subject of the War in Iraq. Excreable and boring one and all. When we left wingers set out to preach through entertainment we suck it up bigtime.
When I listen to, for example, Louis CK, I am struck by how conservative his messages are. Similarly, Chris Rock (and Dave Chappelle).
There is a huge audience for conservative humor out there. The problem is that the Conservatives are turned off by it because of the, ahem, “plain language”.
Jay- There is plenty of conservatism in liberals. You read TNC, correct..he talks about the deep conservatism of a lot of black folk. The rub is that you can be conservative but not be republican and favour liberal policies. Conservatism is an elastic term that many of us would fall under in some ways. Ditto that for liberal.
Jb, and most of the comedians would react with sheer horror if identified as such, and start inserting a lot more anti-Bush (or Santorum or whomever) jokes in their script.
Except Ron White, who would run with it. And did, for a while.
I believe that Louis C.K. is the most articulate moral philosopher you will currently find in pop culture. He confronts uncomfortable truths in a way that I fond bracingly honest, and completely admirable.
You realize that, almost by definition, if you believe in a position, you think it reflects reality, right?
Saying that reality has a liberal bias is no more definitive that saying that it has a conservative bias, or a communist bias, or a fascist bias. It is simply rhetoric; punchy, but not convincing.
Being unable to see why someone could seriously hold a position with which you disagree is a failure of imagination; it deserves no commendation.
That being said, the other side is of course less capable of using the requisite imagination than your own. Naturally.
Saying ‘reality has a liberal bias’ is a truism. It’s not the same as saying it has a conservative bias, even remotely.
Reality DOES have a liberal bias. Liberal ideas can be extreme just as much as conservatives but on the whole they are not, they cater to the understanding of facts and evidence. Conservatives base their ideas on emotions and fallacies that shouldn’t even make sense to themselves.
That’s the problem. Conservatives tend to favour ideology, views and belief that fly in the face of reality. This only isn’t a problem if such views cater to their own logic and goals. They overwhelmingly don’t.
Conservatives constantly claim they are trying to protect the nation and yet when faced with the fact that the nation is comprised of the people in it as well as it’s economy, they fall flat. Hell, most of the time when faced with the fact their ideology will fuck up the economy, they ignore reality.
Liberals can, and consistantly do (hence the fact they are not conservative), change their beliefs and views and ideology to suite facts and evidence presented. Sometimes it takes a while to change that view but it changes. It’s the 21st century and we’re still struggling to get blatantly racist ideology off of the table when it comes to conservatives. We can show them, most of the time using their own logic, HOW and WHY they are completely, irrefutably wrong…and they still want to do what they do.
Liberalism changes with evidence and knowledge. Understanding, evidence, facts and knowledge are reality. Hence the so-called “liberal bias”.
I think there’s also a matter of audience. Which brings me to my anecdotal point — many, if not most, if not pretty much all, of my friends/acquaintances who were in some way, shape, or form involved in College Republicans also found Colbert and Stewart at least moderately entertaining — if not as funny as the more liberal of my friends did. The biggest Colbert fan I knew was pro-life, anti-gay marriage, pro-Romney straight-ticket Republican who lived down the hall from me. (She still may, only half-jokingly, want to steal him from his wife.) So if at least some segment of the target audience already finds Stewart/Colbert funny enough, or well-done enough, it’s going to make it that much harder for even an adequately scripted conservative “version” to catch on/compete/successfully pitch itself to a studio.
Conservatives see black and white, not grey.
Funny is true and righteous.
Not funny is not true, offensive and is a campaign against them.
Conservatives have difficulty discerning non-fiction and fiction.
Conservatives see politics like they see their sports’ teams rivalries or the beer and cars that get advertised to them.
Press a lever, get a pellet.
I had actually drafted up a plan for a sort of reverse-Colbert. I think it can be done. I don’t think it has been done in part due to what Burt is talking about, and in part due to circumstances (there is no soft-right outlet).
(The reason I never went forward with my plan was that one of two things would happen. 1) It would be unsuccessful. Or 2) It would be successful, and I would ultimately be giving aid and comfort to people I am disinclined to be giving aid and comfort to.)
Whenever a big name right winger says something egregiously insulting and what would have been considered beyond the pale years ago, defenders immediately say it was a joke. Of course when people are joking, or at least good at humour, you DON”T HAVE TO TELL THEM ITS A JOKE. Duh. What Rush’s listeners find funny about his kind of “joke” is that it pisses off liberals. Funny isn’t the issue; needling, by being sleazy or offensive, is the actual goal. Pissing off the opposition isn’t strictly humour although it may fall into the basket of humour if done correctly. But since Rushbots care most about pissing off liberals, and most attempts at conservative humour, aim only at irritating lib’s it has little wide appeal and is likely to fail at being humorous first.
Anecdote: There was cop who used to hang around my office every day ( i work in a court). He would gossip and joke and talk Repub politics. One day i mentioned how many conservative pundits say disgusting things like calling Lib’s traitors. He gave me the “just a joke” line. I got a little pissed but calmed and waited. It was all going to be to easy really. I think it was the J Wright non-troversy hit the news and he was fuming about it. So i just said what is the problem with “God Damn America” and i said the phrase a few times. He got all pissed. Just to easy…i just said it was only a joke and kept saying that to his every fume and fuss. He was a good enough guy to see how weak his own argument was, he let it drop and never brought it up again.
Part of the problem is that one *VERY* effective use of humor is to mock idols.
Let’s look at Elijah in I Kings 18. The priests of Baal were praying to their god and Elijah was saying such things as “yell louder! Maybe he’s in the bathroom.”
That’s comedy GOLD.
The problem is not that the left doesn’t have idols to mock, it’s that mocking them has a lot of “Conservative” collateral damage. You want to mock Big Government? Welp, you’re going to be mocking Hurricane W. Hitlerburton. You want to mock reliance on the government to help enforce moral behavior when it comes to saying “people of gender” instead of “women”? It certainly makes “people of faith” sound a lot differently when you say it five minutes later, doesn’t it?
So on and so forth.
The left’s humor was at its best when it was tearing down old, hollow idols. When it had the job of propping them up (see the Daily Show on Obama’s presidency through much of 2010, for example), it was *MUCH* less funny.
It’s pretty simple. Comedy works best when you punch up. Unfortunately, conservatism has pretty much spent the last 20 years beatifying anyone who makes over $10 million/year, as long as they aren’t actors, musicians, or Warren Buffett.
It’s really hard to be “funny” making fun of people that most people actually feel sorry for. It has an audience, about the size of Rush Limbaugh’s audience of people who quite frankly are just mean people, but outside of that, even right-leaning conservatives don’t want a comedy show made up of making fun of welfare recipients, pregnant women getting abortions, and gay couples. On the other hand, even right-leaning conservatives will laugh at jokes about rich CEO’s, over-the-top preachers, and Ron Paul. 🙂
Comedy works best when you punch up.
Yep. That’s why Tom’s analogy to Lenny Bruce (on the other post) didn’t seem to me to really work. Yeah, they’re both trying to be funny, both can be called comedians with reasonable accuracy, but punching down is a fundamentally different art form than punching up.
I suppose, though, that Limbaugh and his supporters actually think he’s punching up–sexually active liberal women are, by definition, elites, right? Especially if they’re G-Town law students. This, despite the fact that Ms. Fluke’s future law career is unlikely to ever make her as much money or give her as much influence as Rush has.
Oh, sure. There’s a way to make fun of feminist women (that I may agree with on the issues) that’s funny to a broad swath of the American populace. But, calling them sluts for wanting easier access to birth control isn’t that.
As Liberty said, as much as conservatives talk about elites on the coasts stuck in their ivory towers, much of the conservative movement are permanently stuck in 1962 on a lot of culture war issues that aren’t gay marriage or abortion.
I had a course in comedy theory in college.
In the section on humor taught that there are two basic themes for a joke to work: the degradation of the sublime and the sublimation of the degraded. There is no humor in further building up the elite or in further beating down the lowly. This idea builds off of the notion that we laugh as a release of tension when our expectations are upended.
As you point out, the culture war has made it hard for the modern American Right to move along either course – because the movement has invested itself in an epistemology that closes off those roads.
Apropos of nothing: a college course in comedy theory reminds me of the old EB White line about humor being like a frog: You can dissect it, take it apart and figure out how it actually works, but when you do that the frog usually dies in the process.
Generally, you’re probably right. This one had two things going for it, one was that the professor was a hoot. The second was that by ‘Comedy’ it was meant as ‘the other side of the compass as Tragedy’ – we only did a week or two on what most modern folks would call ‘comedy’ and another one on jokes.
UCB teaches comedy. The way it should be taught, with folks like Carlin as reference material.
Now, they aren’t exactly a college… but comedy isn’t exactly a profession.
The main problem with this is that it overlooks some pretty substantial lines of comedy. Jokes about rednecks aren’t jokes against the powerful (generally speaking). See also, Chris Rock’s comedy.
Some jokes against the less powerful are okay and funny. Helpful if it’s a member of the group being criticized. That suggests to me that, at least in part, it’s not that jokes against the less powerful are not so much unfunny, but rather make us generally uncomfortable without some other context (the joke is told by an ingrouper, the less powerful group is still considered more powerful than another group we are expected to sympathize with more, or the joke is against a less powerful group that it is okay to despise).
That’s what the ‘sublimation of the degraded’ is for – the elevation of the lowly.
Your redneck jokes, fish-out-of-water comedy, a lot of slapstick, etc.
Redneck jokes, and Chris Rock race jokes, can be seen as sublimating… but that’s not the most direct interpretation, is it? Or by “elevation” do you more mean “drawing attention to”?
Not necessarily, but i think that the rough idea of direction is accurate. often it’s putting something lowly in a sublime position – ie worthy of the kind of study and reflection that would normally be reserved for society’s fancy-pants. That certainly risks being more insulting than sublimating depending on who is talking about who – hence your point on in-group vs. out-group acceptability.
I would say also that some of these things aren’t properly jokes, either. . . much of comedy isn’t funny, a lot of things that are funny aren’t jokes. I might also be misremembering some very important part of that lecture I heard 17 years ago, too!
Jaybird and Jesse touch on it, I think.
Groups that are in their end-stage overreach are easier to mock.
I live in Bluey McBlueville, and work in the bluest blue workplace that ever blued. And some of these people are pretty damn mockable. But I think, also, their antics are not nearly as public. I don’t think many people know how crazy they are.
Have you ever caught “Portlandia” on IFC? I think this is just what you are looking for.
Whenever I watch that show, I find myself wondering if people that aren’t from here enjoy it. So much of it is feels like inside jokes. I love it.
Are you in Portland?
I am.
Hey! Are you???
No, I live in Newport Beach, California (about 50 miles south of LA).
I had an uncle in Portland, so I got a chance to visit it quite a bit. And I went through the same cycle every time. For the first few days, I’d be in love–with its beauty, its culture, and Powell’s Book Store–and vow to move my life there. Then, starting on day 3 or 4, the lack of sun would start to really get to me, and I’d start feeling lackadaisical, and then depressed.
So if you know of any cities that has Newport Beach’s weather, and Portland’s culture, let me know.
Is it good? I’ve been trying to get Mrs. P to watch it with me but so far she’s been resistant (I think she secretly fears that the show lampoons people a lot like her).
There’s as much affection as derision in its portrayal of the liberal-new-age-concern-troll-yuppie denizens of coffeeland. I really like it.
The difference is :
Liberal humorists are more likely to go “I’m such an idiot because…”
Conservative humorists are more likely to go “He’s such an idiot because…”
Plus, liberal humorists mostly punch up (John Belushi once said “I never yell at the help”)
where as Conservative humorists, while happy to speak truth to power, are more willing to punch down (This is why the is more outrage for Rush’s attacks on Fluke then Bill Maher attacks on Palin).
The problem with Repubs (Rish is the biggest example of this) is they are not funny. rush thinks of himself as some demented humorist but he’s never been funny or topical … Jon Stewart (and his writers) are genius coming up with great bit after great bit – funny is funny and these guys are. Rush is a lame hack who buys recycled Paul Shanklin bitst and passes them off as “his show” He’s never been funny and never will be