Conservatives Don’t Know Jokes
How Dominion shows why conservative humor falls flat
Documents released as part of the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News continue to be funny and sad, because events can evoke multiple emotions in well-adjusted people. They’re also widely illuminating, and have finally cast some real light on something that has been obvious for a while but for which I have never heard any coherent theory.
Conservatives aren’t funny.
We do laugh at them, naturally. When Kevin McCarthy’s speakership bid went into double-digit votes, that was incredibly funny. Also sad, of course, because this is what we’ve come to as a nation, but also very, very funny. All the more funny because House Republicans all tried to gaslight us about how this was all just good functional democracy, dammit!
Conservatism is unintentionally funny all the time. It’s when conservatives try to be funny they step on their dicks. (Trump is so famously unfunny he bombed at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner.)
Conservative attempts at humor fall into two broad categories.
- Strawmen. Conservatives exaggerate the positions of their opponents to make them seem evil or silly, often to a the point of absurdity. Most of us don’t recognize the nonsense that the far right spews when they try to describe positions on the left.
- Ad hominem. Conservative pundits routinely fall back on personal attacks, either against specific boogeymen or just marginalized groups in general. Punching down — at women, dark-skinned people, immigrants, the poor, LGBT folk, etc — is the conservative pundit’s stock in trade.
It should be no surprise that in the realm of debate and reason both these tactics are considered out of bounds. That wouldn’t matter so much if it was funny. Humor has it’s own special logic. The problem is that all this confabulation and name-calling and down-punching isn’t good comedy.
Recent examples from the conservative trans panic include such gems as “I identify as an attack helicopter,” and “my pronouns are prosecute / Fauchi.” While these are apparently side-splitting for the conservative base, they leave most other listeners scratching their heads. These statements are so weird and disconnected that perhaps conservatives don’t understand the concepts they are trying to ridicule.
Josh Marshall posted an article recently that sheds light on this very question from a historical perspective.
One of the things that is clear from the very start of the conservative movement was a basic failure to quite understand the thing they rallied themselves against […] None of the organizations that the right took issue with — the think tanks, the news publications, the movie studios, the nonprofits, the book publishers — were ideological, let alone partisan, organizations. When the founders of modern conservatism looked at CBS News they saw the shock troops of liberalism and the Democratic Party. Same with Brookings and the Washington Post and all the rest. And when they went to build their own versions of these institutions they patterned them off their own cartoonish understandings of how these operations functioned. The idea that institutions like CBS News or The New York Times were, whatever their faults and unexamined biases, fundamentally rooted in an ethic of news gathering and reporting was really totally lost on them.
Basically conservatives got sucked into their own spin. They not only cranked out strawmen of the post-war liberal consensus for the purposes of argument, but they actually believed that their own hyperbole was true. So much so that they modeled their counter-programming on it.
This fits with what I remember about The Daily Show. When Jon Stewart and his show were starting to really take off nationally I recall conservatives seemed flummoxed. And rightly so. No one had ever seen a long-form comedy show satirizing news of the day, including politics, let alone one that ran five nights a week. No one thought it would work. Political humor on TV was relegated to a few jokes in late-night monologues and sometimes that one SNL skit that showed all politicians as corrupt or idiots. The Daily Show went into depth on policy, platforms and politicians, primarily to the detriment of conservatives.
Jon was and is not an ideologue, but he is a professional comedian. Dissecting conservative positions not only unearthed funny contradictions and confusions, but sometimes the cruelty motivating it all. In other words, comedy gold.
Conservatives first responded to Jon by trying to get booked as guests. I suppose they thought he could be turned to their side, like a naive padawan to the dark side. I recall a stream of conservative pundits in the early days of the show, who tried to act like cool insiders but who Jon systematically dismantled on air.
After that string of self-owns they launched The Half-Hour News Hour, exactly as Josh’s thesis would predict. They saw The Daily Show as primarily an ideological enterprise attacking conservatives, instead of what it was — a comedy show. As result The Half-Hour News Hour made a lot of attacks on liberals in the style of conservative jokes, but very few landed as actually funny. Not surprising since “funny” wasn’t the purpose of the show.
Fox News shut it down after six months.
Conservatives like to think they’re hilarious, and they certainly hide behind “it was a joke” whenever their hateful rhetoric manages to get called out. But they aren’t actually amusing. Because humor, like real journalism, or real research, only works when you are open to discovering it, not when you’re trying to force it to fit your ideological preconceptions. Conservatives are constitutionally incapable of understanding that.
And that’s sad. But also pretty damn funny.
