The modern conservative approach to "comedy"

ronjon said:
I'll read the article later. I do like that I'm allowed to like Blazing Saddles again. That movie is hilarious.
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Blazing Saddles is like the album Making Movies by Dire Straits. It's not the ending of either were terrible but they really didn't fit with everything else. Both, in my mind went from brilliant to near brilliant.
 
It's something listening to board Trumpers crow about Dear Leader ending "cancel culture" and "woke" censorship when just today his FCC Chair refused to deny to a direct question (on Fox, no less) as to whether Trump had something to do with ending Colbert's show, and also implied that The View might be next in their crosshairs for Joy Behar's comments. They're using the full power of the government to suppress and intimidate and bully anyone who dares to criticize Trump, yet they're still obsessed with liberals telling them that they shouldn't use homophobic and racial and sexist slurs and insults. Always the victims, and always, always projecting.
 
Btw, an older conservative who was by far the wittiest one I ever read was Florence King . Her "With Charity Toward None" was a paean to misanthropy, one of my favorite pastimes.
 
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It's very simple. Liberals like wit. We also like surprise in our comedy, probably because surprise is the basic element of comedy. Thus do we like humor that doesn't have to explain everything. If the joke goes A, B, C, D, E . . we don't want to hear E. If D is a good punch line, it gets us to laugh at E without having to say it, which is why we like it. We also like our humor to be critical of the status quo to some degree, because otherwise it's just boring. The greatest comic in the world can't make "everything is awesome" funny.

Conservatives like bullying. Their view of humor is Biff Tanner and his friends in Back To The Future -- or, as Petri suggests, mere punching down. They don't want the punch line to be at all cloying. They want their humor to be exceedingly obvious, because it's doing different work for them. They don't want any subtlety because they always intend to use humor as a cudgel. It's like older kids who laugh when one of them picks on a younger one.

Differences between conservatives and liberals have become mostly personality based. That's really how we have sorted ourselves. Not ideology. Personality.

For all my life, you couldn't pay me enough to sit through a Tim Allen performance. This was true way before I even knew if he had any political leanings (though in retrospect it's not hard to see him as a MAGA).
 
superrific said:
It's very simple. Liberals like wit. We also like surprise in our comedy, probably because surprise is the basic element of comedy. Thus do we like humor that doesn't have to explain everything. If the joke goes A, B, C, D, E . . we don't want to hear E. If D is a good punch line, it gets us to laugh at E without having to say it, which is why we like it. We also like our humor to be critical of the status quo to some degree, because otherwise it's just boring. The greatest comic in the world can't make "everything is awesome" funny.
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fundamentally untrue; The Lego Movie was hilarious.

for me, what's missing from these discussions is the fact that laughter is supposed to be joyful. the kind of "jokes" that conservatives complain about being censored or cancelled aren't joyful, they're just, as you say, mean. most of the time it's sarcasm or irony without understanding what sarcasm or irony is -- or, as put in the article in the OP, "Everyone is trolling, until they aren’t, and even when they aren’t, they are. Everyone is always and never joking. It’s not a threat. It’s a joke."
 
akillesheel said:
fundamentally untrue; The Lego Movie was hilarious.
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True, but everything is awesome was only the setup. It wasn't funny in itself. Anyway, you know what I mean. Just like with good storytelling, good comedy needs tension. No comedian does a routine about how awesome his or her life is, except as sarcasm or to set up a joke about first world problems.

And you are correct about the joyful part at least to some degree. There always has been dark humor, which isn't joyful; and politically or socially biting humor. But the average laugh should be joyful, yes, and that's another place where conservatives go wrong.

I remember seeing the Daily Show doing a clip about Sarah Palin going on Oprah. Oprah asked, "how are you doing?" and she was like, "I'm really good, out there making sure our judges understand the constitution." Jon Stewart was like, "that's what you say on Oprah? that must be exhausting."
 
finesse said:
Btw, an older conservative who was by far the wittiest one I ever read was Florence King . Her "With Charity Toward None" was a paean to misanthropy, one of my favorite pastimes.
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John Shelton Reed has a good essay about her in his book, Minding The South.

books.google.com

Minding the South

You're in the American South now, a proud region with a distinctive history and culture. A place that echoes with names like Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee, Scarlett O'Hara and Uncle Remus, Martin Luther King and William Faulkner, Billy Graham, Mahalia Jackson, Muhammad Ali, Elvis Presley...
books.google.com

King was a pistol-packing lesbian-feminist-traditional conservative.

I guess some might argue that H.L. Mencken was a funny conservative though contrarian is probably the best label. And he wasn't always funny but pretty consistently acerbic (as was King).
 
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