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That’s Not Funny: How the Right Makes Comedy Work for Them

2023; Penn State University Press; Volume: 9; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/studamerhumor.9.1.0178

2333-9934

Evan Cooper,

Radio, Podcasts, and Digital Media

As the media landscape has grown increasingly fragmented over the last thirty years, it has become increasingly difficult to be cognizant of, let alone consume, all the different forms of media. In That’s Not Funny: How the Right Makes Comedy Work for Them, Matt Sienkiewicz and Nick Marx investigate the sizable array of right-wing comedy forms that have flown under the radar of the politically left. They scrutinize the extensive variety of right-wing comic forms, probe liberal myopia about the appeal of right-wing comedy, and explore the implications of its popularity.Sienkiewicz and Marx posit five categories of right-wing comedy and devote a chapter to each: Fox News’ comedy programming, “paleocomedy,” “religio-rational satire,” libertarian podcasting, and far-right internet trolling. The chapter on Fox News’ satirical programming documents the network’s several failed attempts at comedic programming before it earned the ratings successes of both Watters’ World and Gutfeld! Like their liberal predecessor, The Daily Show, both programs feature a mocking, ironic tone. The second chapter argues that paleocomedy prods liberal pieties and indulges in nostalgic invocations about various aspects of American culture rather than engaging in cutting satire or harsh invective. For instance, the sitcom Last Man Standing derives much of its humor from the comic feuds between Tim Allen’s staunchly conservative patriarchal figure and his liberal daughters. The third chapter explains that “religio-rational” satire is predicated on a foundation of conservative philosophical and religious beliefs and targets what it views as the left-wing’s inconsistencies, hypocrisy, and delusions. Sienkiewicz and Marx discuss the well-known political commentator Ben Shapiro, as well as Stephen Crowder, a major figure at the satirical conservative website the Babylon Bee. In the fourth chapter on libertarian podcasters, the authors discuss the hugely popular Joe Rogan, the insistently offensive Legion of Skanks, and Andrew Heaton, whose less caustic brand of humor has been unable to attract a substantial audience. The fifth chapter, on right-wing trolls, focuses on the central figures within the far-right, white-nationalist movement. Sienkiewicz and Marx scrutinize their trolling the internet to elicit reactions and then mock those who take their racist and misogynist humor “seriously.”Sienkiewicz and Marx liken the broad range of right-wing comedy media forms to a vast and interconnected “comedy multiplex.” Thus, audiences for more mainstream comic forms like Gutfeld and Joe Rogan’s podcast can end up in the “dark basement” of the multiplex, imbibing the most odious and “hate-driven” material like the animated Nazi sitcom Murdoch Murdoch videos and The Daily Shoah podcasts. According to the authors, the threat posed by right-wing comedy is amplified by a “liberal psychological complex”—liberals do not believe that conservatives can be funny and so don’t pay attention to right-wing comedy forms. Consequently, liberals underestimate the popularity and dangers of the right-wing comedy complex. Furthermore, they assert that left-wing comedy risks becoming too doctrinaire and self-serious, thereby potentially alienating ideologically ambivalent individuals who may be more inclined to pursue the guilt-free pleasures of right-wing comedy.First of all, I want to thank the authors for their deep dive into the right-wing mediascape. I watched about ten minutes of a Murdoch Murdoch video that was both abhorrent and mind-numbingly boring. I cannot fathom having to consume the hundreds (if not thousands) of hours of media that the authors did in the process of conducting research for the book. Moreover, the authors do a very good job of providing both descriptive and analytical accounts of the media forms that they study. In particular, they provide a cogent and illuminating examination of far-right comedic trolling, especially the ways that someone like the former Proud Boy Gavin MacInnes utilizes a comedic persona to deflect criticism.In their wide-ranging investigation, however, the authors tend to conflate conservative entertainment with conservative comedy. For instance, they devote extensive attention to Ben Shapiro despite their own admission that he is not a comedian but a person who promotes conservative comedy. While Shapiro did serve as host and interviewed right-wing comics in a video for the Daily Wire website, his lamentations about wokeness and cancel culture ruining comedy do not make him a purveyor of comedy. Likewise, while right-wing media personalities like Diamond and Silk, whose appearance at the yearly Conservative Political Action Conference Sienkiewicz and Marx discuss in the concluding chapter, incorporate comedic one-liners and put-downs into their videos and appearances on Fox News, I contend that they are better understood as commentators with a snarky sensibility than comedians.The authors correctly note liberals’ general lack of knowledge about many of the right-wing entertainment figures described in the book, but the contentious left-wing debate about Joe Rogan, especially when Bernie Sanders appeared on his podcast, clearly indicates a concern on the left about his significant cultural influence. Moreover, the authors too often rely on strawman arguments about liberals and “the left.” Claims like “today’s liberals often celebrate All in the Family” (61) and “recent years have seen at least some self-seriousness and risk-aversion creeping into traditionally liberal comedy, ceding metaphorical real estate to the right and lowering its political value” (185) are unsubstantiated, as is their assertion that liberals believe that “conservatives are constitutionally averse to humor” (184).In the book’s final pages, the authors excoriate the liberal talk show host Stephen Colbert for tearing up in his monologue on his show on the Thursday after the 2020 presidential election. Colbert bemoans Trump’s lies and refusal to acknowledge that he lost the election. The authors lament that Colbert’s incorporation of “sadness and anxiety” levies a “pain tax” on viewers, many of whom will therefore pursue other comic offerings. In my opinion, this complaint misreads American comedy and entertainment media. First, earnest discussion of monumental national and world events on comedy-oriented talk shows and shows like The Daily Show is not unusual. Secondly, while I don’t think Colbert and the show’s producers were concerned about his monologue turning off viewers, it’s hard to imagine that more than a handful of people tuning into the show would have been upset by Colbert’s serious monologue. Indeed, a lot of viewers might have been upset if he made jokes about a hugely serious threat to American democracy.More significantly, I do not think that the authors sufficiently substantiate their concluding argument that right-wing comedy serves as “the blowtorch that welds together contemporary right-wing politics” (187). Lacing right-wing invective with comedic elements may make it more digestible for some individuals and seeing conservative comics and performers may provide audiences with validation of their views, given the paucity of mainstream comic forms with an overtly conservative perspective. Nonetheless, it is a huge leap to say that comedy, rather than racialized grievances, nostalgia, or the increase in economic inequality over the last forty years, is the glue that binds all the different elements of the right.Despite the book’s flaws, That’s Not Funny: How the Right Makes Comedy Work for Them could be constructively utilized in graduate courses on media, popular culture, politics, and comedy. It is a timely examination of an important contemporary cultural phenomenon and is certainly likely to encourage class discussion.