Why are there no funny conservative comedians/humorists/cartoonists?

[KingOrfeo]

The departure of Jon Stewart from The Daily Show and all the Intertube buzz over same got me to thinking . . .

Why is there almost nobody funny on the RW? Mallard Fillmore is not funny . . . Alex Rodriguez is not funny . . . No RW editorial cartoonist I've ever seen is funny . . . Dennis Miller is not funny . . . The "Christian comedians" are not funny . . . Not even the great P.J. O'Rourke has been very funny since his National Lampoon days, IMO . . . There was The Half Hour News Hour, a Fox effort at its own counterpart to TDS, but it didn't last long . . . Why is that?!

 

[NeverEndingMe]

more racist derp....in the name of islam someone needs to chop off KingofAssRetards head

 

[Ulaven_Demorte]

NeverEndingMoron thinks "conservative" is a race?

 

[KingOrfeo]

Perhaps I should amend that: Why is there almost nobody intentionally funny on the RW?

 

[Colonel Hogan]

Perhaps I should amend that: Why is there almost nobody intentionally funny on the RW?

Of course there political comedians on the right who are funny. What you are forgetting is that political humor suffers from the same malady that infects political debate: partisanship.

A pie in your face would be hilarious. A pie in my face, not so much.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Of course there political comedians on the right who are funny. What you are forgetting is that political humor suffers from the same malady that infects political debate: partisanship.

Can you name any whom I am underappreciating?

A pie in your face would be hilarious. A pie in my face, not so much.

"Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die."

-- Mel Brooks

 

[unregistered]

 

[Ulaven_Demorte]

The departure of Jon Stewart from The Daily Show and all the Intertube buzz over same got me to thinking . . .

Why is there almost nobody funny on the RW? Mallard Fillmore is not funny . . . Alex Rodriguez is not funny . . . No RW editorial cartoonist I've ever seen is funny . . . Dennis Miller is not funny . . . The "Christian comedians" are not funny . . . Not even the great P.J. O'Rourke has been very funny since his National Lampoon days, IMO . . . There was The Half Hour News Hour, a Fox effort at its own counterpart to TDS, but it didn't last long . . . Why is that?!

Stewart was great for fake news and I guess you've never heard of "P. J." O'Rourke.

Not only do you not read the articles you link, you don't read the posts you respond to..

 

[Colonel Hogan]

Can you name any whom I am underappreciating?



"Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die."

-- Mel Brooks

I think Miller is often funny. He and O'Reilly allegedly sell out a lot of their shows. I've never been, so I can't confirm, but somebody obviously likes him.

I think Limbaugh is funny -- far funnier than he is profound. He knows hot to bring barbs that sting.

Back in the day, I thought Mark Russell was good against both sides. A wee bit corny, but, hey, it was the Seventies. Nobody dressed well, either.

One reason that stand-up comics don't populate the political right in greater numbers is that the "P" in WASP resides on the Right. That means more comedians might have to work "clean." It seems to be regarded as almost an "unfair professional handicap."

 

[KingOrfeo]

One reason that stand-up comics don't populate the political right in greater numbers is that the "P" in WASP resides on the Right. That means more comedians might have to work "clean." It seems to be regarded as almost an "unfair professional handicap."

[shrug] Stuart and Colbert often worked blue, but not in a gross-out way, usually by way of hints and puns and euphemisms and irony, and didn't base their highly successful careers on it. Even George Carlin could've gotten his political material across without using the Seven Words, and often did (granted, his political material, while often profound, was usually the least-funniest stuff on the album).

 

[RobDownSouth]

I think Miller is often funny. He and O'Reilly allegedly sell out a lot of their shows. I've never been, so I can't confirm, but somebody obviously likes him.

I think Limbaugh is funny -- far funnier than he is profound. He knows hot to bring barbs that sting.

Back in the day, I thought Mark Russell was good against both sides. A wee bit corny, but, hey, it was the Seventies. Nobody dressed well, either.

One reason that stand-up comics don't populate the political right in greater numbers is that the "P" in WASP resides on the Right. That means more comedians might have to work "clean." It seems to be regarded as almost an "unfair professional handicap."

There's a certain type of comic that just seems to lose it when they get older. Dennis Miller on the right, George Carlin on the left, Bill Cosby in the middle....I dunno, they just stop being humorous.

Limbaugh is a caricature.

Agree 100% with Mark Russell, he could walk a comedic tightrope very well.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Agree 100% with Mark Russell, he could walk a comedic tightrope very well.

Always had a soft spot for singing comics, they're so rare.

 

[mark_j]

The departure of Jon Stewart from The Daily Show and all the Intertube buzz over same got me to thinking . . .

Why is there almost nobody funny on the RW? Mallard Fillmore is not funny . . . Alex Rodriguez is not funny . . . No RW editorial cartoonist I've ever seen is funny . . . Dennis Miller is not funny . . . The "Christian comedians" are not funny . . . Not even the great P.J. O'Rourke has been very funny since his National Lampoon days, IMO . . . There was The Half Hour News Hour, a Fox effort at its own counterpart to TDS, but it didn't last long . . . Why is that?!

Why do you even care?

If it smacks anything of "conservative" it gets nothing but your derision anyway..

 

[KingOrfeo]

Even George Carlin could've gotten his political material across without using the Seven Words, and often did (granted, his political material, while often profound, was usually the least-funniest stuff on the album).

E.g.:

The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They've got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They've got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying * lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else.

But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago.

You know what they want? Obedient workers * people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they're coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club.

Very true. Very profound. But is it funny?

OTOH, it can be funny, see below -- it's just kinda hit-and-miss.

I look at war a little bit differently. To me, war is a lot of prick-waving! OK? Simple thing. That's all it is. War is a whole lot of men standing out on a field, waving their pricks at one another. Men are insecure about the size of their dicks, and so they have to kill one another over the idea. That's what all that asshole jock bullshit is all about. That's what all that adolescent, macho male posturing, and strutting in bars and locker rooms is all about. It's called "dick fear!" Men are terrified that their pricks are inadequate and so they have to compete with one another, to feel better about themselves, and since war is the ultimate competition, basically, men are killing each other in order to improve their self-esteem! You don't have to be a historian or a political scientist to see the bigger-dick foreign policy theory at work. It sounds like this: "What, they have bigger dicks? Bomb them!" And of course, the bombs and the rockets and the bullets are all shaped like dicks. It's a subconscious need to project the penis into other people's affairs. It's called "fucking with people!"

I realized some time ago that I'm not separate from nature just because I have a primate brain - an upper brain - because underneath the primate brain, there's a mammalian brain, and beneath the mammalian brain, there's a reptilian brain; and it's those two lower brains that made the upper brain possible in the first place. Here's the way it works: The primate brain says, "Give peace a chance." The mammalian brain says, "Give peace a chance, but first let's kill this motherfucker." And the reptilian brain says, "Let's just kill the motherfucker, go to the peace rally and get laid."

 

[1sickbastard]

Doug Standhope is an avowed Libertarian, and some of his stuff is wicked funny. But a lot of his stuff is disturbingly gross (but still funny).
Like his bit on Liberty.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Doug Standhope is an avowed Libertarian, and some of his stuff is wicked funny. But a lot of his stuff is disturbingly gross (but still funny).
Like his bit on Liberty.

Well, libertarian humor is a different thing . . . As Stone and Parker of South Park say, "We hate conservatives, but we really, really hate liberals." There is one consistent political message -- maybe true, maybe false, but at any rate consistent -- running through a lot of their material: Too many people take politics too seriously. And they always manage to make it funny.

 

[phrodeau]

Penn Jillette is a libertarian, and often very funny.

 

[1sickbastard]

Penn Jillette is a libertarian, and often very funny.

The issue, I think, is that libertarians rarely ever toe the social conservative line. Or possibly, to be more accurate, they tend to be entirely consistent with their conservatism (particularly about shit that isn't society's/the government's business) Thus even an economic conservative or libertarian comedian/humorist/cartoonist would tend to be disassociated from "mainstream" (social) conservatives.

Moreover, the hypocrisy of social conservatism is just to much of a target rich ideology for most comedians to ignore.

 

[CandiCame]

Chick is pretty good, if we're talking about cartoonists. And you have to remember that in the comics world, Stark is as right-wing as you can get. He's a weapons manufacturer. His registration has actually been mentioned in-comic as Republican because he's been involved in politics. And I think that Stark is hilarious. Yes, that's a character rather than a creator, but most comic creators don't announce their political affiliation.

Tim Allen's a conservative, what's his name- that plays Ron Swanson is extremely conservative; in his book Paddle Your Own Canoe he gets in to his political stance and he's hilarious. Foxworthy and Danny Larry "The Cable Guy" Whitney aren't my cup of tea because I believe that both of them are exploiting my people for personal gain, but they're popular republican comics.

Edit: Nick Offerman is that guy's name

 

[DesEsseintes]

I think it goes back to the very basis of comedy as a craft, as opposed to mere physical humour. It doesn't take politics to do good slapstick, though of course the best of it (c.f. Chaplin in The Great Dictator) can be politically powerful.

But comedy, at its roots, is about inverting the world as we know it. Look at Aristophanes' Lysistrata, in which women become powerful by withholding sexual pleasure from their men, or The Frogs, in which a god (Dionysos) is made to look foolish by his servant. Look at the Fool in mediaeval courts, licensed as no other to speak truth to power - look at English traditions like All Fools Day, when lords served their servants and wore their servants' livery. In other words, comedy at its absolute core is a way for the relatively powerless to mock the relatively powerful. It is, in a way, Utopian, in that it imagines a different world, with different power relations.

Now the right-wing, broadly, does not seek significant change. It might look for a few changes here and there, but they are largely reactionary - in other words, it seeks either stasis, or return to some imaginary golden age. The word conservative is, of course, instructive here. It certainly does not wish to invert power relations - to see the weak (women, minorities, the working classes) in power. And so right wing comedy mocks, not the powerful and established, but the weak and powerless, or at least those who speak on their behalf.

There is a word for relatively powerful and successful people mocking those beneath them in the social hierarchy, and laughing at the afflicted. But it isn't comedy.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Chick is pretty good, if we're talking about cartoonists.

Who, Jack Chick?! He is always funny, but never intentionally.

 

[rosco rathbone]

I read Dostoevsky and Celine literally L'ing OL. I can't think of any stand up comics or John Stewart types that do that to me. At most I think "very clever".

 

[NeverEndingMe]

the real reason is that Conservatives are out there making money to support your liberal welfare asses because you liberals are fucktards

 

[CandiCame]

Who, Jack Chick?! He is always funny, but never intentionally.

Yes, Jack Chick. I love Chick tracks. Just because you, personally, don't like them doesn't mean they're objectively bad.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Yes, Jack Chick. I love Chick tracks. Just because you, personally, don't like them doesn't mean they're objectively bad.

I love 'em too, but they're for laughing at. HAW-HAW-HAW!!!

Jack Chick.