House of Eratosthenes

The people who are most knowledgeable about politics — and therefore, the ones who understand the most political jokes — also tend to be the most ideologically extreme. So it makes sense that political satire shows, like conservative talk radio and its Fox News spinoffs, are ideologically skewed: Their viewers are the kinds of people who know the latest news stories and what their fellow ideologues are saying about them.

Before writer Oliver Morrison gets to that though, there is an interesting story:

Political humor, in particular, might have an inherently liberal bias. Alison Dagnes spent years looking into this question for her 2012 book A Conservative Walks Into a Bar. She spoke to dozens of working comedians who self-identified as liberals, and as many who identified as conservatives as she could find. One of the reasons she posits for a lack of conservative satire is that the genre has always been aimed at taking down the powerful, from the Revolutionary War through Vietnam and 9/11. “Conservatism supports institutions and satire aims to knock these institutions down a peg,” she wrote.
:
Peter McGraw, an associate professor at the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business, has argued for what he calls the “benign-violation theory” of humor. McGraw believes that humor results from violating social norms or by violating a particular person or group. But it only becomes funny when it’s placed in a second context that clearly signals the violation is harmless or benign. In other words, if someone falls down the stairs, it will only be really funny if that person doesn’t get hurt.

Earlier this year the journalist Joel Warner published The Humor Code, describing his efforts to test McGraw’s theory. Accompanied by McGraw himself, he visited improv artists in New York and stand-up comics in L.A. The two men talked to the world’s foremost researchers on humor and explored the vast joke collections of humor anthropologists. They even traveled to Japan to see if the benign-violation theory held up in a culture renowned for its (by Western standards) weird sense of humor. In each case, Warner and McGraw were able to use their theory to explain the various kinds of humor they encountered. But when they tried to put the theory into practice, by having McGraw perform standup — first at a bar in Denver and then at the Just for Laughs Festival in Toronto — it didn’t work very well. McGraw did manage to get some laughs eventually, but only after months of immersion and practice.

This attempt to provide an overarching theory of humor suggests that academic explanations aren’t much help to the professionals who are trying to be funny. Humor is a creative art that responds to a specific culture at a particular moment in its history. This response can take many forms: TV sit-coms, internet parody, late-night variety shows, cartoons, stand-up, sketch, improv. But in each case, the jokes only work if they’re perfectly timed and aimed at the right audience. [bold emphasis mine]

That makes perfect sense to me. It’s like the tumblers behind the knob on a safe. If the delivery and the timing are right, if the forum is compatible with the message that is being delivered, and if the audience is ready to here it, you get a click. If you only have two out of those three then nothing happens…which I imagine to a stand-up comedian must be painfully embarrassing. That would be what in the industry they call “dyin’ up there.”

This struggle to thrive in a particular genre isn’t exclusive to conservatives and satire. At the end of the 1990s, when Jon Stewart took over The Daily Show, conservatives dominated one form of entertainment media: talk radio. Liberals have never managed to equal conservatives’ success in that arena. The Air America network — whose talent included Rachel Maddow, as well as Saturday Night Live alumnus and future Senator Al Franken — filed for bankruptcy at the beginning of 2010. Even MSNBC has never been able to attract as large an audience as Fox News, the televised version of conservative talk radio.

Could it be that American political satire is biased toward liberals in the same way that American political talk radio is biased toward conservatives? Dannagal Young, an assistant professor of communications at the University of Delaware, was looking into the lack of conservative comedians when she noticed studies that found liberals and conservatives seemed to have different aesthetic tastes. Conservatives seemed to prefer stories with clear-cut endings. Liberals, on the other hand, had more tolerance for a story like public radio’s Serial, which ends with some uncertainty and ambiguity.

Young began to wonder whether this might explain why liberals were attracted in greater numbers to TV shows that employ irony. Stephen Colbert, for example, may say that he’s looking forward to the sunny weather that global warming will bring, and the audience members know this isn’t what he really means. But they have to wonder: Is he making fun of the kind of conservative who would say something so egregious? Or is he making fun of arrogant liberals who think that conservatives hold such extreme views?

As Young noticed, this is a kind of ambiguity that liberals tend to find more satisfying and culturally familiar than conservatives do. In fact, a study out of Ohio State University found that a surprising number of conservatives who were shown Colbert clips were oblivious to the fact that he was joking.

In contrast, conservative talk radio humor tends to rely less on irony than straightforward indignation and hyperbole. When Rush Limbaugh took down Georgetown student and birth-control activist Sandra Fluke in 2012, he called her a “slut” in order to drive home his point about state-mandated birth control. After the liberal blogosphere erupted with derision, Limbaugh responded with more jokes, asking that Fluke post videos of her sex online so taxpayers could see what they were paying for.

These are excellent examples, made all the more relevant by a common theme reverberating in recent years from Planet Liberal, that there is something innately inferior about the conservative mind for this failure to pick up on irony. That’s an understatement, by the way. Try arguing with a liberal sometime, preferably in one of the faceless forums known for unleashing incendiary rage by loosening inhibitions, like a comment thread in a blog. “Don’t you understand irony?” will come the retort, a few exchanges after the conversation gets a bit heated. It’s one of their Go-To’s. And yeah, turns out, it is possible to snarl at someone on a web page, if you really want to do it.

Left unexplained is, exactly what crime is committed when one fails to get irony. Liberals, today, have a lot more rage for this than they have for robbing a liquor store in Ferguson, MO. And nobody anywhere can coherently explain why that is. There is a bit of hypocrisy in the snarling, too, as the Limbaugh/Fluke example reveals: Limbaugh was doing a lot of joking over that, and in the midst of their hyperventilating the outraged proggies failed to pick up on it.

These examples formed the kernel of Young’s theory that liberals and conservatives look for and see different kinds of humor. Connover, the producer of The Flipside, has already voiced skepticism about Young’s hypothesis. “That’s another way of saying that liberals are smarter,” Connover said. “And clearly that’s not the case. Liberals are some of the dumbest people to walk the earth.” Young insists that hypothesis is not about intelligence; it’s about a preferred structure of jokes. She maintains that there’s nothing inherently better about liking ironic jokes over exaggerated ones.

I would say they’re not quite so much dumb, but let us say, blithely unconcerned with clarity. The passage excerpted ends with a graphic of Stephen Colbert, underneath which an editor has seen fit to append a caption that reads in part, “Stephen Colbert’s humor can leave his audiences wondering whether he’s making fun of conservatives, [or] the way liberals see conservatives…” It goes without saying that this comedian in particular is popular among the left, so this provides additional support for the notion that conservatives and liberals see ambiguity differently. It goes back to my previous observation that

Our “civilization” at the moment…is embroiled in a cold civil war…between people who refuse to define things, and people who MUST see to it that things are strongly defined before they can do what they do.

It is the “do what they do” thing that is the deal-breaker. There are liberals, here & there, who actually do work for a living, in fact there are entire industries that have been fairly saturated with liberals, taken over by them. Just as there are industries that have been taken-over by conservatives. Could anyone with some decent knowledge of contemporary politics, credibly envision a near-future event in which one or more of these industries switches sides? Conservatives give up tobacco farming, truck engine manufacturing, roof inspection, bridge design, in exchange for the industries they’ll take from the liberals — Hollywood, psychiatry, tort law, social work.

It’s pretty safe to say that isn’t going to happen. There are characteristics involved in these professions. The biggest attribute I notice is change-of-states. The crop is not yet farmed, the job is done, and then the crop is farmed. Psychiatry doesn’t work that way, of course. You stretch out on the couch, you pay your money, after awhile the therapist says “Mmmm, okay that’s very interesting, but at this point I’m afraid we’re all out of time. See you next week. We’re making fantastic progress!” But there’s no way to assess any sort of progress without anything changing states. Just like with the social work and the tort law and the making A-list blockbuster movies. Twelve months on, money will have shifted hands here & there, but all the situations will be unchanged. So that’s the big difference I’ve noticed, and in my opinion it’s a difference that essentially locks all the industries into whichever half in which we find them ensconced today.

And I connect that back to the ambiguity-thing. Conservatives don’t look at ambiguity the same way. It’s not a punchline, it can potentially be a killer. If you’re going to go walking out on a bridge your company just designed and built, you’re going to look at the measurements that went into building that bridge, a whole lot differently. So this Colbert-confusion is not going to be that titillating to the conservative mind, because that’s an evening show, and the conservative is going to look at the brain-teaser as not quite so much a punchline, as a piece of unfinished work. And hey, he just clocked out of work. If there’s more work to do, then fine, we call that “overtime” and who’s writing the check for that?

Liberals may see that as greedy or selfish. But the truth is that it’s just one of many transformations involved in reaching adulthood.

You know, the author’s own biases are worked in throughout the article, so that I distrust any of his conclusions. “One of the reasons she posits for a lack of conservative satire is that the genre has always been aimed at taking down the powerful, from the Revolutionary War through Vietnam and 9/11.”

One of the things Jonah Goldberg has mentioned a few times recently is how non-transgressive leftism in. Here they are, raging against “institutions” and “the man,” but they’re patted on the head by it by academia, the media, Hollywood, the President. They get institutional praise and support all the time. There’s literally nothing risky about being a liberal.

Or this comment: “Stephen Colbert, for example, may say that he’s looking forward to the sunny weather that global warming will bring, and the audience members know this isn’t what he really means. But they have to wonder: Is he making fun of the kind of conservative who would say something so egregious? Or is he making fun of arrogant liberals who think that conservatives hold such extreme views?”

This is chock full of unexamined assumptions. The primary one, of course, is that looking forward to more warm, sunny weather is “egregious.” Some well-respected climate scientists have noticed recent greening trends, and the fact that even if the planet is warming, there could be *at least* as many benefits as drawbacks.
- cloudbuster | 02/15/2015 @ 17:17
I took a look at the OSU study that found that conservatives purportedly don’t understand that Colbert is joking and the study appears to be garbage from a scientific perspective. It doesn’t really have the possibility of control cases or single-variable modification that would allow it to definitively draw any meaning from it.

I’d posit that a lot of the conservatives who supposedly didn’t realize Colbert was being satirical were thrown off because, from their perspective, the positions he’s being satirical about are so sensible (conservative positions) that they believe, in the process of being satirical about them, he *must* appreciate them.

Colbert, of course, doesn’t have the intellectual wattage to actually comprehend what he lampoons, as far as I can tell.

I would doubt that this is a phenomenon particular to conservatives. There simply isn’t at present a good control case of a conservative who goes as thoroughly undercover as a satirist of liberalism as Colbert from which to draw an alternate perspective (Thus the lack of any possibility of a control group, though even that wouldn’t be scientifically rigorous, because different comedians have different styles and personalities and aren’t interchangeable).
- cloudbuster | 02/15/2015 @ 17:31
Conservative humor punch line?
“Get ‘er DONE!
- CaptDMO | 02/16/2015 @ 02:32
Interesting points, but they merely hint at the underlying cause.

Liberals suffer arrested development.

Feminism is stuck in the third grade, where all boys are yucky.

The broader left suffers the insecurities of high school, desperately wanting to be part of the in-crowd.

There’s nothing truly funny about John Stewart. He semi-smirk is merely a signal for the cool kids to laugh.

At first, the followers don’t know why they are laughing; over time it becomes a conditioned response.
- Robert Arvanitis | 02/16/2015 @ 07:45
Cloudbuster:
“I took a look at the OSU study that found that conservatives purportedly don’t understand that Colbert is joking…”
I propose that conservatives (mature adults, whatever) understand the Stewart/Colbert (et al) are TRYING desperately to be “joking”. (Or the cast of (ie)MSNBC are desperately trying to be taken seriously) It just that an astonishing number of folks with “opinions” drilled into their heads….do NOT!
(Para)”It’s not that they’re stupid, it’s that they KNOW so many things that just aren’t so!”
- CaptDMO | 02/16/2015 @ 09:06
@cloudbuster,

Speaking of Jonah Goldberg, he made another relevant point a while back — that if it’s funny, it’s humor first, and political second. He used the example of The Simpsons writers (so, “a while back” must be “the late 1990s,” when the show was funny. Gosh, time flies). Anyway, he said that they’re all out-n-proud liberals, but they don’t do “liberal humor” — they go where the joke goes, and indeed they end up making fun of Lisa’s knee-jerk leftism as often as they do, say, Burns’s evil capitalist conservatism.

Which makes sense. Liberals as liberals have exactly ONE joke: “Boy, isn’t [something or someone conservative] stupid? Let’s all point and laugh together.” Which admittedly can be funny, but most often it’s the “Jon Stewart smirk” kind of funny — all the desperately hip and with-it chuckle, lest they too be pointed-and-hooted at.
- Severian | 02/16/2015 @ 14:06
The difference in ability to handle snark (it rarely even rises to the level of true irony, just an ironic pose) is mostly because liberals really can’t face the truth about themselves or anyone else head on. They’re comfortable with ambiguity not because they’re brighter than conservative (demonstrably false), but because they are just bright enough to understand that clarity would reveal a lot of uncomfortable truths about their ideology. You can’t just come right out and say most of the things they believe, because they are insane. 😉

Conservatives go for the hard, direct stuff because reality bears them out. That’s all.
- Getalonghome | 02/16/2015 @ 15:31
Mark Driscoll once said something to the effect, “The best preachers in America are stand up comedians.”

If you start to watch stand up comedy with that concept in mind, you will see that they are often similar to a pandering evangelical preacher. They often have a super-liberal/progressive message. They try to win points by ringing specific bells that the standup attendee demographic will cheer at. They champion the latest progressive causes and denigrate the enemies of liberalism: traditional-minded individuals, whites, men, those that reserve sex for marriage, Southerners, those that find a problem with Islam, sometimes the goyim, et c.

Is stand-up comedy the sermon for the progressive ideology?
- fwh | 02/17/2015 @ 18:03
“Is stand-up comedy the sermon for the progressive ideology?”

Not necessarily so. I think it’s more basic than that – people are generally social critters. We prize being able to get along. Humor is one of the biggest ways to break tension and look more approachable, less intimidating, to everyone. That’s why so many sermons start with an obligatory bad joke, why there are folks to warm up a crowd before the actual paid performance begins, why we roast celebrities or public figures to express our admiration… heck, it’s why guys in a locker room will spend half their time mocking each other and laughing at everyone’s mistakes – including their own. And by tradition, the Jester is usually the only one allowed to poke fun at the King. And that’s all healthy human interaction.

It’s only natural to make use of this when selling something. We’re more likely to rate a person as trustworthy and believable if we happen to like them. More importantly, we try to stay in their good books, and will do this by agreeing to stuff: buying some gadget, pledging $25 to some benevolent’s association, or nodding politely even as the conversation starts to include bad ideas.

Problem is, even a genuinely likable fellow may be a crackpot – harmless like Emperor Norton I of San Francisco, or immensely dangerous like a cult leader. Another problem is that sepaking up in disagreement makes everyone a little uncomfortable, and the appeal to group togetherness is sometimes used in place of an actual reasonable discussion: here we were having a pleasant conversation and that crank had to go on insisting on facts!

“Conservatives go for the hard, direct stuff because reality bears them out. That’s all,” in the words of Getalonghome above. “On with the truth and up with the volume,” in the words of theologian Robert Short – but it can’t be the only approach, or we won’t win anyone over. The Left makes a lot of hay out of painting us as humorless, unfeeling, perhaps inhuman – sometimes, it must be said, with cause. That doesn’t make our theories or policy wrong, but by that point it’s too late to convince anyone.

One important means of dismantling the monopoly the Left seems to hold on pop culture and entertainment is the constant demonstration that their own likability and humor is mostly facade. (Social media has done wonders in that arena.) That doesn’t prove their ideas are wrong, of course, but it does mean that as we seem more human and they more bitter and controlling, the fairer hearing our own ideas get, and the more that the previously-unquestioned assumptions of the Left get scrutiny.
- nightfly | 02/18/2015 @ 09:18
Bah, I screwed up the close tag. Sorry Morgan.
- nightfly | 02/18/2015 @ 09:27
@Nightfly,

well said. Even though I can’t bring myself to use Twitter, it’s a wonderful, wonderful club with which to beat Our Betters, the Liberals. They’ve well and truly painted themselves into a corner — Liberalism’s entire schtick is “We’re Better than You,” and that’s a tough facade to maintain.

On the other hand, I think likability is overrated, especially in times of high stress. How many Americans, do you think, would instantly pledge to vote for any man who told those giggly spokes-pledges Jen Psaki and Marie Harf to shut up and make him a sandwich? There’s not a single remotely serious-looking person in this entire administration; a teller of harsh truths won’t be likeable, but I bet he’d get tremendous respect.
- Severian | 02/19/2015 @ 09:55
I’m an online cartoonist. Trust me, I’ve hashed on this question a lot.
I’ve come to a few conclusions:

One, mocking something and actually making it funny are two different things. Colbert mocks the conservative viewpoint and his audience applauds him and throw him a treat like a performing seal. But he’s not actually FUNNY. Telling the truth as if it were stupid is not funny.

Two, bias. Everyone thinks you’re hysterical until you gore THEIR sacred ox. Then they pucker up and start whining like a leaking balloon. Humor is a lot like preaching, and you know when the sermon’s hit a nerve when they stop shouting “amen” and start looking like they’re sucking sour cream.

Three: political humor is less about getting a laugh than about making people mad. Most conservative humor is political. Ergo, an audience that has been largely biased towards leftism is going to get mad when you start ripping off right-wing one-liners.

Four: The best humor has an element of self-effacement to it. Jeff Foxworthy, while making fun of rednecks, embraced being one– and gave redneck people permission to like what they are and be proud of themselves. Steven Urkel was a parody of nerdiness, but his shtick endeared nerdy characters to millions of viewers. Ron Swanson from “Parks and Recreation” could be a perfect liberal parody of a right wing, conservative alpha male— except his red-meat antics have the audience on HIS side, not on the lettuce munching types that vex him.
Most conservative humorists haven’t really mastered balancing satirizing their adversaries with subtly poking fun at themselves. (Myself included. But I’m learning, I’m learning.) So their jokes and comedy fall flat. Humor that only lambasts the sinner is just a sermon, and nobody enjoys sitting through a sermon.

Five: some people have no sense of humor, and will never be won over by yours. AS the joke goes, how many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer: OMG THAT’S NOT FUNNY!!! It’s of note that the more power leftists gain, the more brittle and sensitive their egos get… till soon NOTHING is funny because it might be a subtle dig at THEM.
- rhjunior | 02/22/2015 @ 05:20

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