That's Not Funny

How the Right Makes Comedy Work for Them

Matt Sienkiewicz

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780520382138
• eBook ISBN: 9780520382145
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Television
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A 2022 Best Comedy Book, Vulture

A rousing call for liberals and progressives to pay attention to the emergence of right-wing comedy and the political power of humor.

"Why do conservatives hate comedy? Why is there no right-wing Jon Stewart?" These sorts of questions launch a million tweets, a thousand op-eds, and more than a few scholarly analyses. That's Not Funny argues that it is both an intellectual and politically strategic mistake to assume that comedy has a liberal bias. Matt Sienkiewicz and Nick Marx take readers––particularly self-described liberals––on a tour of contemporary conservative comedy and the "right-wing comedy complex."
 
In That's Not Funny, "complex" takes on an important double meaning. On the one hand, liberals have developed a social-psychological complex—it feels difficult, even dangerous, to acknowledge that their political opposition can produce comedy. At the same time, the right has been slowly building up a comedy-industrial complex, utilizing the humorous, irony-laden media strategies of liberals such as Jon Stewart, Samantha Bee, and John Oliver to garner audiences and supporters. Right-wing comedy has been hiding in plain sight, finding its way into mainstream conservative media through figures ranging from Fox News's Greg Gutfeld to libertarian podcasters like Joe Rogan. That's Not Funny taps interviews with conservative comedians and observations of them in action to guide readers through media history, text, and technique. You will find many of these comedians utterly appalling, some surprisingly funny, and others just plain weird. They are all, however, culturally and politically relevant—the American right is attempting to seize spaces of comedy and irony previously held firmly by the left. You might not like this brand of humor, but you can't ignore it.

1 Fox News and Mainstream Right-Wing Comedy

Imagine you’ve had a long day at work. Your cubicle mate was at it again, audibly chortling to himself about the “libs” as he scrolled his Facebook feed. Your cousin wouldn’t stop texting you about new research discovering a link between vaccines and halitosis. All you want is to pour a drink, plop onto the couch, and watch a show that takes aim at the absurdity of the current political climate. For old time’s sake, you decide to turn on your television and flip channels, stopping on someone in the general shape of a late-night host—an unthreatening white man with a telegenic, smirking smile—making fun of Trump’s speech that day. The burned-out pixels on the lower right corner of your TV make it so you can’t actually see the name of the show or network. But you figure this’ll do.

In his speech, Trump reminisces about partying with celebrities so past their sell-by dates that you can’t help but laugh. The host of the show knows and notes how silly it all is. Trump jeers at Nancy Pelosi, then says a bunch of things no one could possibly believe to be true. The host raises his eyebrows and shakes his head in disbelief. At some point, the faux newsman just starts incredulously repeating Trump’s most outlandish non sequiturs, rendering the speech into randomized refrigerator magnet poetry. He giggles, gleefully quoting one bonkers soundbite after another. Trump’s speech is now a surrealist audio montage, and the effect is surprisingly amusing. Yes, it’s weird. But it’s also fun, topical, and gets at exactly what makes the conservative world so infuriating. But oddly, it pulls the punch. You know what the point must be—Trump is an unfit leader—but the host doesn’t say it. You start to get suspicious, coming to realize that you can’t quite tell if the host is laughing at Trump, with him, or something in between.

The next segment on the show clarifies things in just the way you weren’t expecting. It’s about the Trump campaign selling “Trump 2020”–branded straws, exactly the kind of inanity you’d expect to be the target of a bit on The Daily Show or Saturday Night Live. But the host likes the straws. Loves them, in fact. They are, in his telling, the perfect, ironic response to the self-serious, symbolically excessive liberal crusade to ban plastic straws for environmental purposes. This time, the host makes his political perspective fully clear: “The Republican party can harness the power of mockery, long the turf solely owned by the smirking left. Now the libs are the cranky old farts shaking their rakes at those teens on skateboards and the right are laughing their asses off drinking whiskey from plastic straws.”¹ The show goes on to a recorded comedy sketch about other potential Trump-branded products aimed at tweaking liberal sensitivities. You don’t like it, but now you’ve got to wonder where your sense of humor ends and your sense of politics begins.

Suddenly, you realize that you’ve been watching Fox News’s late-night comedy/talk show host, Greg Gutfeld. You’re not sure if he’s funny, but you suspect some people think he is. He’s certainly more ideologically complicated than you would expect from Fox News, mixing jokes directed at Trump with ones on behalf of him. Flummoxed, you quickly Google Gutfeld. You are more than a little shocked to discover that his show routinely doubles the audience of cable comedy competitors like The Daily Show and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. He has even beaten bigger broadcast shows like The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.² How does a right-wing comedy show get so popular, going mostly unnoticed amid so much successful liberal political humor?

The answer lies in this book’s central metaphor, the complex. For the right, Gutfeld represents the most successful face of a rapidly developing, wide-ranging comedy business structure. At the same time, liberals’ psychological complex occludes the right’s comedy complex from view. Liberals simply cannot, will not, see it. Even those who would seem most attuned to this emerging threat—practicing political comedians—have developed a remarkable blind spot to the right-wing comedy complex. In a 2017 interview, the cast of The Daily Show were asked “Could a conservative equivalent to your show ever work?”³ The result was confused bemusement, as if they were a group of mathematicians asked to calculate the area of a two-sided triangle. Eventually, one of the show’s star correspondents, Hasan Minhaj, adjusted the question for greater liberal comfort: “Why do you think, as liberals, we’re just funnier?” The consensus among the group was that right-wing political comedy was inherently oxymoronic, safely precluded by the comedy equivalent of a geometric proof. To be fair, Roy Wood Jr. did acknowledge Greg Gutfeld’s strange talent and his potential as a comedian, but referred only to his then defunct Fox News show, Red Eye. The cast was unaware that Gutfeld! was challenging them (and winning by at least one metric) on a weekly basis.⁴

It has taken some time, but over the last decade or so, the right-wing comedy complex has tried, failed, and finally succeeded in disproving the headline (and its many variations): “Why Does Every Conservative Daily Show Fail?”⁵ In Gutfeld!, the right has a topical news satire that serves as a reliable, genre-defining big box store for a broader structure of ideologically adjacent right-wing comedy products. Like The Daily Show, Gutfeld! provides an institutional center that combines irony with politics, serving as an entry point for consumers interested in exploring the overlap. Before discussing Gutfeld in detail, however, we must first consider: How did The Daily Show come to define both liberal political satire success, and conservative comedy failure?

The answer lies, in part, in the immense, genre-defining influence of The Daily Show and its importance for Comedy Central and the television industry. Indeed, for the first two decades of the twenty-first century, The Daily Show has been at the heart of the liberal news satire universe. One of Comedy Central’s earliest hits (alongside the crude animated sitcom South Park), the show thrived with Jon Stewart as host, routinely providing liberals’ core comedic critiques of the Bush administration after 9/11. Equal parts news media deconstruction and political satire, The Daily Show spawned a brand of liberal humor that lives on today through alumni of the show such as Steve Carell, Olivia Munn, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Jessica Williams, Ed Helms, Michelle Wolf, Rob Riggle, Hasan Minhaj, Josh Gad, and Samantha Bee.

One often overlooked aspect of The Daily Show’s legacy is its influence on television industry economics. For years, it was at the forefront of Comedy Central’s efforts to court a small, dedicated audience, a strategy that would become increasingly important across the cable landscape in the first decade of the twenty-first century. A 2006 Variety report notes, for instance, that The Daily Show and its lead-out, The Colbert Report had become “key to courting ‘the irony demo’: the coastal, college-educated cadre of young viewers who get much of their political analysis in the form of satire.”⁶ As we discussed in this book’s introduction, the success of Daily and Colbert in the climate of opposition to the George W. Bush administration inspired dozens of studies examining the link between those shows, voting patterns, and the political attitudes of young people. The studies range in tone from expressing concern about the “increased cynicism” of those in the irony demo to optimism about how liberal satire television mitigates “disaffection” for and inspires excitement in the voting process among young viewers.⁷

These studies about Comedy Central’s stable of satirical news shows and their “irony demo,” however, are tied to a specific moment in American television history, and we suggest that it is dangerous to apply the perspective of one time and place as a universal, everlasting truth. Indeed, not all Comedy Central programming has courted young, irony-literate viewers in the service of political liberalism, as evidenced by the sexist humor of hits like The Man Show and Tosh.0. As Raúl Pérez and Viveca Greene argue, for instance, viewers often excused Tosh’s ironic rape jokes and thus supported a broader “dominant patriarchal framing” of comedy.⁸ In other words, Comedy Central has long sought to pair viewers and shows in profitable, though not necessarily politically liberal, combinations. In the case of its news satire, Comedy Central successfully targeted young, educated viewers by making liberal politics and comedy seem like a natural fit in the 2000s. During this peak of The Daily Show’s influence, George W. Bush provided a steady stream of mockable malapropisms, and cable audiences after 9/11 were big enough to make Jon Stewart a household name. If we start the story today, however, the seemingly natural connection between liberals and irony is much more tenuous. Certainly, current Daily Show host Trevor Noah aims for a liberal viewership. It just happens to be much smaller than Stewart’s. Today, both young viewers and comedy consumers have scattered throughout the mediascape, across ever-multiplying entertainment options.

The Daily Show’s sense of humor, then, isn’t determined exclusively by its political ideology. It’s also shaped by commercial mandates to program for an audience—young adults—attractive to advertisers. The practice of audience siloing discussed in this book’s introduction has allowed liberals to nest in their own televisual enclaves while ignoring—or at least discounting—the possibility that comedy might be flourishing financially just down the dial and coming from the conservative viewpoint. Overall, the dual dynamic of television’s profit imperative on the one hand and liberal viewer siloing on the other has helped create the (false) impression of a seemingly natural relationship between liberal politics and comedy among liberals. But, as we’ll see with the case of Fox News, there is nothing natural about this relationship.

There is, to be fair, another reason for the assumption that only liberals can do political comedy well: a lot of right-wing Daily Show attempts have been really, sometimes famously, bad. Today, the right-wing comedy complex has its big box store in Gutfeld, who attracts Tonight Show–size audiences and refers customers to other nearby conservative comedy storefronts. However, liberal discourse tends to focus on the curious, failed right-wing comedy development project across the way, a ghost town full of clunky, ill-conceived, and ultimately unsuccessful efforts to appropriate Daily Show–style comedy toward right-wing ends. Think of it as the abandoned mall next door, the names of the stores faintly visible via the rust marks left by their long-removed signs. Despite their short lives, these failed right-wing Daily Shows garner outsized attention from the left, in large part because they reaffirm deeply held assumptions about comedy’s liberal politics. When the liberal world thinks about right-wing comedy, it tends to zoom right by the real thing and instead spend time kicking around the tumbleweeds of failure across the way. And who can blame them? What’s more fun than watching the other team lose? Join us for a quick tour of all that can, and has, gone wrong, when the right tried to do the Daily Show before Gutfeld!

THE CONSERVATIVE COMEDY GHOST TOWN

Live from Jacksonville, It’s . . . Headlines Tonight

The economy of Jacksonville, Florida, is fairly strong. Unemployment is relatively low, and certain sectors are thriving: retail, insurance, waste management. Jacksonville is not, however, a boom town for either comedy or media production. Yet the most recent failed effort to build a conservative political satire show, Headlines Tonight with Drew Berquist (2019), is live, or at least live to tape, from Jacksonville. To spoil this story’s ending, no, Berquist will not claim the title of the right-wing Jon Stewart. His budget is too small, his audience is too news focused, and, frankly, the show’s circumstances are just too odd.

Also, Berquist is not a comedian. He is a military special operations veteran for whom killing has not been a metaphor for getting laughs. His media company, OpsLens, provides security analysis for other right-wing news outlets and produces talk shows about military affairs from, yes, Jacksonville. The show’s production circumstances are far removed from the New York cosmopolitanism of The Daily Show. These production limitations have not, however, stopped the Daily Beast and Esquire from using the presumed failure of the ultra-niche program on the ultra-right-wing One America News Network (OAN) as the latest evidence of the failure of conservative comedy. As Esquire puts it, “ ‘Headlines Tonight with Drew Berquist’ Is What Happens When Conservatives Learn the Word ‘Skit.’ ”⁹

It is easy enough to see where liberal outlets like Esquire are coming from. Headlines Tonight’s opening episode has more than its share of rough, uncomfortable, and crude moments. Staged like The Daily Show but burdened by a stationary, single camera, the majority of the show features Berquist looking intensely into the lens, offering sarcastic news commentary, and listening into an earpiece for an artificial laugh track, added later for home viewers in postproduction. The targets are predictable—Democratic congresswomen, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris. Written by Berquist and a tiny production team, the jokes are simple, and often very amateur. They also drift with frequency into the thoughtless and superficial, fraught with derisive stereotypes. A remote call-in to Berquist from “Bernie Sanders” features the latter rambling about “Shapiro’s deli,” in what is hard to read as anything other than a means of needlessly signposting and making suspicious Sanders’s Jewish heritage. A taped person-on-...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Right-Wing Comedy
• 1.   Fox News and Mainstream Right-Wing Comedy
• 2.   Making Comedy Great Again: Paleocomedy
• 3.   Religio-Rational Satire: Owning the Libs One Faulty Syllogism at a Time
• 4.   The Legions of Libertarian Podcasters
• 5.   Trolling the Depths of the Right-Wing Comedy Complex
• Conclusion: Performing Right and Left
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index