In 2016, the writer Andrew Lipstein and I gathered a bunch of funny and talented friends to make a magazine called Paul Ryan. It was a follow-up to a previous satire project, The Neu Jorker, and for this second outing, we parodied lots of different magazines, but the universal target of all our jokes and jabs was Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House. This Paul parody was a chance to get the gang back together, but we also wanted to say something, to blast off a pre-emptive satirical salvo at the man we thought would be cleaning up in 2017 after Don Trump, inevitably and finally, fizzled out. When the GOP shits the bed in November, we thought, we’ll be sitting pretty with over 100 hundred pages of jokes making fun of this weasely, wonky, Ayn-Rand-fetishizing, Rage-Against-The-Machine-misunderstanding politician.
Then the 2016 election erupted like a boil, and the excellent writing and art we’d so painstakingly compiled suddenly felt a lot less funny. Nearly overnight, the heft of the satire seemed insubstantial to the moment. How could we expect the acid of our jokes to sting people who are utterly and constitutionally without shame? You can’t scold someone with no self-reflection, with no sense of anything outside of themselves.
Now we’re here in 2024, at the top of a very scary rollercoaster operated by absolute and craven freaks. The GOP has only embraced ugliness more closely, I’ve got a box of unsold parody magazines under my bed, and Paul Ryan’s off in some Wisconsin boardroom making a million dollars. Who’s really laughing?
This feeling of satire as insubstantive and defanged colors so much of how I look at contemporary topical comedy. And look, I love jokes, and I think there’s real value in preaching to the choir. Shared laughter at what we find horrible and contemptible is cathartic, it’s fun. But I don’t think we can delude ourselves into thinking that joking about Don Trump and the bozos around him is doing anything substantive to wound them or blunt their movement. So many politicians on the right seem to view their jobs merely as shitposters with taxpayer-funded salaries, delight in outrage, and are heartened and vindicated by liberal tears. I don’t see many jokes penetrating that deranged armor.
But this election cycle, as before, the mainstream comedy acts and late-night shows mostly returned to the same tenor of joke they’ve been doing since 2015, and that Spy magazine debuted in the ‘80s. Very few writers and performers seem to have tired (publically, at least) of joking about someone that Jesse David Fox wrote was the “worst thing to happen to comedy” in 2017.
This isn’t to say that nothing is funny, but anything topical seems futile, and I find myself most drawn to work that is thinking more broadly. John Oliver’s show is doing impressive and illuminating journalism and explainers with a funny spin. Reductress is continually excellent, especially when they find jokes outside of specific news stories, and in the moods and anxieties we’re all suffering. Late Stage Live! is fresher, looser, and more surprising than most late-night talk shows, with a clear and passionate point of view. And the best diagnosticians of the male ego and pathologies that drive someone like Don Trump are not the legions of impressionists, but folks like Tim Robinson and Connor O’Malley, whose hysterically pathetic characters refuse to apologize or take responsibility, and who lash out and flail at any accountability or self-reflection.
But if we’re honest about who from the realm of comedy is the most influential, it’s the right-wing stand-ups and podcasters, the jesters of fascism. Look at any list of the most-listened-to podcasts, and you’ll find a lot of reactionary comedians. And the worst of the “culture wars” — the bleating about wokeness, the casual just-asking-questions platforming of noxious ideas, etc. — is taking place most prominently in comedy spaces. And the purveyors of this stuff are making a lot of money doing it.
Look at this Kill Tony guy who was all over the news the week before the election: a comedian who was dropped from mainstream entertainment for being too racist on stage, but pivoted to the right, and a few years later got the opportunity to do his racism as an opener for the party of Lincoln’s candidate at Madison Square Garden.
“Failing right” is the new, more lucrative “failing up.”
The writer Seth Simons has been a dogged and clear-eyed investigator into the world of extremism, bad politics, and money in comedy. His post-election piece is characteristically excellent:
As usual, I am less interested Joe Rogan and his ilk’s influence over national politics than their influence over comedy itself. By narrowing the scope, we can speak with a little more certainty about what happened over the last few months, which is this: some of the most famous comedians in the world overtly aligned themselves with fascism. Tony Hinchcliffe performed at a Nazi rally. Joe Rogan endorsed the candidate who said he’d be a dictator on day one and that he wanted generals like Hitler’s. Tim Dillon helped JD Vance pitch the mass deportations that will soon cause unspeakable horror across the country. Theo Von sat down for friendly chats with an insurrectionist and a guy who said Haitian immigrants are eating cats. Andrew Schulz gave Trump a space to soften his stance on abortion and lie about the 2020 election.
Comedy’s biggest names are fascists. There is no other art form and no other cultural industry you can say this about.
Simons’ piece ends with a simple, compelling proposal: “comedy is an industry, and industries can be organized. You cannot change the world, but you can change the spaces you work in and move through.”
I want to live in a world with more laughter and more jokes, but it’s going to take all of us to build something that is no longer a safe haven for bad actors, and that aspires to something more than recycling the same jokes and ideas.
