That's Not Funny
On owning the libs
Happy New Year! We’re happy you’re here.
Starting off the new year with a new interview. We spoke to Matt Sienkiewicz about political comedy — what’s funny and to whom?
We’ve also spent a lot of time over the past few weeks thinking about this piece from art critic Dean Kissick about a culture that is overdue for a change.
Matt asks why the left isn’t funny and why the cultural landmarks (SNL, The Daily Show, Colbert) that used to criticize, pressure, taunt, and ultimately create culture, are bordering on irrelevant. We don’t get into it so much below — but after thinking about Kissick’s argument and reading things this year like this on “The indomitable human spirit” from Dirt — maybe it’s that we just don’t find a hopeless pessimism so funny anymore. Maybe in 2023 optimism will be in.
This interview with Matt Sienkiewicz, Chair of the Boston College Communication Department and author of “That’s Not Funny” (which made Vulture’s Best Comedy Books of 2022 list), was conducted and condensed by Tatti Ribeiro for franknews.
What is right-wing comedy?
It's a great question. The first thing to say is that I'm not a political scientist, my coauthor and I are scholars of the media industry. To some extent, if somebody calls themself right-wing, we count them as right-wing. But we're really talking about sort of an industrial strategy, a group of products. There are some people who would not call themselves right-wing who we argue nonetheless sell their comedy wares in spaces targeted at conservative and right-wings’ media consumers. We argue that there's a bunch of comedians who don't agree on everything, they can be right-wing in different ways, but they sort of work together.
So who are we talking about? The biggest name on there is probably Greg Gutfeld. Greg Gutfeld is an interesting case. He's one of the people who convinced us that this is a book we should write because a lot of people that we talk to are people who don't watch Fox News that much and they have just never heard of Greg Gutfeld. To the shock of many, he and Colbert go back and forth as the highest-rated late-night comedy talk show. Those numbers aren't like what they were back in the Johnny Carson days, to be clear. TV's not what it was. But Gutfeld gets more viewers than The Daily Show. He gets more viewers than Jimmy Kimmel and more viewers than Jimmy Fallon almost every night. He is a Fox News personality doing a more or less classic-style late-night comedy talk show. So he's kind of the Target of right-wing comedy. He is the brand name, at least for people who consume right-wing media.
And then from there, we get more interesting characters like Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan is a complicated fellow when it comes to politics. The tagline we use in the book is Joe Rogan doesn't really have politics, he has demographics. He's into basically what younger guys are into, and that can mean he will endorse Bernie Sanders, and then after Sanders drops, he endorses Donald Trump. And now he's on the Ron DeSantis train. He's sort of politically all over the place, but a chunk of his audience and a big chunk of the comedians he brings in are very openly right-wing people, or at least people looking to own the libs through comedy. So he might be involved in multiple parts of the comedy world, including some aspects of the left, but he’s also a major figure in right-wing comedy world and perhaps the greatest creator of right-wing comedy celebrities.
We talk about the Babylon Bee, which is a sort of right-wing Christian satire site. It's sort of like The Onion, the owning the libs version of the Onion. We also talk about these troll-like figures. People like Michael Malice and Sam Hyde. We also talk about real extreme voices on the fascist end of the right spectrum where there's more comedy than you might expect, disgusting though it is.
To what end are you looking at this? What are your conclusions?
The first thing we're trying to do is encourage a generally critical look at this notion that comedy has inherent politics. We wanted to push back on what we call the "liberal psychological complex" – the idea that liberals like to close their eyes to and wish away comedy that doesn’t fit their politics–as it relates to comedy and push back on the idea that some people like comedy, and some people don't.
There is a lot of political chauvinism as it relates to comedy, and it's not helpful. It leads you towards strategies that don't make sense if you assume only some people are interested in laughter. That's a start. And we are academics. So part of what we're doing is pushing back on many years of books and articles where people have sort of focused only on liberal satire. The role of The Daily Show, Tina Fey as Sarah Palin, you hear it so much about this lane of comedy that you start to think that these are the people who do comedy. There's this whole other world you don't see. There's a tunnel vision that we think is intellectually wrong. So that is the first thing we sort of say -- look at this and see how that changes your understanding.
We also make arguments as to what the function is of right-wing comedy. One point we make is that, actually, the types of right-wing comedians I went through, they don't actually agree on all that much. You can find all sorts of fissures in this right-wing world. So the question becomes, what are the tools that these different right-wing spaces and people are using to join together and sort of put their differences aside and vote as a block and strategically operate? And we argue that comedy is one of the things that helps a right-wing coalition come together. Like, they don't talk about abortion, as the libertarian types and the Christian moralists have opposed view on that front, so they just make jokes about AOC. They find these things that they agree on, make comedy through those points, and create a coalition that's quite varied in terms of its position on some of their most substantial matters.
We don't think that's unique to the right, but we think they're doing a good job of it in the United States and using owning the libs through comedy as a point of connection, in order to create more strength than maybe their numbers would otherwise allow.
And there is a little bit of an undercurrent of that we feel that people on the left side of the spectrum have sort of felt very confident about owning comedy. That shouldn't be taken for granted if you are sort of strategizing on the left side of the spectrum.
From our perspective in writing this book, over-policing and sucking some of the joy out of comedy through being so worried about causing offense on the left, is maybe not a great idea and also gives an opening to the right side of the spectrum to be the place that is doing comedy is a more open and free-wheeling way. That doesn't mean encouraging liberal comedians to be intentionally offensive or anything like that. But, it shouldn't take for granted that the left is the more fun, open-minded side when it comes to this comedy. There are a lot of people who are attracted to places where they see the laughter in play -- that's where they wanna put their politics. The left should see they have got competition here.
Do you also look at how it's made the left less funny? I mean, Trump is doing Trump better than anyone on SNL is doing Trump. It's different from when Tina Fey was doing Sarah Palin – but I was wondering if you look at the space between those two.
No, that's right. That Trump is doing Trump better than Alec Baldwin doing Trump is definitely true. And it fits into what we were talking about before, Greg Gutfeld is enhancing and echoing Trump when he does a Trump bit.
SNL was offering these very repetitive, and sort of predictable parodies of Trump, which were satisfying to somebody who's already convinced, but probably no one else.
And then on the other side of things, you had Trump being Trump and Gutfeld sort of playing with it on Fox News to great effect. Gutfeld would do these bits where he would take Trump's most unhinged speeches and cut them up to make them even more unhinged in a way that turned them into crazy refrigerator poetry. Which is kind of fun and certainly unpredictable. He sort of leaned into the craziness of it.
And then also there is the self-seriousness on the left. I mean, the one example we draw on at the end of the book is Colbert literally crying when he talked about January 6th. I get that to some extent, but, like, it's not your job, man. We have plenty of people out here to cry and tell us how serious this is. Your job is to use incisive cutting wit to give us a different perspective on it. John Stewart right after 9/11 was a little weepy I suppose, but mostly he was just cutting at the Bush administration. I feel like the liberal world towards the end of the Trump administration didn't know when it was allowed to laugh but knew it could keep its slipping ratings stable by playing for sighs and sympathy as opposed to risking anything on jokes that may not land quite right.
Sure. The right is self-aware now and has fully accepted the joke, they’re too in on it for it to be funny as irony or parody. They're just like, yeah okay, we know.
Yeah. That's what Gutfeld does. He says, yeah we know he is nuts. This is a playground for us. Do you want to play?
Do you worry or care about who it pushes toward the right?
For sure. One of the things the right in America, and throughout a lot of the world, has done really effectively is position itself as countercultural over the last five or ten years. And you can sort of understand their argument, despite its dishonesty. A lot of their ideologies are decidedly hegemonic, but they've successfully sort of marketed themselves as fighting dominant liberal worldviews. Conservative commentators enact this strategy and try to position the right as the home for countercultural comedy. Ben Shapiro is not super funny, to be sure, but he's all in on the idea that the left is not funny. Lots of people are buying.
Whether or not it's true, is almost not important. The target here is really men — pre-politically formed men — and I think it's become sort of an accepted fact among these audiences that the left is where you can't joke and the right is where you can. That's not necessarily true, but if it's the way it's understood, that is very powerful.
We also argue that with this variety of right-wing comedy and the way that they connect through cross-promotion and through social media recommendations, you can enter into the right-wing comedy in one space and sort of end up anywhere. Nick Fuentes is all over the news lately, for example. We talk about Nick Fuentes in the last chapter of this book where he's doing holocaust denial comedy in the service of sort of this extreme, I mean, it's actually fascist, extreme anti-immigrant, extreme antisemitic, extreme racist, argument. But, his appeal from the start was that he was going to be funny about it. He wasn't gonna be an angry sort of the 1990s, mimeograph newsletter where this trash used to reside. He wants to connect himself to this world of supposedly countercultural right-wing comedy, where racial slurs and misogyny are supposed to be examples of ‘free speech’ and then turn it up a bit. So, we don't wanna say that you watch Greg Gutfeld, and all of a sudden you are in Mar a Lago with Nick Fuentes, but these spaces are more connected than you'd think. And at the very least, once you enter into these comedy spaces, you can end up in all kinds of spaces, and some of them are quite terrifying.
Is there any backpedaling on this? Or it's just over? How do you start to be like, oh, Chappelle, you can make that joke now.
Yeah. It's really tough. I think it all has to emerge somewhat organically. The answer to the question of why any of this happens is media structures. The center-left comedy world has these big defining institutions. SNL is probably the most famous, but there are also all the late-night shows. This used to be the place where the rules were made, and so the rules could actually change there somewhat effectively. If SNL made a concerted effort to say ok we're gonna start doing this, then that would become part of the popular comedy world. It's much more diffuse now. There's really no institution to say, okay, these jokes are now allowed. I mean, SNL can put Chappelle on, but it doesn't have this sort of shaking effect that it would've had in 1987. There's no one to appeal to say, okay, we have to start embracing this kind of comedy, there’s a mainstream market for it. The institutional powers just don't exist anymore.
That's a great point. Tonally, do you feel like there's a way to shift? I was thinking earlier about how Fetterman ran his campaign. He was clearly trying to position his opponent as a loser. Does that comedic take seem like a deviation for somebody who considers themselves a liberal?
Yeah. I think the take was that this was finally a Democratic campaign that is playing on the strengths of the media that people are actually influenced by. You can say it's not Trumpy, it's not Trumpy in the sense that it seems thoughtful, but it was Trumpy in the sense that if something is risible in your opponent, then you point to that thing and you mock it. You don't pretend to respect every part of your opponent if they shouldn't be respected. And I mean, maybe there's a loss there, but that ship has sailed. That's how these things are gonna operate until new media structures and new social mores emerge. When you make jokes, people are gonna interpret them all kinds of different ways. There is a tendency, I think, in center-left establishment spaces to worry about how every person might understand a joke and whether it might get taken the wrong way. I think Fetterman did not take that on. He made the joke and accepted the fact that some people aren't fully going to get, but the people who you really want to get it are going to get it in a sharp way. Taking the politics out of it, and just thinking about the comedy, I think he did represent something that was a long time coming.
I think too, sometimes it's the way that they treat the electorate. I feel like campaigns lack maturity. There is something mature about being like, we cannot respond seriously to this guy who's buying charcuterie from Wegmans. There is a level of adult awareness in saying that's absurd. This impulse to scold, to say “that’s so disrespectful”, is not reading the room.
I never heard it put that way, but I think you're right. Knowing when to take things seriously and when not to take them seriously is a very mature way of thinking. The default position of taking everything seriously in any context is inappropriate and actually somewhat childish. It reads, in some ways, as more intellectually sophisticated, to respond to the charcuterie board not with a price index chart, but with a joke. Sometimes when you argue with things you also give them credence they don't deserve.
What are you looking at next? What has your focus shifted to – perhaps as an extension of this book?
Two things come to mind and I think we've touched on both of them.
We talked about Fuentes and one is this role of antisemitism, which is something we talk about extensively at the end of the book. There is this whole world of Holocaust denial comedy. And these people will tell you that their goal is to turn Hitler into a meme or turn Nazis into something that's sort of so crazy that it happened that its sort of funny. And then you watch this last month and a half of popular culture, and Nick Fuentes really emerged into the mainstream. I don't know what to say about Kanye exactly, but there's an intersection here of turning something like the Holocaust and traditional forms of antisemitism into sort of points of debate in entertainment spaces.
The other thing we have been thinking about is how we get these extreme kinds of political spaces because of all the feedback people in the media get. For a long time, you never knew exactly what your audience wanted and that was considered a flaw. But it used to force people to really think creatively about their audiences, especially in comedy. You didn't know exactly who was watching and who might stumble upon it and who might get interested. Some might say that that sort of created a kind of bland synthetism, which could be true, but it also made you sort of think about how different people could deal with this comedy.
People now have these very limited audiences where they get immediate feedback. The tweets hit them right away. Their metrics are immediately accessible. How does that drive people into certain creative choices that have their own problems?
I spent a lot of time in the last two years with the Lincoln Project…
Oh wow. Interesting. They have some funny stuff too, alongside all the grifting.
They have their moments. They're afraid of no one and they have no candidate, which helps.
But you know, watching how they interact with the media generally was crazy. These guys are on the news every night. Why is MSNBC putting them on the news literally every night? What does she get out of that? The projection that she is unbiased? They just raise more money.
Yeah, incredible amounts of money. I always sort of read it as a way to claim that you're not super strictly partisan on the left. Like, look, some of my best friends are Republicans. It's a weird dynamic for sure.
All it takes is them saying, “No, totally, I am responsible for Sarah Palin and I don't know what else you want me to do. I'm here now.” Immediately it's like, okay! Thank you so much for joining us! I was always surprised how fast tensions diffused.
It points to a broader dynamic. We'll see if Trump really does fade away, but if he does, one of the effects likely will be making Ron DeSantis look pretty conventional. That is big. One of the more inevitable consequences of Trump is this reframing of people who liberals used to have real problems with and making them seem more palatable. If DeSantis is able to paint himself as a moderate, that reflects nothing but the moment we are in.
Is DeSantis funny?
That's a really good question. He has a certain trollish quality. It wasn't a knee slapper, but the prankishness with which he flew the migrants to Martha's Vineyard, and the choice of Martha's Vineyard, speaks to a certain kind of comedic thinking, right? Like the fish out of water shows up on Martha's Vineyard — that's very sitcom.
Previously, similar things have been tried in big cities, but there's something about sending them to Martha's Vineyard that actually reminds me of Greg Gutfeld. Gutfeld got his start as a gorilla prankster in New York -- he would show up at places like conferences and break all the norms and it got him the attention that led to his comedy career.
And if you remember DeSantis had an ad where he was reading the Art of the Deal to his kids. I mean, that's not a serious thing to do. There is an irony there. I don't know if he's funny, but he's trying to brand himself as freewheeling and not so serious and making choices that create sort of that persona.
It's very own the libs – I get what he's going for. His comms team is really wild on Twitter. When I think about Trump, what he's so successful at is being petty. Pettiness I think can be really funny whereas real anger reads less funny.
That's what the right has learned to do. The traditional tagline is that the left does irony and the right does anger. I think in this case it's really tough because DeSantis' idea is to somehow be both Trump and an early-aughts Bush kind of Republican.
He can't decide.
Right. I mean there is such a contradiction inside of it, but this speaks to this bigger media question. On the one hand, you think he has to pick a lane, but on the other hand, you can now bifurcate your media appeal in a way that you could never before. He can be a prankster on Joe Rogan and a responsible Republican on the National Review podcast because maybe those audiences don't cross. Also, hypocrisy seems to be less of a problem than ever.
You used to have to pick that one ad that was gonna be the big ad that you ran in a region. You don't have to do that anymore. So, I don't know.
I'm so curious about how he seeps into America. I mean, Florida is not America, so there's that.
As the last election showed, I mean, we are really in a different place.