The Death of Liberal Comedy

[American_Jihad]

I thought is was DOA...
The Death of Liberal Comedy
Laugh or you’re racist.
May 4, 2016
Daniel Greenfield

Larry Wilmore didn’t bomb at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. He wasn’t trying to be funny.

Comedians bomb when their jokes aren’t funny. But Larry Wilmore, Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, John Oliver and the rest of the gang in the post-comedy clown car aren’t comedians. They’re not here to entertain you. They’re here to scold you. If you’re a good progressive you’ll be allowed to laugh with them at an appropriate target like conservatives or your own white cis hetero privilege.

Not quite comedians, they’re a neological tragedy. Combine edutainment, infotainment and comedy and call it comedunfotainment. It’s not funny, educational or informational. But it tries to be all three at the same time. And, like Larry, it fails miserably.

But it’s also the only form of comedy allowed in campus safe spaces. It’s not controversial, except to the people who don’t matter. It’s also not funny, so it can’t be subversive of anything that matters.

It’s the perfect accompaniment to the final nerd prom of a disastrously progressive administration.

The sad trend got its start when the media decided that Jon Stewart’s snarky remarks about Bush represented the future of news. Today media snarkiness is ubiquitous. But Stewart didn’t bring down Bush. Instead he and his fellow media hipsters became the comedy palace guard for Obama.

And they stopped mattering.

Colbert is flailing badly on CBS. Stewart quit. His replacement has failed. There are a dozen contenders to be the Generation X class nerd awkwardly saying sarcastic things about Republicans on a cable show, (John Oliver is currently in the lead) but everyone in the media is already playing that game.

And the game stopped mattering once Obama won. Even Jon Stewart realized that. If there was ever anything “liberating” about a snarky cable pseudo-news show, it has long since become confining. With the last of the Generation X irony replaced by millennial conformity, all that’s left are topical references combined with identity politics pointing the way to politically safe targets to throw weak jokes at.

That’s what Larry Wilmore’s performance was. It wasn’t funny. It was politically safe. And that’s all progressive comedy can be. It’s every bit as liberating as a roast of the Politburo.

...

That joke is almost funny. But you have to be far enough inside, but outside the media to enjoy it. And the only ones who can really do that are in the White House.

The Death of Liberal Comedy

 

[BULLDOG]

I guess you could be right, but it's more likely that your sense of humor sucks. The president had funnier material, and it's always harder to follow a funnier act.

 

[The Great Goose]

Probably wont be allowed to laugh in Orwellia.

 

[American_Jihad]

Probably wont be allowed to laugh in Orwellia.

Nor Utopia...

 

[S.J.]

I didn't watch the jerk (either one of them) but from everything I heard, he wasn't funny. Liberals never ARE funny when they try to use politics in their jokes.

 

[Bob Blaylock]

I'm reminded of something I recently posted somewhere, perhaps on this forum, perhaps somewhere else. I'm not going to go looking for it right now.

I made reference to a TV sitcom from the 1990s, titled Dharma and Greg. It was about a marriage between a man from an extremely conservative family, and a woman from an extremely liberal family, and the clash between their families, and their ideologies. Of course, for comic effect, it played on extreme, exaggerated depictions of liberalism and conservatism.

What I recently observed is that the jabs that it took at liberalism, would no longer be funny today, because in the twenty odd years since that show was aired, liberalism has devolved into something far more bizarre and twisted than what, in the 1990s, was meant as a hyperbolic caricature of liberalism. Today's real-life liberalism truly comes across as an exaggerated parody of how liberalism was depicted and lampooned in Dharma and Greg.

How can you make jokes, and have them be funny, about something that has become far more bizarre than any jokes you can come up with about it?

 

[NoNukes]

I didn't watch the jerk (either one of them) but from everything I heard, he wasn't funny. Liberals never ARE funny when they try to use politics in their jokes.

Because they tell jokes that go over your head. They are not funny like Hee Haw was, are they?

 

[BULLDOG]

I'm reminded of something I recently posted somewhere, perhaps on this forum, perhaps somewhere else. I'm not going to go looking for it right now.

I made reference to a TV sitcom from the 1990s, titled Dharma and Greg. It was about a marriage between a man from an extremely conservative family, and a woman from an extremely liberal family, and the clash between their families, and their ideologies. Of course, for comic effect, it played on extreme, exaggerated depictions of liberalism and conservatism.

What I recently observed is that the jabs that it took at liberalism, would no longer be funny today, because in the twenty odd years since that show was aired, liberalism has devolved into something far more bizarre and twisted than what, in the 1990s, was meant as a hyperbolic caricature of liberalism. Today's real-life liberalism truly comes across as an exaggerated parody of how liberalism was depicted and lampooned in Dharma and Greg.

How can you make jokes, and have them be funny,about something that has become far more bizarre than any jokes you can come up with about it?

Lots of old shows aren't as funny they were when new. Try to watch an old Lucy rerun. That's the dumbest stuff ever, but it was great back then.

 

[S.J.]

I didn't watch the jerk (either one of them) but from everything I heard, he wasn't funny. Liberals never ARE funny when they try to use politics in their jokes.

Because they tell jokes that go over your head. They are not funny like Hee Haw was, are they?

A joke is only funny if it has an element of truth to it and liberals have never been truthful when it comes to politics. When they tell a political joke it doesn't come across as funny, it comes across as hateful. I don't expect you to understand this though, being that your shoe size is probably higher than your IQ.

 

[Bob Blaylock]

I'm reminded of something I recently posted somewhere, perhaps on this forum, perhaps somewhere else. I'm not going to go looking for it right now.

I made reference to a TV sitcom from the 1990s, titled Dharma and Greg. It was about a marriage between a man from an extremely conservative family, and a woman from an extremely liberal family, and the clash between their families, and their ideologies. Of course, for comic effect, it played on extreme, exaggerated depictions of liberalism and conservatism.

What I recently observed is that the jabs that it took at liberalism, would no longer be funny today, because in the twenty odd years since that show was aired, liberalism has devolved into something far more bizarre and twisted than what, in the 1990s, was meant as a hyperbolic caricature of liberalism. Today's real-life liberalism truly comes across as an exaggerated parody of how liberalism was depicted and lampooned in Dharma and Greg.

How can you make jokes, and have them be funny,about something that has become far more bizarre than any jokes you can come up with about it?

Lots of old shows aren't as funny they were when new. Try to watch an old Lucy rerun. That's the dumbest stuff ever, but it was great back then.

To some extent, that's probably true,but not for the reason that it is true here.

As is the usual method of creating such comedy, Dharma and Greg poked fun at liberalism by presenting us with a distorted, exaggerated caricature of it. (It did the same with conservatism as well.) Since then, real-life liberalism has literally turned into that exaggerated, twisted caricature of itself, and then gone well beyond it. Dharma and Greg's jokes about liberalism are no longer funny, because they are no longer based on an exaggerated version of what is now known as liberalism, but on what now seems to be a flattened-out, deflated version of it.

 

[BULLDOG]

I'm reminded of something I recently posted somewhere, perhaps on this forum, perhaps somewhere else. I'm not going to go looking for it right now.

I made reference to a TV sitcom from the 1990s, titled Dharma and Greg. It was about a marriage between a man from an extremely conservative family, and a woman from an extremely liberal family, and the clash between their families, and their ideologies. Of course, for comic effect, it played on extreme, exaggerated depictions of liberalism and conservatism.

What I recently observed is that the jabs that it took at liberalism, would no longer be funny today, because in the twenty odd years since that show was aired, liberalism has devolved into something far more bizarre and twisted than what, in the 1990s, was meant as a hyperbolic caricature of liberalism. Today's real-life liberalism truly comes across as an exaggerated parody of how liberalism was depicted and lampooned in Dharma and Greg.

How can you make jokes, and have them be funny,about something that has become far more bizarre than any jokes you can come up with about it?

Lots of old shows aren't as funny they were when new. Try to watch an old Lucy rerun. That's the dumbest stuff ever, but it was great back then.

To some extent, that's probably true,but not for the reason that it is true here.

As is the usual method of creating such comedy, Dharma and Greg poked fun at liberalism by presenting us with a distorted, exaggerated caricature of it. (It did the same with conservatism as well.) Since then, real-life liberalism has literally turned into that exaggerated, twisted caricature of itself, and then gone well beyond it. Dharma and Greg's jokes about liberalism are no longer funny, because they are no longer based on an exaggerated version of what is now known as liberalism, but on what now seems to be a flattened-out, deflated version of it.

So, it wasn't that funny to start with. Watch some Archie Bunker. Similar scenario, but you'll still laugh till you almost pee on yourself.

 

[The Great Goose]

Probably wont be allowed to laugh in Orwellia.

Nor Utopia...

 

[NoNukes]

I didn't watch the jerk (either one of them) but from everything I heard, he wasn't funny. Liberals never ARE funny when they try to use politics in their jokes.

Because they tell jokes that go over your head. They are not funny like Hee Haw was, are they?

A joke is only funny if it has an element of truth to it and liberals have never been truthful when it comes to politics. When they tell a political joke it doesn't come across as funny, it comes across as hateful. I don't expect you to understand this though, being that your shoe size is probably higher than your IQ.

How do you explain the fact that most of the most intelligent, funny comedians are liberals?

 

[S.J.]

I didn't watch the jerk (either one of them) but from everything I heard, he wasn't funny. Liberals never ARE funny when they try to use politics in their jokes.

Because they tell jokes that go over your head. They are not funny like Hee Haw was, are they?

A joke is only funny if it has an element of truth to it and liberals have never been truthful when it comes to politics. When they tell a political joke it doesn't come across as funny, it comes across as hateful. I don't expect you to understand this though, being that your shoe size is probably higher than your IQ.

How do you explain the fact that most of the most intelligent, funny comedians are liberals?

Intelligent? Sure, like this? Real funny stuff.

 

[American_Jihad]

I didn't watch the jerk (either one of them) but from everything I heard, he wasn't funny. Liberals never ARE funny when they try to use politics in their jokes.

Because they tell jokes that go over your head. They are not funny like Hee Haw was, are they?

A joke is only funny if it has an element of truth to it and liberals have never been truthful when it comes to politics. When they tell a political joke it doesn't come across as funny, it comes across as hateful. I don't expect you to understand this though, being that your shoe size is probably higher than your IQ.

How do you explain the fact that most of the most intelligent, funny comedians are liberals?

Intelligent? Sure, like this? Real funny stuff.

I heard she is totally out of control when drunk and on drugs, I guess she wanted to be a hard core democrat. Have you noticed those libtart beatchs all favor michelle obongo look...

And she got that look from mama & papa...

You can feel the love, rolmao...

 

[Moonglow]

No, I have better things to do with my time, like porn...

 

[NoNukes]

I didn't watch the jerk (either one of them) but from everything I heard, he wasn't funny. Liberals never ARE funny when they try to use politics in their jokes.

Because they tell jokes that go over your head. They are not funny like Hee Haw was, are they?

A joke is only funny if it has an element of truth to it and liberals have never been truthful when it comes to politics. When they tell a political joke it doesn't come across as funny, it comes across as hateful. I don't expect you to understand this though, being that your shoe size is probably higher than your IQ.

How do you explain the fact that most of the most intelligent, funny comedians are liberals?

Intelligent? Sure, like this? Real funny stuff.

You know what I mean, you are just too ignorant to admit it.