Funny and Conservative/Liberal? I don't know...

Why aren’t conservatives funny?

The easy answer to this question is that they are not funny as a matter of taste.  You don’t agree with them and therefore they are humorless wretches who spread vitriol and kill house pets for their own sick, twisted amusement.

That is the easy answer.  It is the one that let’s you ignore things as they are and go on about your life without batting an eye.  But, it also suggests that there are people—and there are people—who think conservatives are funny (and not just hair-brained liberals that look down on “normal folk” from their positions of moral and intellectual superiority) for exactly the same reason.

Besides, there have been occasions when conservatives are funny. Dennis Miller is a conservative leaning comedian (and that’s not an oxymoron). Ronald Reagan had a very sharp wit and used it with regularity on the campaign trail—just ask Walter Mondale. 

Even a show like South Park has been known to draw its comedy from the well of conservative (if not hyper-conservative) impulses.

This is the trouble with trying to understand political humor. Eventually, it all boils down to the idea that if you agree with the joke then the comic is funny and if you don’t then they should rot in hell with Hitler, Ann Coulter, and Richard Nixon—or Hitler, Al Franken and Bill Clinton.  And whether or not I find the joke funny doesn’t make it not a joke, it doesn’t make it any less humorous for the people that find it funny in the first place. In fact, it may even make it funnier for them because they can cobble together some sense of superiority over me because I don’t “get it.”

So why ask the question in the first place?

Because this is my blog and I can do as I please thank you.

But I digress. On more than one occasion, I’ve made the argument that conservatives make ‘serious’ arguments and liberals make jokes in response (this conclusion also appears in some form in the dissertation written by Christopher Allen Medjesky… esquire), but recently I came into another argument that suggests an alternative way of thinking about humor: joke wars.

Joseph Boskin appeals to the idea of joke wars with some regularity in his book Rebellious Laughter and I think it’s useful here. Rather than picturing humor as a guerrilla tactic employed by jesters from the safety of their comic distance, the joke war understands that humor is ever present and constantly circulated and re-circulated. What joke wars allow us to see is the strategic choices made by each side in terms of what they target, what they support, and why they support it.

In light of the tragic events at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the following examples seem to have made their way into our culture’s humor as a kind of emerging joke war about gun-control.

On the pro-gun-control side of things we tend to see images of two things: Reagan and muskets.

On the anti-gun-control side of the joke war, things aren't quite as simple. Though, it seems that the general modus operandi tends to be an appeal to historic patriotism (particularly in terms of the revolution) or fear (most notably the tried and true Obama is Hitler/Stalin/Mao/Che/etc.).

  

Like it or not, each of these examples is funny. Maybe not to you, but they are funny to someone.  What I find so interesting about these particular jokes is that the teller points to a truth that orients her or his humor. Because the funniest jokes are the ones that contain at least a modicum of truth and tend to work as reductions toward that truth, looking to joke wars might be especially useful in determining the specific points of antagonism between opposing sides.

That said, given the examples above, joke wars also have a nasty little habit of sliding towards caricaturing the opposition rather than engaging them. Jokes tell us something about who the teller assumes her or his opponent to be.  In each case, they joke is told by someone who assumes a position of intellectual superiority to the opposition. The image of the latte-sipping, sandal-wearing, pony-tailed liberal, for example, distorts the opposition in ways that discourage engagement with the issues in much the same way as the depiction of gun advocates as hyper masculine, bullet clad, all-things-Obama-hating rednecks.  This tendency, to reduce the opponent to absurdity, may be humor's darkest because it undermines democratic contest in favor of a kind of populist anti-consensus where we may not agree on any argumentative premises, but we agree on an enemy. 

Returning to my question from the beginning of this entry I will leave with a few thoughts and questions to ponder.  The question is not "are conservatives (or liberals) funny," but how are they funny, why are they funny and who finds them funny?  My fear is that people on either side of the political divide are less interested in considering these questions and prefer instead to see their opponents as humorless Hitlerites that hate freedom.  My fear is that our willingness to give in to the easy answer about our divergent senses of humor will result in an unwillingness engage each other in the undeniably difficult work of democracy.