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Left-wing comedy, especially late-night shows, took another hit recently when Paramount’s CBS canceled the Late Show and its host Stephen Colbert, whose pathetic ratings were nowhere near worth the millions of dollars the show has been burning through for years. The Dems’ press-agent media, of course, have been parroting Colbert’s claim that Paramount is carrying water for President Trump, the prime target of Colbert’s juvenile, humorless insults.
In reality, the show had a staff of 200, cost $100 million annually to produce, and lost $40 million a year. You don’t have to be Adam Smith to figure out why the show was cancelled. Once again, terminal Trump Derangement Syndrome has added another lefty Democrat comic to its growing casualty list.
More important, however, is why lefty comics and leftists in general are so unfunny? The answer is suggested by my title. Readers of a certain age, i.e. old, may remember where it comes from. Back in the Sixties and Seventies, there was a popular gag called “lightbulb jokes,” based on the question, “How many [fill in ethnic group, sex, profession etc.] does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” The punchline was something humorous, insulting, and satiric.
The feminist version started circulating about the same time, just when equity feminism had shifted from a movement for equal opportunity and rights, to its current Nurse Ratched version––a humorless, bossy, whiny, arrogant, leftwing, alpha-male-hating iteration of identity politics based on perpetual grievance and victimhood marinated in aggressive ressentiment. The joke goes like this: “How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” The feminists’ punchline was always “That’s not funny!”
This tagline captures well the left’s humor deficit, which worsened with smug, self-righteous identity politics that flourished with “wokeism” and reflects the nature of Marxism––which is not just a political ideology, but a totalizing, deadly serious, messianic world view and way of life.
And, as the NYC candidate for mayor reminds us, Marxism today––no matter how disguised by euphemisms like “democratic socialism,” ––is still focused on Marx’s mission to overthrow capitalism and the whole liberal-democratic, Judeo-Christian civilization of the West. Communists believe they can replace it with a “communist heaven on earth,” a political order that provides the equality of results and “social justice” that capitalism and liberal democracy allegedly ignores or destroys.
Of course, we know from history that communism also relies on violence and “big lies,” reflecting its signature tactic “by any means necessary.” And like most totalitarian creeds, it deems humor a trivial, bourgeois false consciousness, which like religion or consumerism distracts from Marxism’s proselytizing––unless it is a tool of propaganda and a weapon to wield against political enemies. Even then, as we’ve been experiencing for a decade now, making people laugh is at best secondary to getting their attention and programming audiences with Marxist clichés.
In other words, like all authoritarian ideologies, Marxism is the enemy of freedom and hence an incubator of tyranny, especially dangerous for our right to free speech, which challenges the left’s authority. That’s why our “woke” useful idiots are so eager to censor political enemies and “cancel” their influence. As the philosopher Democritus said, “Freedom of speech is the sign of freedom.” And laughter is subversive and one of freedom’s greatest boons.
As such, humor is inherently political. Indeed, public comedy was created more than two millennia ago in Athens at about the same time as democratic political freedom and equality. Both political equality and freedom required empowering a wide diversity of citizens, no matter their low birth or lack of education. In order for the masses to participate in the public deliberations and offices that comprised governing, there had to be free speech for all citizens.
Without comedy’s power to publicly humiliate politicians, the social advantages and wealth of the elites would have used both as the instruments of tyranny. As Theseus in Euripides’ Suppliant Women responds to a Theban oligarch who mocks Athens’s democracy, “This is the call of freedom:/ ‘What man has good advice to give to the city, /And wished to make it know?’” This question was the formula that opened the Athenian Assembly.
Theatric comedy, then, developed at the same time as democracy, as a means of reinforcing political freedom, and holding politicians accountable for their actions. As a function of free speech, there were no limitations on plots or language, no standards of propriety, and no libel laws that could inhibit the playwright and violate his and the audience’s political equality. Nor did the politesse or high social status of the elite matter.
Indeed, politicians and other officials were frequent targets, and humiliated by name in front of thousands of their fellow citizens. Scatological jokes, a favorite of comedy then and now, reminded elites of their foundational, universal human nature with its passions and flaws. After all, humans are all alike in fundamental ways––eating, defecating, having sex, dying––and laughing, which is why they feature so frequently in ancient comedy, just as they still do today.
These were the common necessities that create the basis of human equality and identity, for no amount of status or wealth frees the rich and high-born from them. Comic humor reminded the overweening, self-important politicians and elite factions mocked on the stage, that they were still flawed humans and so should check their hubristic arrogance and greed for power and status.
Moreover, such brutal public humiliation was widespread in ancient comedy. Classicist K.J. Dover notes, “Of all the men whom we know from historical sources to have achieve political prominence at Athens during the period 445-385, there is not one who is not attacked and ridiculed either in the extant plays of Aristophanes or in the extant citations from the numerous lost plays of the period. . .” Nor were the gags and jokes just gentle joshing: “All these leading men, and many minor politicians besides, are uniformly treated by the comics as vain, greedy, dishonest and self-seeking; and . . . are represented also as ugly, diseased, prostituted perverts, the sons of whores by foreigners who bribed their way into citizenship.”
And, since the actors wore masks, the mask-makers could exaggerate, highlight or invent embarrassing facial features. When the actor playing Socrates, for example, in Aristophanes’ Clouds, first appeared on stage, the audience burst into wild laughter and applause at how skillfully the mask-maker had captured and caricatured Socrates’ famous ugliness. But ever the philosopher, Socrates rose from his seat and turned towards the spectators so they could better appreciate the mask-maker’s skill.
In our times as well, brutal humor is the sign of our political equality and freedom, which is why censoring “hate” speech as “violence” is so dangerous. My quarrel with the Dems’s comics is not their juvenile politicization, or assertion that their humor is based on facts rather than partisan talking-points, which are both protected by their First Amendment right to free speech.
What’s objectionable is their intolerant, imperious leftist ideology, which they support and advance in order to further corrupt the Constitution and Bill of Rights––the predicate for the tyranny that the Constitution was created to prevent.