Unfunny At Any Speed

Liberal comedians betray a tradition dating back to Aristophanes and choose to instead curry favor with their corporate owners

When I was a PhD candidate, I read and studied a lot of pornography and scatological comic political satire from the 17th and 18th centuries. Some English, but mostly French: Diderot, Abbé Prévost, Rétif de la Bretonne, Sade, Boyer d’Argens. Pornography was one of the earliest forms of modern novelistic discourse, and before it morphed into glossy skin mags and on-demand fetish sites, it was a genre responsible for groundbreaking formal inventiveness and known for producing some of the most challenging and subversive political and revolutionary commentary of the time. It was a primary means of resistance politics, appealing to the Philosophes as much as the layperson. Irreverent political satire, as I alluded to in the title, is a tradition as old as Aristophanes and a bulwark against the power of tyranny that can reach and move large masses of people across class and other demographic lines.

Or it used to be before American comedians decided to muzzle themselves and concentrate on ensuring a cozy future first and foremost, maybe a spot in the next tent-pole movie or an easy late-night gig. They are living, breathing examples of the kind of self-auditing and self-censorship described by philosopher Byung Chul-Han in The Burnout Society: the avatars of a cowed nation.

I saw a bit on YouTube last night, one of those pieces cobbled together by a comedy fan with a vlog who dreams of one day not having to hump it into an Amazon warehouse. So God Bless and Good Luck. He was doing a number on Jimmy Fallon, discussing how vapid and mediocre the corpsing king of SNL has turned out to be.

No arguments here. But he also talked about Fallon’s lack of political commentary. Pardon me for asking, but exactly which late-night hosts or TV sketch shows are doing political comedy of any value?

There’s rarely if ever any risk-taking or envelope-pushing in the midnight hour, and even John Oliver, the best of a sorry lot, is nothing more than a stenographer for the Democratic Party. As a friend put it, quite succinctly, Oliver, just like Colbert and Samantha Bee, never criticized Obama’s immigration raids, and during the Gazan Genocide, he stuck it hard to Netanyahu while ignoring the man who both funded the slaughter and had the power to stop it: Genocide Joseph Robinette, Jr. He said nothing of Hillary voting to build a wall in Mexico before Trump. He raked snake oil salesman Dr. Oz, another genocide denier/facilitator, over the coals for not acknowledging the Armenian atrocities while he ran cover for a president committing the same crimes, filling the dead spaces in between with lame Trump jokes.

Often the denial is funnier than the jokes themselves. Case in point, Bill Maher, who once endorsed Amy Klobuchar for president and now chides liberal Democrats for getting lost in identity politics. Maher is a liberal Democrat himself and a cable TV shill for corporate America, making it quite laughable, really, for him to call out a group of comfortable elitists when he is one of their own ilk. Plus, it’s about ten to twenty years too late for his “insight” about liberal identity politics.

If anyone has press copy or video footage of Oliver, Stewart, Colbert, Fallon, Sarah Silverman — who told a Democratic National Convention audience to shut up and vote for Hillary — or of any of the liberal stalwarts calling out Biden and the US for being complicit in and propagandizing the Israeli Genocide in Gaza, I have not seen it. And I have scoured the internet, so help me out and send me some footage if you can prove me wrong.

The most pathetic and revolting tale in this entire saga is that of Jon Stewart, who to tell the truth, has always been a shill for liberal establishment politics and has never acknowledged the graft, corruption, and warmongering in the Democratic Party. One night, a couple of years ago, he decided to go on Colbert and tell some truth about COVID, which no single liberal entertainment or news media personality would do at the time. Stewart stuck out his chin on the topic of the lab leak, and that shitbird Colbert immediately started to panic and chastise him, terrified that his big pharma patrons or intelligence pals would see it. It nearly ruined his former boss’s bit. It’s almost too painful to watch:

So afterward, Stewart dragged his ass off the show, and as an act of contrition, pinned a medal on a Nazi in Canada. I suppose that was his punishment from the billionaire corporatists and weapons dealers who run the Democratic Party.

Here’s a novel idea: Why don’t Stewart, Oliver, Bee, Cobert, Fallon, or any of these bland shills go on TV to do a hilarious bit about a chief-of-state with Alzheimer’s disease lying about beheaded Israeli babies: a heaping shit-slab of “malarky” utterly ignored by comic writers? This would have been infinitely funnier than any of the pathetic and predictable Trump parodies trotted out by a benzo-stoned Alec Baldwin, another liberal who is embarrassingly misinformed about politics. Now, I believe I have pretty good comic instincts and have even written comedy, but maybe I need schooling. If anyone can tell me what is clever or gut-busting about this, I would appreciate it. It’s like something from a mediocre network TV sitcom pilot that ended up on the editing room floor. I mean, where’s the genius and inventiveness that I am missing?

George Carlin would never have let an opportunity like Genocide Joe pass him by, and neither would the late, great Bill Hicks. Where are they? Where is our Richard Pryor, our Lenny Bruce?

Nowhere.

They are all part of a liberal Hollywood machine that pays lip service to identity politics while supporting an anti-working-class party committed to forever war. That is unless you’re talking about Jimmy Dore, who really doesn't do comedy any longer and invites Rob Schnieder on to his show to humiliate intelligent leftists (not “shitlibs”) who are making salient points. But that’s another unfolding tragedy.

So how did this happen?

Part of it is the fact that a handful of media conglomerates control the planet, and pissing them off seriously limits one’s chances of success. These corporate monoliths ensure the propagation of the dominant class narrative and instill in people what they want them to believe are “common sense” assumptions about the world, as Gramsci would put it: “Orange man bad, Democrats good” and “Capitalism = Democracy” and “Socialism = Totalitarianism” and “Maybe it’s bad, but it’s the best system we have.” When someone like Joe Rogan can do something that is NO different than what Oprah Winfrey and Phil Donahue did for DECADES and face massive blowback, then maybe there’s a problem with these corporate media forces and how they wield their power.

When I pointed this out to one liberal, her response — actually there were several people I know who responded this way — was “You take medical advice from Joe Rogan?”

Now that, my dear readership, is what I call funny, and like all unintentional humor, it’s the most delicious. They have this population so conditioned that most Americans are now unable to identify the main idea of a two-sentence paragraph. I’ll end with a movie pitch:

One sunny spring morning, Biden and Trump are partying together in a tricked-out vomitorium beneath the White House, some huge cement pit with a gaudy, Hearst Mansion type of vibe. Sean Combs and Kid Rock are there along with other faceless beltway lizards who’ll do as they’re instructed when it comes to managing the orphaned Turkish teenagers chained to the wall. Everyone’s doing amyl poppers and experiencing the joys of having the kids there for involuntary, on-the-spot blowjobs. Bon Jovi is blasting from the kitschy jukebox that looks like something you’d find in Bruce Willis's house or Planet Hollywood. Kid Rock, coke-stoned, mounts a marble table and starts doing Karaoke, living on a little prayer while AOC and Rashida Tlaib piss on him from the catwalk above, golden showers that seem to enflame his muses all the more. He tries to sing “Mustang Sally” but Combs calls him a cracker and the two exchange blows for a second before suddenly finding themselves staggered to see that Trump has a bigger shaft than anyone else at the party, more epic in girth alone than anything they’ve ever witnessed, and the ensuing shock sends ripples through spacetime, causing all other men on the planet to become sterile and leaving Trump alone to sire all future generations of mankind as he travels the galaxy in a phallus-shaped gold rocket.

So many comedy riches are being left unmined… But I’m busy now, off for a date with a binaural beat meditation that makes me feel just like a bratwurst in Betty Rubble’s bun.

By the way, I have copyright on this page, so I want a percentage if you run with my idea!