GUERRILLA COMEDY: The fight totalitarians can never win.

You could say that comedy today is effectively dead, or at the very least it is on life support. The notion of being “canceled” appeared around the same time as the emergence of the #MeToo movement. Strictly speaking, getting “canceled” is something that happens to you—it is not something you are. But those who accept the terms of their cancellation, or allow the fear of it to chill their speech, are effectively internalizing the regime’s censorship: put bluntly, they are letting the bad guys win. Whether the person getting censored is truthful or not, vulgar or polite, is beside the point. What’s important is that they have said something which somehow threatens or challenges state-approved ideology.

That is why true comedians are often targets of authoritarian regimes. Plenty of entertainers masquerade as comedians, but in reality they are doing something like anti-comedy—not subverting but reinforcing dominant modes of thought. Their jokes suck the air out of the room just insofar as they are constructed to disallow criticism of preferred targets. (Ever since Barack Obama was elected president, this has been the state of basically all mainstream late-night shows, SNL sketches, and awards-show monologues—with a few notable exceptions.)

If you pay close attention to the so-called “woke comedians,” you will find that their routines boil down to using mockery as a strategy for reinforcing a list of leftist ideological points, and forbidding a list of disfavored right-wing thoughts (for instance, making opposition to abortion and transgender extremism seem ridiculous). The jokes are rarely smart or incisive, and have instead the character of schoolyard taunts: they are social cues for distinguishing the ingroup from the outgroup. Regime-reinforcement “comedy” says: “you had better find the following viewpoints ridiculous, or else you are anathema.”

Are there people who laugh at such humorless humor? Sure, just as there are bullies who enjoy mockery of others in order to elevate themselves. Fake comedians perpetuate this propaganda because they too are weak, and generally do not understand their targets. Think of leftists making fun of conservatives. Very rarely do they know their subject well, and thus, the comedy act has nowhere else to go but to retreat into full-blown mockery. What is lacking is intelligence, and a clear sight of human absurdity in the everyday.

Earlier: Destroying Comedy: David Zucker, the co-writer and director of a little-known and rarely watched comedy film called Airplane! on the state of comedy today, and those who are attempting to eliminate it.