There’s an op-ed in the New York Times on Tuesday on the rise of right-wing comedy, and you won’t be surprised to learn that this is no laughing matter.
Left-of-center satire is becoming an endangered species, Times opinion columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom begins. Trevor Noah is retiring from “The Daily Show,” and James Corden is following his lead. Samantha Bee’s TBS program was canceled. Desus and Mero broke up. The late night shows, most of which have transformed into flaccid group-therapy sessions for anxious progressives, are struggling to retain viewers. And in their place, comedy with a distinctly right-wing flavor has become an emerging cultural and financial powerhouse. Humor that is utterly devoid of any social mission beyond its entertainment value is back in vogue.
The retreat of the left-wing comedy scene is a cultural phenomenon, McMillan Cottom observes. “Audiences have different orientations toward humor and political talk,” she writes. “Those orientations have some underlying psychological needs.” Indeed, much of mainstream center-left comedy predictably caters to those “psychological needs,” and predictability is the enemy of the joke.
As the late satirist P.J. O’Rourke told me in an interview for my book The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back Against Progressives’ War on Fun, the laugh is a product of “two planes of meaning at an unexpected angle”—emphasis on “unexpected.” But the extirpation of frisson from the equation is only part of the problem.
As the Ayatollah Khomeini famously said:
“Allah did not create man so that he could have fun. The aim of creation was for mankind to be put to the test through hardship and prayer. An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious.”
Just think of the left as a substitute religion, and their own fatwa on humor makes perfect sense.
