Humor on the Right

Adam Kotsko has an interesting blog post on the asymmetry of parody on the left and right. He argues that "though a liberal can assume the voice of a conservative to produce comedic effects, this process cannot simply be reversed. Where the liberal parody consists of an exaggeration of what conservatives actually do say, the conservative parody of liberals consists in 'exposing' what the liberals don't say."

At the risk of quoting too much of his post, here's the thrust of his point:

I think immediately of Rush Limbaugh's anti-liberal gags. In one memorable case in the early 1990s, he had Clinton sing a song about how he had pulled the wool over the nation's eyes, but now that he was elected, he was free to implement his radical agenda of raising taxes through the roof. Comedy gold, to be sure -- but there is an inner necessity to this procedure. It's not simply that there are no generic features of liberals to mock: the instinctive fake "balance" between two sides, for instance. The problem is that none of this would register as funny, nor would it undermine liberalism; instead, the conservative parodist would simply end up associating liberals with qualities that the public at large values (moderation, fairness, etc.). The only possible route is to reveal the "hidden truth" of liberalism, normally by completely omitting any reference to the liberals' surface-level moderation -- indeed, their continual attempts to distance themselves from any part of the supposed "hidden truth."

The liberal parodist, by contrast, has no need to project content onto the conservative. Whatever "hidden" content there may be is "hidden" in plain sight. Only a minor twist is needed to make a statement ridiculous, and sometimes not even that. This is because within the liberal frame, the conservative is already a parody of himself -- so strictly speaking, Stephen Colbert is not "parodying" Bill O'Reilly; he is simply imitating O'Reilly's parody of himself.

What is this content, though? At the end of the day, it's a (usually hallucinated) set of "traditional" or "substantial" ties -- family, race, country. Such things appear ridiculous to the liberal. On the other side, from the perspective of the conservative, the very "cosmopolitanism" of the liberals -- their lack of substantial content -- already is an active assualt on that traditional substance.

The hyperbolic claims of liberals "hating America" and wanting to "destroy the family" thus are not, strictly speaking, conscious lies -- from the conservative standpoint, liberal moderation and open-mindedness already takes up a side in the struggle to defend "traditional values." The center is the radical left, the element introducing a conflict into a previously homogeneous social substance. Thus on the formal level, the very fact that there are "culture wars" indicates that the liberals have won -- the idea of gay marriage as a live possibility that must be fought already disrupts the fantasy of an immutable "traditional" meaning of marriage. Even if the end result is to outlaw gay marriage, the very act of treating it as a potentially open question already cedes the crucial ground.

It's an interesting dynamic, and one I've thought a great deal about, myself. You simply don't find satire that cuts in the other direction very often, if at all. While I'm not convinced that O'Reilly is "a parody of himself" (nor even sure what that means, nor how the theoretical line between self and self-parody is crossed). The entire gist of right-wing humor is based on a single, catch-all "joke"--in essence, if you're a liberal then anything you do makes you an unpatriotic, ant-government, anti-Christian, hypocritical elitist with socialist leanings.

To demonstrate, here's an e Right Wing News satirical interview with Bono:

John Hawkins: [What] inspired you to start fighting poverty regularly?

Bono:... Edge and I had a couple of prostitutes up to our hotel rooms. This one looked at me and went "You're the guy who wants to fight poverty right? That's so sweet, I'm going to give you the f*** of your life." That was when I knew I was on to something. So from then on out I started talking about global poverty at all my concerts.

John Hawkins: So a HOOKER got you started talking about poverty?

Bono: That and a vision from God.

John Hawkins: Woah?!? A vision from God?!?

Bono: Yes. Strangely enough God spoke to me right after Edge and I drank 3 bottles of whiskey each. That night God told me "fight for the poor people in Africa. In Zimbabwe, Nigeria, New Zealand, South Africa, Brazil or wherever it was in Africa that those poor people didn't have the money to buy our records. He also told me to nail all the furniture in the hotel room to the ceiling which I did as well with Edge's help. That hotel bill cost me over $4000 but what can you do when God gets involved you know?

John Hawkins: Right, I suppose so. Well how did you get involved with world leaders like Kofi Annan and Jessie Helms?

Bono: Well that Kofi Annan is a funny story. I'm talking about these poor people at my concerts and one day I get this call. Edge picks up the phone and yells over to me

"It's Kofi Annan on the phone for you."

I was like "who the Hell is that? Is that the guy that drives the tour bus?"

Then Edge tells me "No, he runs the UN."

So of course, I have no idea what the "UN" is. I'm thinking he's left some letters off or something but eventually I talk to him and he explains that he means the "United Nations." At first I thought the "United Nations" was like a subsidiary of RCA or Geffen records but he explained a little more about it and invited me to do a speech in front of the whole UN about poverty.

John Hawkins: Wow, not many people get that type of opportunity.

Bono: You're right but one problem. I didn't know anything about poverty at the time, heck I still don't. So I had no idea what to talk about. But Edge came to the rescue. He just copied a lot of terms out of an old economics textbook and told me to mix it in with our song lyrics and no one would know the difference. He was right too. I think it's because most of the people at the UN don't speak English….

And, if such "humor" isn't enough, the right-winger can always fall back on fart jokes. Here's a bit of Fox's "1/2 Hour News Hour":