For most people, humor and comedy are meant to provoke smiles and laughter. According to Salon writer Scott Eric Kaufman, however, conservatives aren’t like most people, since “their version of comedy isn’t intended to be funny, it’s just meant to be mean.” It enables them, he alleged in a Wednesday article, to conceal their “awful thoughts” in supposed jokes.
Kaufman claimed that right-wingers’ deep pessimism precludes a sense of humor: “The situation they believe themselves to be in is perpetually dire…All they see are enemies who need notches whipped into them. They possess, in short, the mindset of an embattled bully being forced to live in a world in which the meek are rising against him en masse, and so they react as any cornered animal of meager intelligence would — they lash out.”
From Kaufman’s piece (bolding added):
Wednesday’s “Fox & Friends” featured the show’s hosts having a conversation with Colin Quinn about Jerry Seinfeld’s recent complaint that political correctness has ruined comedy. Elisabeth Hasselbeck, in particular, didn’t seem to know what comedy even was, asking questions of the sort one would expect from an alien anthropologist who barely passed her required “Human Culture” courses…
That’s because for conservatives like her and her co-hosts, Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade, a “sense of humor” isn’t about what’s actually funny, but about what awful thoughts they possess that comedy would provide them the “freedom” to express aloud without facing public opprobrium.
When Kilmeade points out that in Quinn’s new book…the comedian talks “about growing up with Italians, Jews, Koreans, and Chinese,” [Kilmeade is] positively radiating jealousy…[He] is enraptured by the very thought of making jokes at the expense of Italians, Jews, Koreans, and Chinese.
It was a disgusting scene, and clearly one Quinn wanted no part of, but it does answer the question of why conservatives haven’t found their own equivalent of Jon Stewart or John Oliver — or why the comedians who convert to conservative ideology, like Dennis Miller, aren’t funny anymore — and it’s that their version of comedy isn’t intended to be funny, it’s just meant to be mean.
At least among Fox News aficionados, because in the real world, it’s quite different. The single funniest human being I’ve ever met is a distant uncle-in-law who’s also a pastor in rural Mississippi, so liberal he is not. But sit him at a kitchen table and let him observe the world around him and breathing will quickly become an issue. His comedy is situational and observational in the best sense, which points to the problem with Fox News-watching conservatives: the situation they believe themselves to be in is perpetually dire, always on the verge of cultural and moral collapse, so when they observe the world around them, all they see are enemies who need notches whipped into them.
They possess, in short, the mindset of an embattled bully being forced to live in a world in which the meek are rising against him en masse, and so they react as any cornered animal of meager intelligence would — they lash out.
