First, Kill All the Comedians

Remember the old meme (based, if I remember right, on an exchange between two characters in Shakespeare's otherwise-forgettable Henry VI cycle) that, when the revolution comes, the first task will be to kill all the lawyers? I think a better idea would be to kill all the comedians.

Comedy is the perfect profession for modern liberal materialists and atheists who make an ideology and a movement out of taking nothing seriously. Unsurprisingly, nearly all stand-up comics nowadays are either hardcore liberals or entirely apolitical*, and are almost universally venomous, hateful, ignorant dicks. What better way to smash tradition, civilizational order, basic decency, respect for elders and the dead, etc., than to subject the people who represent and defend them to ruthless, withering, and usually grossly unfair (often baseless) mockery?

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that comedy is the primary method of advancing the left's reductionist agenda. Want to shock people out of their respect for the dead? Burst into hysterical laughter at a funeral. Want to generate rebellion against the Church? Stage a fake news interview with an actor pretending to be a priest. In general, want to attack and destroy people's reverence for the order of being? Declare that nothing means anything -- then heap ridicule on all who beg to differ.

They are also one of the most highly-visible symptoms of the constant modern push for novelty. Remember that joke "The Aristocrats"? Or the documentary version made of it, in which high-profile comedians were invited to tell their own renderings of the joke? Most of them were simply brutish and vulgar, reeling off long chains of obscenity and profanity, which quickly became as funny as... well, as any of them normally are, really. (Sarah Silverman probably won when she deadpanned into the camera, after a long and awkward silence: "Joe Franklin raped me.")

The hypocrisy of the comedian is what is most galling. Just as surely as the leftist will never question the authority of the authority who commands him to question authority, so too will the comedian never permit his own mockery to be turned against him. Witness the treatment of any heckler at any comedy show. Some, like Jimmy Carr (who, I'm fairly sure, stages them), handle it with composure; most, like Michael Richardson, simply degenerate into insane, vulgar, arm-flailing rage. Jerry Seinfeld lampooned comedians' over-the-top response to heckling on his own show; after he's heckled by his neighbor's girlfriend at one of his own shows, he loses his mind and storms into her office to heckle her. (She runs outside crying and is promptly hit by a street-sweeper).

Where will the stand-up business be when there are no sensibilities left to offend and no taboos left to transgress? Most jokes rely on the perception of incongruence; for an ideology formally dedicated to the belief that there's nothing so absurd it can't be embraced, subsidized, and ultimately mandated, those jokes will quick fall by the wayside. Mockery and criticism will be all that's left. The leftist dystopia of the near-future, then, will have two options. It can co-opt the comics and turn them into its Two Minutes' Hate squad. Or it can simply kill them.

Conversely, if they want to keep along the progressive-novelty-of-shock shtick, I think the only thing left soon will be suicide-comedy. It's a sad day when the only thing the next 20 years has to offer anyone is the sight of Eddie Izzard slicing off his own fingers for laughs.

*There are, of course, "rightish" comedians. They are generally amateurs and usually so painfully unfunny that I hesitate to classify them even as comedians.

Comments

[bgc]

I know what you mean - I was thinking just the other day how I find Monty Python almost unwatchable these days, for the same reason.

But then actors in general are among the most Leftist of people. I remember being sickened by going to see the Royal Shakespeare Company during the Margaret Thatcher era, and one of the actors came out in front of the curtains before the play (Twelfth Night) to treat the audience to a party political speech complaining about the 'cuts' in funding the RSC were threatened with.

We had paid to see Shakespeare, and that was how we were treated.

Even though I was, at that time, strongly against Mrs Thatcher, it still got me mad - because it revealed such a spoiled-child sense of *entitlement*.

I suspect that showbiz people, like most high brows and intellectuals, always fawn to their paymasters/ regulators - and since that is now the State, and the state is The Left - they are all Lefties. In the old days, they would have fawned to the court and aristocracy.

Academics are just the same or worse. When the state pays for education they are on the Left - when education is paid for by the (mostly) rich then they are conservatives - if education is paid for by the Church, then academics are loyal/ fanatical Churchmen.

[Kristor]

"Where will the stand-up business be when there are no sensibilities left to offend and no taboos left to transgress?"

Speaking of which, has anyone else noticed that there haven't been any new jokes in about 2 years, or is that just me? Have we perhaps reached the bottom of the barrel? If so, would that be a perversely hopeful portent?

[HenryOrientJnr]

While I agree that many comedians are on the left and their "comedy" consists entirely of boring, PC put-downs of conservative values, I do not think a wholesale condemnation of humour is appropriate. Humour is a double-edged sword that can be used by either side. Mark Steyn does it brilliantly. We need more like him.

[Rusty]

A jewish comedian was on the radio a couple of years ago saying that it was getting hard to satirize much of American life anymore. Nothing is sacred in the public space except destroying sacred things.

The public is dumber and less cultured than ever before. Little gets a laugh other than bathroom humor; the public doesn't understand much more than that anyway. Take the old Saturday Night Live and Monty Python humor, for example. As juvenile as it was, it worked because the underlying themes were about important, beautiful, complex things. What can we talk about now? It's Idiocracy everywhere already. Fortunately, I can tune it all out now, but for how much longer?

[Joel Raupe]

Buster Keaton is enjoying a revival in our house. Tonight we've been watching TCM, enjoying a full-scale Chaplin festival. We're all wide awake and sober though we had to stay up long past curfew to watch this delightful spectacle. It may be precisely because we're having so much fun that TCM felt compelled to show these exceptionally well-restored films so late at night. We're having too much fun.

[Alex]

Liberal jews write everything in Hollywood, films, TV, and control many news outlets. Their job is to bring down organized Christian culture, ridicule it out of existence. Black comics and now mexicans, lesbians, are allowed by the liberal jews to say anything as long as it denigrates white christian culture. Open your eyes.

[imnobody]

comedy is the primary method of advancing the left's reductionist agenda.

No, the primary method is movies and TV series. The second method is humor. The third method is the rest of mass media. The fourth method is books and the fifth academia (but this is the more important because everything else stems from the ideas created in academia).

[Anymouse]

Academia is important, because Americans are so exposed to it.

[Bill]

Wait, are you saying that stand-up still exists?

[Steve Nicoloso]

"Where will the stand-up business be when there are no sensibilities left to offend and no taboos left to transgress?"

They will turn their attentions upon the regnant zeitgeist... lampooning political correctness is already a common trope in comedy. When scoffers turn their scoffing upon Scoffing, it is in a very real sense, a step in the right direction. Only the Court Jester can directly criticize the King.

[Ro Gal]

I started with 3 stooges, went on to Mad Magazine, then some SCTV followed by Saturday Night Live. Pause for...marriage,job and kids. Resume...In living color, Mad TV, Seinfeld, etc...Great stuff huh? So how the heck do folks like Rosie O Donnell, Whoopie Goldberg, and Bill Mahr fall under the guise of comedy? They're the John Wilkes Booth of President Comedy.

[christian comic]

I couldn't stop laughing to the post title. I love comedians! I think as a profession it's quite cool if you get regular gigs. Everyone loves a laugh.