An excerpt fromThats Not Funny: How the Right Makes Comedy Work for Them.
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Humor seems to naturally veer to the left politically.
The people on the fringes mock and tease their oppressors because its often the only weapon theyve got.
Because theyve got all the power, right-wing things and right-wing individuals can be perceived as utterly humorless.
Theyre just not equipped.
But thats the view from the outside looking in.
It can be an opinion stated as a fact.
It can be a motion to dismiss.
Often, liberals use Thats not funny to express a bored disinterest in conservative attempts at humor.
This book will introduce a number of new, odd, and sometimes terrifying right-wing comedians doing reactionary jokes.
There is also, however, a blithe, dismissive way in which Thats not funny frames right-wing comedy.
And then there is, of course, the moral approach to Thats not funnying away right-wing comedy.
And its not much better at the surface level of the right-wing comedy world.
But closing our eyes doesnt make the monster go away.
Take Fox News Greg Gutfeld, for example.
It sounds, we admit, dismissible.
The shows ratings, however, tell a different story.
For people who disagree with Gutfeld politically, his jokes are not funny at all.
In fact, they should be taken quite seriously.
The comedy institutions we examine in this book are not forgettable footnotes regardless of their moral or aesthetic failings.
Greg Gutfeld dismisses racism and dabbles in sexism.
He celebrates the most egregious actions and uncouth sentiments uttered by the likes of Donald Trump.
And Gutfeld is one of the more innocuousones.
It gets worse, so much worse.
In fact, it may be all the more effective because it goes nearly unnoticed by the liberal world.
Right-wing comedy has reached a point of economic sustainability and significant influence.
Thats not funny is a perfectly fine way to express ones tastes and moral principles.
Its just not a very good political strategy.
This book warns readers not to bury their heads in the sand.
We confront right-wing comedy with two specific goals in mind.
The first goal is to avoid taking for granted the lefts significant recent advantage in the comedy arms race.
Such comedic efforts also inevitably, occasionally, invite criticism for being too incendiary or edgy.
The left must overcome the impulse to respond to conservative comedy by saying Thats not funny.
It is robust, growing, and profitable.
But ignoring the prevalence of right-wing comedy means more than just missing the conservative joke.
It also means overlooking the tools that conservatives use to reshape the cultural and political landscape in America.
Imagine entering a representation of the contemporary mediascape of the United States.
Hundreds of buildings dot the landscape, representing all your favorite content on a given night.
For much of the 20th century, the mediascape was less densely developed and chaotic than it is today.
There werent as many destinations then, and they were all on the same few major thoroughfares.
The map was not yet organized around specific demographics, identity groups, or political affiliations.
The classic data pipe era of American television from the 1950s to the 80s took a similar tack.
As the 21st century approached, the media map got messy.
Two trends, media convergence and audience siloing, motivated a whole new approach to developing media real estate.
With convergence, both creators and consumers stopped emphasizing traditional media content categories.
In the past,The Daily Shows Trevor Noah would have been just a TV star.
Media convergence coincided, perhaps ironically, with increasing divisions or siloing among media audiences.
The advent of digital media radically reduced the cost of construction for new media spaces.
Creators produced new content at an unprecedented rate.
Podcasts and YouTube channels further slice up audiences into razor-thin segments.
This politically motivated audience siloing is both economically useful and democratically problematic.
Smaller audiences, so that be attractive targets for advertisers, simply must become more ideologically and culturally homogeneous.
Liberal comedys version of this media structure has been going strong for decades.
Like the stores in the mixed-use complex, these shows are not owned by a single entity.
For years, right-wing comedy struggled to put together a coherent, profitable complex.
As noted above, the aesthetic subtleties of comedy and entertainment have proved challenging for the right.
And so, perhaps, are the media we discuss throughout this book.
This book is a tour of the right-wing comedy complex.
Like any good trip to a shopping center, it starts with a well-known big-box store.
In todays right-wing comedy complex, thats Fox News.
version of the news-satire website the Onion.
Our tour through the right-wing comedy complex will be, at times, disturbing.
Right-wing comedians normalize these virulent ideologies.
The goal of this book is not to convince you that right-wing comedy is funny.
Reproduced by permission of the University of California Press.
Copyright 2022
