Humor has a liberal bias.
I’m willing to bet the majority of The Daily Shows audience didn’t vote for McCain and he uses little profanity and stays away from provocative religious insults.
Conservatives don’t appear to have an equivalent, which is surprising to me taken that our Presidential races are so often so close.
So I’m done with you.
Isn’t a sense of humor necessary to appreciate comedy? Why target a group of people who don’t possess a sense of humor?
[QUOTE=Sitnam]
So I’m done with you.
[/QUOTE]
Yes, that follows so well with the rest of what you were saying there. There is no conservative equivalent to the Daily Show, so you are done with me. Q.E.D. 
-XT
Do writers count? P.J. O’Rourke is pretty funny (as is Christopher Buckley, although I’m not sure he really identifies as conservative these days).
It’s not easy to find people funny when they are laughing at you. Therefore liberals are not going to find conservative comedians funny, and vice versa.
And therefore the SDMB, which is skewed pretty heavily left, is going to believe that there are no funny comedians on the right.
Regards,
Shodan
So, who are they?
John Edward and Miss Cleo, apparently.
I’d actually argue that at one time, Rush Limbaugh was an excellent satirist. He’s gotten increasingly bad as he’s gotten increasingly popular and thus increasingly taking himself seriously. But a lot of his rise to fame was through doing pretty good mockery.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone are pretty explicitly libertarian. I’d also throw Phil Hendrie out there, for those who know who he is.
But I’d agree with RickJay – most good comedy is anti-authority and willing to mock anyone. Anytime a comedian commits himself to a ideological or partisan line, he’s setting a ceiling on the funny.
Agreed. And I have yet to meet a solid conservative who could poke fun at his or her own ideology. There are plenty of lefties who can’t take a joke either, but on the whole liberals do tend to be more open to examination. And of course moderates/independents/disaffecteds are more than happy to mock any and all sides that deserve it.
Jon Stewart is still funny when making fun of Democrats. It is painful, sometimes, because he is often right, but still funny.
P.J.s first few books were very funny, but lately he has gotten very into himself. He is terrible on Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me - not very fast and not very clever.
Comedians have to be comedians first and political commentators second. Liberals appear to be able to take liberal comedians making fun of them far better than conservatives take conservative comedians making fun of them. Look at Mallard Fillmore. 8 years of hilarious George Bush antics, and the only time the strip satirized Bush even slightly was when he had the nerve to come out for immigration reform. Doonesbury has no problem making fun of liberal presidents. Any conservative comedian not doing at least one Palin joke is an ideologue, not a humorist.
It wasn’t always like this. I subscribed to National Review in the late '60s early '70s and they had lots of pretty good political humor.
Nobody’s going to question this?
Well, I admit I haven’t watched it lately, but I recall a few episodes in which Hank is baffled by some new-agey character or premise… made uncomfortable by a female minister, or something…
Well for one thing, I don’t think that the conservative mentality and most types of humor mix very well. Someone capable of not taking things seriously probably wouldn’t be a conservative in the first place.
And I expect most of what actually passes for conservative humor is deeply bigoted and generally juvenile, and not the sort of thing they want to expose for public consumption. Remember “Barney Fag” and “Ellen Degenerate”? Bigoted, and something out of grade school. And there’s all the race based “humor” aimed at Obama, like the White House with a field of watermelons, or portraying Michelle Obama as a monkey. Conservative humor is going to be mean and bigoted because they themselves are mean and bigoted. Lots of nasty race and sex jokes.
This is the important thing to take away from this discussion. Everything else is a side issue.
It’s the inverse of why the left hasn’t produced their own version of Limbaugh despite seemingly endless attempts (Mario Cuomo, for heaven’s sake!).
It doesn’t show that one side or the other is superior but rather that those who lean one way or the other respond to different inputs. The right has a near monopoly on outrage-oriented radio (and to some extent television) and the left has satire and humor. It’s the way the market works.
Hell, look at how painful Mallard Fillmore is. Ugh.
While not really a comedian, I find Andrew Klavan to quite funny.
I don’t question that Carlin was liberal but he’d happily attack anyone and anything (and with awesome skill, might I add.)
Well, I think there’s two parts to the answer.
Number one is that there are a LOT of comics and very little room for them. Early on in your career, whether or not you get the precious, precious stage time you need to learn the craft has very little to do with how funny you are and a lot to do with how good you are at making connections and sucking up to venue owners, comedy room organizers, and the like. There’s a lot to be lost in pissing off people in the entertainment industry and the people IN the industry have far more to do with your success than the audience does. You can be Mr. Hilarious, the funniest rookie comic in the country, but if the club booker doesn’t like you, you are not getting on, and that’s that; he can snap his fingers and find a dozen comics who will get laughs and who will do whatever he wants. Cmedy clubs usually have Byzantine, difficult manners of asking for a spot (“Call between 10 and 1:20 AM on the first Tuesday of the month, speak to Dave, ask for a spot but do not speak for more than 20 seconds, and be ready to receive a call between 4:30 and 4:45 PM saying whether or not you will get a spot the following month” is a typical booking procedure) just to reduce the number of people who harass the clubs begging for stage time. They can always find another comic because there’s a million of them. Hell, the rookies will show up night after night, paying cover, just on the off chance someone will get sick or something and they can get five minutes onstage. Why would you risk closing the window when it’s so easily slammed shut?
Secondly, what’s the payoff?
You can tell a joke about a completely apolitical topic that makes everyone laugh, or tell a political one that you know will only make some people laugh. Political humour will leave some people cold - some people they’re insulted by your take on the topic, and some (actually, a lot of people) because they just aren’t very interested in politics and don’t care enough about the issues to relate to your jokes. (I mean partisan humor; some “political” humor is not partisan.)
On the other hand, a lot of topics are more or less universally relatable, so why not stick to those topics?
Another thing to bear in mind is that comedy is bred in big cities. Comedians need to be from, or go to, the big city to make it (I know someone will crack out some rare exception; I’m generalizing.) You cannot make it in comedy without a lot of stage time to learn the skills and the industry, and that stage time is to be found in big cities; I can tell you right now as a rookie comic, just living 45 minutes out of downtown is a horrible disadvantage. Big cities are more liberal than suburbs and small towns; downtown Dallas is more liberal than rural New York. So a comedian is likely to be liberal by virtue of demographics; furthermore, he or she will be playing to mostly liberal audiences, since THEY are overwhelmingly city dwellers, and working with other liberals, and judging from the last Canadian election and the folks I know in the Toronto film and arts scene there is no more politically homogenous echo chamber than actors and comedians, and dissent isn’t received well.
I should point out that I’m not dismissing the possibility that conservatism just isn’t very funny, but then, people do seem to think Larry the Cable Guy is hilarious. I don’t, but I’m not the target audience - conservatives.
P. J. O’Rourke is a conservative isn’t he?
Trey Parker & Matt Stone?