I’m not sure what you’re trying to prove with this.
FTR, I’m not much up on the humor scene these days, so I don’t know who is hot in the humor field let alone whether they are conservative or liberal.
That said, it’s obvious that the overall entertainment industry is heavily liberal, and if the top comedians simply reflected the mileu in which they work that alone would account for an imbalance.
Furthermore, the fact that people find humor funnier when it aligns with their beliefs seems pretty obvious too.
These two factors alone would account for an imbalance, especially when this imbalance is being measured in the subjective judgment of liberals declaring that so-and-so is not funny (as is being done here).
Do you actually disagree with these factors, or are you just saying that they don’t account for the entire phenomenon?
I did a search for Victoria Jackson, for some background info on her non-appearance at the 40th annivsary show. I found an article about her, that included this: She also took the opportunity to highlight former SNL cast members who are allegedly conservatives — Jon Lovitz, Dennis Miller, Adam Sandler, Norm Macdonald, Colin Quinn, and Jim Downey — and even noted that Lorne Michaels may be a “closet conservative.”
There’s no accounting for tastes, but I was disturbed about Jon Lovitz, who I’ve found very funny at times. A little googling turned up that he voted for Obama, but thought taxes on the rich were high enough, dammit. So, a false alarm really.
Norm McDonald seems borderline, in both politics and funniness. He claims he’s apolitical, and doesn’t really believe Clinton killed Vince Foster.
Adam Sandler seems to be a real Republican, and appeared at a National Convention – I’m not a huge fan, but routines like Canteen Boy were better than average. In his heyday he was one of the biggest comedy draws in the movies.
On the SDMB Shodan can often make me laugh.
The above opinions and facts are presented as points on a graph. No conclusions.
This is the second time I’ve heard someone rationalizing Jon Stewart leaving because he looked ‘tired’. i’ve never noticed him looking or acting tired & I still enjoy his show.
Almost seems like I just tripped over some newsletter’s talking point.
I mean, it does have its low points. Check out what this hack wrote. Jon Stewart always wrote better “Jon Stewart touches children” subtitle jokes than this. I mean, if you’re going to go lowbrow, at least make it FUNNY.
Must have been a guest strip that week. From these two examples, the first one is clearly written by a guy who deserves to have years of employment writing comics, and the other one is written by a talentless humorless joyless hack who hasn’t written a joke in decades, and should probably go sit on a traffic cone.
The people who actually *make *things are poor people. Often in entry level positions or labor positions which get paid far less than the median.
The ones who take all the profit from increased productivity and don’t share it with the workers who made it possible, those who steal employees’ wages, those who dodge paying their personal income taxes, those who accept government subsidies, while trying to relocate their company overseas and still operate in America so they can avoid paying corporate taxes, those people are the takers.
The billions of dollars in profit each year end up mostly concentrated in the hands of the few in our society.
To paint the poor as takers, and greedy, and lazy, is so far from the truth, it’s literally insane that anyone believes it.
I also want to point out, it is (also literally) impossible for someone to get as wealthy as they do, without hiring a bunch of people to do 99.99% of the actual work.
The only way you get that rich is to either invent/patent something and manufacture and sell it yourself, or to get an army of paid workers to generate sales and product to sell.
You can’t do it on your own. The rich should be grateful there’s people willing to make them rich for a low wage, instead, they’re greedy fucks who shit on their workers at every opportunity.
But, that doesn’t count, it was never really political material even when it was. Sure, comics who happen to be politically conservative can do funny stuff – but not, apparently, if it’s political, like most of Stuart’s and Colbert’s stuff.
Yeah, there’s a difference between a comedian who votes conservative and one making “conservative humor”. Adam Sandler might be a card-carrying Republican but that doesn’t come through in Happy Gilmore unless you stretch into the credibility strained “But he’s an American who achieved his dreams!” territory that gives us arguments like “Ghostbusters has an EPA guy who’s a jerk! Brilliant conservative humor!”
I’m not sure the discussion was heretofore limited to political humor. And putting that limitation on it does make things tricky, because it’s hard to be amused by something that you philosophically disagree with.
Libertarian humor, now, is a different thing . . . As Stone and Parker of *South Park * say, “We hate conservatives, but we really, really hate liberals.” There is one consistent political message – maybe true, maybe false, but at any rate consistent – running through a lot of their material: Too many people take politics too seriously. And they always manage to make it funny.
