I assert that liberals are more funny, in general, than conservatives. Even conservatives that are somewhat funny are funny in a very “old-school,” non-groundbreaking way.
I contend that it’s because liberals are predisposed to thinking about how things are not, and are more able to “think outside the box.”
Sounds good to me.
Actually, you know Ben Stein, the TV/movie personality? He’s really, really conservative, but if you watched the quiz show he used to have on Comedy Central, you’d notice he had a pretty unconventional sense of humor. And then there’s John McCain - he seems pretty witty at times. And Ronald Reagan made that great joke about bombing the Soviet Union (o.k., just kidding on that one).
Most really funny humor, IMO, contains a self-deprecating note in it. I wonder if liberals have an easier time doing the self-deprecating number?
Of course, there’s folks like Brutus, who can be pretty hilarious sometimes. So not all conservatives are Mallard Fillmores.
Daniel
Actually, it seems to me that most moderate liberals and conservatives have senses of humor similar to the general population. When you get a bit further out to the radicals vs. the reactionaries, however, you do see some distinct differences. While the reactionaries don’t appear to have much of a sense of humor, they will occasionally crack a joke, albeit poorly.
The radicals, on the other hand, seem to be philosophically opposed to the concept of humor altogether. Apparently, they take themselves and their issues so seriously that any attempt to find a lighter side is considered grossly offensive.
Frankly, people (on either side of the political divide) who take themselves this seriously scare me a bit. If they are so convinced of their rectitude that they can’t even laugh at themselves, there is little that they would not do for their cause, no matter how heinous.
I’m not convinced that this rule holds. Some examples:
-Bread & Circus is a troupe that does puppet shows at protests; they’ve got plenty of humor in what they do.
-Billionaires for Bush was a group of pretty zany leftists going out stumping for Bush while dressed up as the obnoxiously rich.
-Earth First! had such songs as the gospelly “You can’t clearcut your way to heaven,” “The Ballad of the Lonesome Tree-Spiker,” and “Free the Dead” (a song about the virtues of being maggot food instead of being embalmed). Maybe not to everyone’s taste, but with clever wordplay in them.
I don’t know of similar examples on the right, but I bet they’re there.
Daniel
Bob Dole is the funniest politician I have ever seen.
In my experience, ordinary on-the-street liberals generally have a much better sense of humor than their conservative counterparts. But, for some reason, that does not seem to apply to their public figures. Until Al Franken moved into political satire as a regular thing, Rush Limbaugh was way funnier than anything the Left had to offer. I mean, come on, who’s funnier, Rush Limbaugh or Noam Chomsky?
::nitpick::
That would be the Bread and Puppet theater out of Vermont, I assume?
Bread and Circus is the East Coast wing of Whole Foods Market, and not particularly humorous.
Of course, the humor one show of Bread and Puppet I saw, was, much to my dismay, not as much to my liking as I had hoped.
::/nitpick::
As to the OP, I think the real question is: Are leftist humorists funnier to a larger percentage of leftists than con humorists are to cons, and how funny are they to the other side, in qualitative terms.
The opinion expressed in the OP basically says, “I don’t find as many examples of humor from the right wing that I find genuinely funny as I do examples of left wing humor.”
But how many conservatives share this opinion?
In the 1980s, Reagan tended to get big yuks from a lot of people with the lamest, warmed-over humor on record, so what can you say?
D’oh–yep! I couldn’t decide which one their name was, so rather than do actual live research, I just guessed. Wrong, apparently.
Daniel
I’d say it was all in the delivery–the man WAS a professional actor–except I’ve seen some of his movies that purported to be comedies so I know that couldn’t be true. (sick joke alert) We now know that the old saying is true because he managed to die while never managing to do comedy. (I’m such a :wally !)
Maybe everybody in the room was sucking up to get their own logging rights in a national forest (a joke on the level of most I’ve heard out of the current administration or its minions).
Yep–it’s all about the delivery. If Bush had grabbed his crotch when telling his one joke in the last debate, it would have been immeasurably funnier.
Daniel
**That’s not funny!!!
**
The alarm cry of the humor-challenged liberal.
It’s true. There are no funny liberals out there. What the heck was I thinking?
Daniel
Cite?
:dubious:
Liberal (mostly) here checking in… and there ARE humor-impaired people in our ranks, y’know? It’s conceivable that maybe if the stars were right, mks57 was referring to them, and not saying that all Liberals are humor-impaired.
I agree on the comments about the MOR wings of the respective movements being more or less even. Even on the pointing out that there ARE far-left and far-right funnypeople.
However, the far ends of the spectrum also gather their share of sourpusses. And I will own up to that those in the “radical” left-end of the spectrum that are sourpusses, are much more likely to do a whiney “that’s not funny, man”; while the sourpusses on the right, OTOH, will get mean and dismissive and insult you for being stupid and treasonous and communistic.
However, as to the OP itself:
What this seems to be discussing is not so much sense of humor, a subjective preference, or even wit, an intellectual trait, but humorism, or comedic talent. And when you get to this, you might as well be asking why the correlation between belonging to the creative-arts community in general, and trending towards the “liberal” side of the spectrum. That may have to do with the outside-the-box thinking; but a conservative will shoot back at you that it’s a symptom of living in a world of make-believe
See, I can laugh at jabs at liberals - if they’re funny.
F’rinstance, SNL isn’t funny in general, but I did think it was funny when Seth Myers as John Kerry said “I could just list three mistakes Bush has made and sit down, knowing that I had cleaned his clock, but I’m not going to do that, because I can’t help myself. I have to keep talking.”
Whoever said John McCain is capable of being funny, I agree. He’s also not conservative.
The basic distinction is between "comedy"and “tragedy”.
“Comedy” is where you fall down an open manhole and break your pelvis.
“Tragedy” is where I get a cut on my finger.
I think conservatives find conservative humor funnier than liberals do. Likewise vice versa. I thought Al Franken’s “Why Not Me?” was hysterical. His more overtly anti-conservative stuff isn’t. Reagan is the only politician who could get away with a lot of self-deprecating humor.
But BrotherCadfael is correct, the extremists don’t find anything funny.
Regards,
Shodan
By the way, the quote about the cut finger/broken pelvis is a quote cribbed from (I think) Mel Brooks. I can dig up a cite if anyone wants, but it is not original with me.
Regards,
Shodan
I know the standard idea is that Reagan just did lines, but he cracked jokes after he got shot, and I somehow doubt anyone wrote lines for him about that.
PJ is pretty funny. In the late '60s, National Review had a lot of funny stuff, including a special issue on an underground movement, including a list of 100 subversive organizations, such as
Communist Anti-Christian Crusade
The lesser of the two eagles rent a bird franchise.
I’m more liberal now, but I still think this stuff is funny. However, as things get grimmer and grimmer, they do seem to have lost a lot of humor. Much humor is self-deprecation, so it is hard for an administration who thinks they’ve never made a mistake to be funny.