Whatever happened to political comedy? That blessed offering from The Gods of Humour, President Donald J. Trump, is no longer around to kick about like a bright orange football. This has left late night comics a bit adrift on the playing field. Though mockable, President Biden and his administration don’t offer the same brand of hardy, colourful sports equipment for comics, cartoonists, or meme-makers.
Actually, things haven’t been quite the same comedically since Daily Show host Jon Stewart departed the scene in 2015, after 16 years skewering the inanities and outrages of Republicans and Democrats alike. Stewart’s Daily Show alumni, Stephen Colbert and John Oliver, started off brilliantly with their own endeavors - they had four easy years of booting MAGA the Hutt through the goalposts, after all - but they’re now risking the worst fate possible for mass appeal comics: becoming court jesters to the corporate state.
It’s not a great time for comedy overall. The Venn diagram of permissible humour topics has been shrinking for years, thanks to warriors of woke who don’t get the joke. There are even organizations of students who patrol campus comedy nights to hang a scarlet letter on performers who say anything “triggering.” Little wonder that Jerry Seinfeld and John Cleese have said they’re no longer interested in college gigs. Who needs a post-show Twitter-mobbing by the Morally Upright Citizens Brigade?
I’m either old enough or politically incorrect enough to believe comedy should be contagiously funny…and risky. Meaning routines more infectious than weakened strains of yuks about cats, bad drivers, and McDonald’s food.
In the fifties and early sixties, New York comic Lenny Bruce regularly got arrested and charged with obscenity for his nightclub offences against good taste and polite language. In the seventies, George Carlin followed suit, with serial arrests for his “seven dirty words you can’t say on television” routine. And in the eighties and nineties, the most fiery of them all, the late Texan comic Bill Hicks, somehow avoided a chaffeured trip to the crowbar hotel - though not for lack of trying. (After one show in the early eighties, two unimpressed Vietnam veterans followed him outside and broke his leg in a brawl. More on Hicks in the next post.)
These three comics in particular were tireless critics of corporate media and the abuses of state power. In a pre-Chomsky 1957 routine, Bruce talked about unreliable press reporting, using newspapers as props. In a 1999 routine predating the Bush/Cheney war on terror, George Carlin commented on how Americans are “always willing to trade away a little of their freedom in exchange for the feeling, the illusion of security,” before segueing into a prescient rant about the republic’s fear of germs. And in a 1993 routine, Hicks ranted about television producers being “whores at a capitalist gangbang.”
They weren’t scientists or sociologists. But these three public intellectuals had sharply-calibrated bullshit meters, and their constituency was the doubtful, the desperate, and the despised. I wonder, if they came back today what would they say of our public health policy initiatives for COVID-19, and the corporate media handling of them?
Would they cheer on our acquiescence to state directives abolishing freedom of association through lockdowns? Would they advocate that employers fire employees for refusing mandatory injections of experimental gene therapy under emergency use authorization, cooked up by pharmaceutical conglomerates that are legally indemnified against vaccine deaths and injury?
Kinda doubt it.
Geoff. brilliant as usual!
You outdid yourself with 'the warriors of woke who don't get the joke'! Maybe you ought to take up writing woke limericks...