This is funny. Trump supporters are illogical and full of contradictions.
But it’s also troubling. What would happen if you sent a similar crew of interviewers to a Clinton event? Are they also nonsensical in their reasoning?
I also wonder whether there were Trump supporters who were not amusingly stupid, who weren’t used in the video. How many of them were there? What’s the difference in frequency of idiots between Democratic and Republican voters?
Yeah, I’m looking at a comedy bit and wondering about control groups and sample size and data representation. I’m a science nerd. No apologies.
This stuff matters. We’re kind of lucky that all the witty, sharp, funny comics tend tend to be on the liberal side, while the conservatives have nothing but unfunny smirking dudebros who use racism and misogyny to get laughs, but imagine if a talented, insightful comedian arose among the far-right and turned this same strategy against us. Shall we get into an arms race in which we each raise the worst of the other side as their champions?
I think you answered you own question. Right wing “comedians” can’t get laughs EXCEPT by using racist, sexist, etc. stereotypes. The hypocrisy inherent in right wing ideologies makes them vulnerable to humorous attacks from the left.
Liberal people are not necessarily more reasonable, but reasonable people are necessarily more liberal. This is because liberalism itself is more reasonable than conservatism. This explains both phenomena: why most Trump supporters are stupid, and why most comedians are liberal.
I read an post a few years back, might have even been one here, that pointed out: Liberal humor is about punching up at the powerful, while conservative “humor” is about punching down. And kicking people who are already down isn’t very funny. It’ll get the sadistic goblins on the right wing off, sure, but by its very definition it isn’t funny.
I do wonder about the quality and quantity of idiots on the Democratic side. Not so much on the Trump side. Like with their humor, being idiotic is inherent in that position; if someone WAS thoughtful enough to not be taken in by this bilge…they wouldn’t be voting Trump. Trump sells a fantasy that is contradicted by reality and even itself; he has nothing of substance – so, by definition, those who support it are fantasists.
Sharp, biting comedy necessitates open-mindedness, the ability to question the status quo. Small wonder the far-/alt-right has trouble with that.
The closest they’ve come is Southpark, with its brainless shock “humor” and vacuous, edgy political proclamations.
PZ:
The stumbling block there is insightful. Certain qualities are required for insight, and they aren’t traits you find in abundance among the far-right.
‘imagine if a talented, insightful comedian arose among the far-right’
On a very basic level, liberals are pro-change and conservatives are anti-change. On another very basic level, comedy is inherently subversive. Both these statements are simplifications. But. ‘Anti-change’ and ‘subversive’ do not mix. Thus, right-wing political commentary tends towards outrage and/or punching down, whereas liberal political commentary tends towards snark and humor.
I think what’s happening here is fair, insofar as it is a caricature by synecdoche. But it *IS* also nutpicking: you go to your opponent’s rally, you shoot 2-3 hrs of street interviews, you edit together the stupidest 5 minutes and plaster it on the internets. And you CAN do that to anyone if you’re so inclined, but the attempts that I’ve seen at doing it to liberals mostly fall flat. 1) Because I’m not the intended audience; 2) because of the conservative humor problem I’ve outline above; 3) because present-day liberal positions aren’t as inherently effedup as their conservative counterparts; and 4) because present-day liberals aren’t as inclined to idiotic conspiracy theories/racism/misogyny as present-day conservatives.
OK, imagine this: there are no insightful, sharp-witted people among conservatives (which I think is unlikely, but let’s go with it). But there are people smart enough to see a winning tactic used by liberals, and to copy it. They send a film crew to a Clinton event and copy Samantha Bee exactly, asking questions about whether Clinton will win (they say yes) and whether Trump will try to rig the election (some will also say yes — he’s openly advertising for “election observers” among his followers to hang about polling places).
I bet that with some simple selective editing, a conservative could build a video that precisely apes this one.
@PZ
“voxpops” are the cheapest, most awful manipulative way of news broadcasting in general. This editing tactic has been used time and again for comedic effect or serious stuff like “young people don’t know anything today.”
My favourite example is a local Swiss TV news show which interviewed me about Nelson Mandela when he was sick (not even dead yet, but a lot of media had basically already written him off). They cross-cut my interview with “voxpops” of young people in the city, who they claimed had no idea who Nelson Mandela was. Which was not only wrong, they were actually so stupid as to leave the ones who said “he’s the president of South Africa” (close enough) in the cut. Then, they introduced a snippet of my interview with “what nobody knew was that Mandela used to be considered a terrorist”. This was in Switzerland, where the (still) most prominent and very influential extreme right-wing party leader used to head a business network of people who protested the boycott by referring to Mandela and the ANC as “terrorists”. He actually repeated that allegation when interviewed after Mandela’s passing.
The best reaction to this bad, manipulative technique in comedy comes, of course, from Colbert, in specific reference to Watters:
http://www.cc.com/video-clips/1e524e/the-colbert-report–watters–world—-tad-s-turf
I’ve also heard the punch up/punch down thing as the ‘comic drop’: to take a high status individual and drop their status is funny. Since it seems liberals and conservatives perceive status differently, that probably means we won’t find each other’s political comics funny. Witness all the narratives about Christians persecuted by the dreaded secularists, or ‘political correctness’ (just the name: the idea that society as a whole looks down on ‘politically incorrect’ language, despite the fact conservative politicians use it to garner votes).
So I imagine for a conservative comic, joking about the liberal elite and secularism and so on is perceived as ‘punching up’ to the conservative audience, while liberals listening in see it as punching down, and thus, a bully (or bullies’ sycophants) mocking the weak, rather than someone mocking the leaders of society.
I think it is very dangerous to assume that good comedy must, necessarily, tend towards the political left. What people find funny varies tremendously – those on the right will find right-leaning comedy funny, those on the left won’t. It’s just the same level of chauvinism as a British person wondering why all the good comedians are British and the Americans and Europeans just don’t understand proper comedy.
But, as is my usual wont, a historical perspective might shed light on the issue. In Classical Athens the height of comedic talent was generally seen in biting political satire that poked fun at both stuffy, old-fashioned sticks-in-the-mud and wide-eyed radical innovators with their trendy modern nonsense. The plays of Aristophanes show both populist, anti-intellectual leanings (Socrates is sent up mercilessly) and a disgust with the warmongering of demagogues and the traditional elites (Cleon, the Athenians in Lysistrata and Birds). Aristophanes cannot easily be classified as a liberal or a conservative – he turned his attention to whatever was a pressing issue at the time, and tended to make appeals to all classes of society in his bid to win awards. Though the jokes about farting and anal sex were always pretty constant.
That’s Greek Old Comedy. Greek New Comedy and especially Roman comedy were very different. Those tended towards whimsical sitcom-style comedies of manners rather than political commentary. Safe topics in societies where direct democratic involvement in politics was practically nonexistent. For the nearest Roman equivalent to Aristophanes you would have to go to the amusing courtroom speeches of a Cicero, who very much was a conservative stick-in-the-mud himself. When the Romans did discover biting satire on modern mores, in the late 1st century AD, they tended not to lambast prominent individuals but rather the culture as a whole. Though it is something of a vexed question as to whether Juvenal’s condemnation of Roman mores is more a send-up of the hoary old whingers who are constantly moaning about how everything is going to hell in a hand-basket.
The point is that the best comedy in any society or era tends to mirror the social and cultural preoccupations it arises from. The US in the 2010s seems to be a society characterised primarily by political stagnation, the rise of demagogues and spin, dissatisfaction at the excesses of entrenched vested interests and unease at the encroachment of the global situation on its consciousness. That’s why your most popular comedians are people like Samantha Bee and John Oliver and Stephen Colbert – because they speak to these cultural currents, rather than trying to cut across them.
The investigations I done with respect to humor have some potential explanations for the things mentioned above. Despite it’s complexity there do seem seem to be some general patterns.
*It has to do with transforming emotion. Mostly negative to positive at at the in-group level, but positive to negative can occur in some contexts.
*It has to do with a violation of expected norms. Either the comedian is violating a norm, or the humor is about a violation of norms.
*It very often has to do with critisizing beliefs, manner of thought, and resulting actions.
Many on the right feel negatively about issues related to sex, gender, race and more. But since that negativity tends to be based on characteristics irrationally tied to groups of people their humor is very often bigoted by definition. They want to feel better about the way people talk, the way they dress, the way they express sex and gender, the people with different skin color, and attempts to make society less bigoted. This is also on the left, but to a much lesser extent because of the social dynamics are more focused on solving the problems than simply feeling better about them or acting like they are only present the “other” (we still have our bigots that need dealing with though).
And that still neglects the level where humor is a means of social conflict.
I think that one of the important tools in the box for a comedian is the ability to empathize — put yourself in someone else’s shoes, some else’s position, someone else’s life, to view things from a different point of view. Comedians, good comedians, can look at a normal everyday object from a different angle and build a joke on that. And my experiences with conservatives, with authoritarians, with right-wingers, leads me to think that Barometer Thinking is foreign to a certain mindset. Can conservatives and authoritarians think outside the box?
Many interesting ideas in this thread. There sure seems to be a dearth of right-wing comics. (Dennis Miller comes to mind, but he isn’t funny any more.) I snobbishly lean toward Caine’s suggestion. “They (the right wing) just aren’t bright enough” is satisfying to me on one level, but I appreciate the ideas of many other of the contributors. There are probably systemic issues in the way of ‘right-wing humor’ (whatever that is).
PZ:
Oh, there are, say someone like PJ O’Rourke, although I don’t think it would be fair to class him as far-right. Conservative, yes.
No bet, it could be done without any trouble at all. Comes down to the audience, I guess. I don’t watch stuff like this, and even if I had teevee, I wouldn’t watch it. I don’t find this sort of thing humorous. It might make me sad, depressed, or angry, but I don’t think I’d be laughing. Deeply entrenched, willful stupidity scares me, no matter what direction it comes from.
Setting aside discussion of the imperfect terms (conservative, liberal) for our two super-tribes, what strikes me is the lack of awareness on the right. It’s just baked-in, incurious, unquestioning authoritarianism. And if comedy is observation extrapolated, then comedy will be severely lacking in the absence of awareness. I mean, we are talking about people who do not examine their own emotions (“Grrr I’m angry!”), or their contributions to and benefits from a diverse society, or any other irrational positions. It takes critical examination to produce actual comedy.
I’m reminded of Jeff Dunham and his tired stereotypes, and the types of people from my rural Louisiana childhood that lap the shit out of his racist puppetry.
I’ve met some incredibly stupid liberals.
I’ve met some incredibly inskeptical atheists.
I’ve seen online some of the most irrational rationalists you could ever imagine. Luckily never exposed to any in person.
The fundamental tool of political comedy is hypocrisy. Spotting it, amplifying it, and applying it to the extreme and showing off just how far down the well for their side people are. This doesn’t necessarily take a brilliant comedian. The oft-social-media-spammed “liberal logic 101” “memes” demonstrate a cursory understanding of the premise even if I often think their understanding is faulty in a way that undermines their humor.
To say there’s no right winger, or opportunist, or centrist with a bone to pick who could apply this fairly basic tool well is just insanity.
Penn and Teller, on Bullshit”, started the whole “Dihydrogen monoxide” meme targeting left leaning activists. It worked amazingly well.
@OP
YES.
my evidence is last night’s episode of TDS (The Daily Show) one of their journalists visited a Feminist who “broke the glass ceiling” by operating a bigtime souvenir/T-shirt business in NYC. When asked who she would vote for, she replied with no hesitation, “Hillary. of. Course”. The reporter notices that most of her merchandise is all Trump props (aka prop-aganda). T-shirts attacking Clinton, and campaign buttons For_Trump.
When asked about the contradiction, she replied, “They sell, so I follow the money *wink*”
In conclusion, it is clear that the logic within the Clinton-istas can be as goofy as the Drumpshits.
@17
I don’t know if thats necessarily a failure of logic. It’s not incoherent to think a person is awful, and still support them to cash. That is a fast and loose definition of the word “shill.”
Not that I think they’re right in doing such, but I draw a line between actually having the doublethink required to be a conservative and just selling trump merch while being a hillary supporter.
As I may have mentioned once or twice, I have a long commute. I have what I am increasingly deciding is a bad habit of listening to National Pubic Radio under the misapprehension that I am making some positive use of the time.
Currently they are doing the common lazy journalistic stunt of rounding up random nobodies-in-particular and getting them to talk about why they are going to vote for candidate A or B.. In this case 50% of them are going to vote for the Cheeto dusted megalomaniac.
These people all have one thing in common. They are blithering idiots who presumably are able to dress themselves or they wouldn’t be out in public, yet that seems implausible. I discovered that I cannot listen to their drivel so I have to turn the radio off for a couple of minutes until I’m sure it’s safe.
The Clinton voters, however, are uniformly thoughtful, well informed, and talk about values such as kindness and inclusiveness. Look, you have to be an idiot to vote for Trump. That’s just a fact.
18:
I called her logic “goofy”, not “failure”.
After further review of that story, it seems she is failing to use logic, not the logic she is using is a failure. She’s viewing the benefits of selling that propaganda merch, very superficially. As only the cash it brings in, while totally disregarding the consequences of advocating that Cheeto dusted weasel. Trying to squeeze $$$ out of a trainwreck, is a bad attitude, no matter how much she wants to prevent trainwrecks. I still tend to characterize it as “prtzel logic” [sic], not in a bad way, but in a eww.
IDK. BRB I’ll stick with TLAs
“We used to have a name for Right Wing satire. We called it ‘cruelty.'”
-Roy Zimmerman
Now, if she was taking all the money she was making off of selling Trump merch, and donating it to the Clinton campaign, THAT would be genius. A medal might actually be in order.
re 22:
*thumbs up*
I’d agree that’s ideally true, and the best ones do that, but I’m reluctant to take that as quite the universal characterization many people think it is.
I’ve heard liberal comedians punch down: for example at uneducated, working class poor, rural whites (i.e., rednecks and hillbillies). This gets excused with the fig-leaf that because they’re white, it’s an upward punch, but these are people who fall below minorities who are better educated, urban, and have higher economic status. It’s only “punching down” if we define “punching down” as “what liberal comedians do.”
I’ve also heard funny conservatives (although it’s rare, and examples don’t spring to mind). I’ve also seen them punch upward. It helps that I used to be one, because they generally do it carefully, lest they upset the existing social structures — so they won’t do it in front of outsiders, where it might be used against them.
What bothers me about this whole meme that “conservatives aren’t funny, because they punch down while liberals punch up” is not that it’s false, so much as that it’s smugly complacent. It becomes justification to look the other way when a liberal punches down because, by definition, wherever a liberal punches becomes “up.”
I don’t think the comedy divide between the two parties is accidental, but instead is a direct reflection of the fact that the Democratic platform is largely evidence-based (though not entirely, sadly). By contrast, the Republican party platform is founded on denial of evidence in pursuit of the interests of the wealthy.
That disconnect from reality on the Republican side forces them to use nothing but emotional appeals, which ensures the promotion and exploitation of many kinds of bigotry.
It’s a lot easier to come up with jokes making fun of such a horrible party that are both funny and insightful. If the Republican party were a more reasonable political party, and our political discussion centered on evidence-based discussions about the role of government, maybe the comedy divide wouldn’t be so stark.
Not picking on the one who said this, but this smacks of self-congratulation. Hillary will be as devoted to the wishes of her wealthy backers as any of her predecessors. For example, she will do nothing meaningful about climate change, because too many wealthy energy interests provide vital campaign funding for her.
The likelihood of a bill passing is roughly equal to the degree to which the 1% want it to pass, and that holds true consistently over time, regardless which party controls Congress or the White House.
We’re better off with her in office than the utterly irrational narcissist that is her opponent, but mostly because she will refrain from doing as much harm as Donald J Caligula will. As for affirmative good — i.e., making measurable progress toward averting what could well prove to be human extinction within the next couple centuries — she will do fuck-all.
precognitive Masked Avenger wrote @26:
tell us the lottery numbers for next week.
I think the real problem here is that yes, there are obviously people so thick they believe that Clinton rigged the election but Trump will win and that yes, those people will vote, so make sure you do as well.
technically true. a POTUS can only enforce the laws the Congress enacts. The Congress are the ones who must act, The POTUS only enforces. Hillary gives every indication of working with Congress to motivate them to enact legislation in the nationally beneficial direction. I can’t say “she will [nb]”, just that she indicates it as her plan.
to reiterate Drumph will only argue for the Congress to pass laws where he alone is the main beneficiary. (that future tense can be said with some confidence). Extrapolation of past performance gives a big big bigger edge to Hillary over Drumph.
Even if she doesn’t promote forward movement, cleaning up the mess we’re in, would be a pretty big accomplishment also. Especially compared to the cliff Drumph will drive us over, while denying the cliff exists.
—
remember POTUS is mouthpiece/figurehead. All action comes from Congress. Vote Down-Ballot, even if POTUS is left blank out of protest.
Your child-like faith is delightful to behold. However, past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.
For reference, her campaign promise is here: https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/climate/
I look forward with great interest to watching events unfold.
For clarity’s sake, I assume this portion of your comment has nothing to do with me, and you have not mistaken anything I said as lending any shred of support for Caligula J Trump.
Does anybody remember the Half-Hour News Hour on Fox? It was the conservative answer to The Daily Show.
And then there’s Mallard Fillmore, the conservative answer to Doonesbury.
All the humor is based on conservative talking points.
The conservative answer to anything funny is always something that’s not very funny.
And yet liberals often make fun of liberalism. The Simpsons, Saturday Night Live, The Daily Show, The Family Guy, are all shows with mostly liberal writers who frequently take shits at liberals when they deserve it. And because the humor is based on things that are true, things that actually happened, they are funny a lot more often. I remember the show Li’l Bush, and it was pretty harsh on Bush and Co., but it also some very funny material making fun of John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.
Conservative humor is stuff like “French tanks only go in reverse! Ha Ha!”
The closest we have to “conservative” comedians who are actually successful at comedy are the smarter glibertarians–Penn & Teller, Matt Trey and Parker Stone, P. J. O’Rourke (all mentioned by others on this thread, above). And even they have a tendency to eventually become old hat, because they never quite seem to turn it inward. And I think the key is that to be a decent comedian, you MUST be able to mock yourself at some point along the way, and to do so honestly (ie, not in the fashion of a job applicant who tells the interviewer that his biggest weakness is that he works too hard). True conservativism, however, holds that certain core beliefs can never, ever be examined, let alone mocked. Without that, their comedians invariably choke, because they have to constantly hold back from crossing that line.
I think Dennis Miller is the textbook example, here. When he went from liberal firebrand to conservative troll (practically overnight), he wound up shunting all the honesty and integrity from his act, and his comedy quickly evaporated.
They don’t have to make up much about their fearless leader, though. The Washington Post just posted this: Trump recorded having extremely lewd conversation about women in 2005. You probably don’t need to read it to know where this is going. The guy is a creep…but we already knew that.
I was thinking about the OP on and off today because humor was only part of that and I only mentioned humor. I would say that in a lot of places people on the left are as irrational as people on the right and just as contradicted, it’s just that the results of the mass are pointed in a direction that is not so bad. They also fail to make connections in frustrating ways too.
My most hated one is how the word “bias” gets used, aparently just saying it makes it true. And it comes in many flavors. My current favorite on the “right” is how the MRA and/or racist cluster talks bias. “Biased” is an argument.
Human communication is biased by its very nature. You can never be unbiased, you only figure out which ones you have and learn to take them into account. The good news is that we become biased in good directions as well. By choice and accident.
I’m voting for Clinton, but don’t forget that the last two presidents should be in prison based on our treaty obligations alone. Torture.
My last thought on humor is that I suspect a rule might be “people joke about what they fear, hate, are disgusted by, or surprised by”. Humor is literally funny and not funny at time when it comes to mockery, that’s how it works. That seems to explain a family racist that mocks how Spanish looks and sounds anyway. It’s a very useful hypothesis with bigots in general. My brother in law and wife tried to apologize later, but they are not the ones who did something.
No: Penn and Teller’s Bullshit episode was in 2003, about ten years after DHMO was started, according to Ye Pffft! of All Knowledge:
Well … Samantha Bee does the same sort of comedy where liberals are the target:
Bernie “Bros” | Full Frontal with Samantha Bee | TBS
Ok, so this is a play list of someone called Mark Dice who does “Man on the Street” interviews in conjunction with Infowars (yeah, I know) in an effort to mock liberals.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLa8S4GilqogQRwblg-wi17_-z5jhPuxVV
They’re very lame examples, and there’s no way of knowing that any people he’s talking to are liberals anyway, but it does show that, in general, you can always find someone who will agree with or sign just about anything, if you look long enough.
My daughter went on a trip to the 2012 election campaign together with several of her fellow-students from Lund University in Sweden. Lund is quite a conservative university, so her ‘fellow travellers’ definitely didn’t see themselves as left-wingers.
They attended (amongst other things) Romney’s last campaign rally in Virginia … and were gobsmacked at the kind of thing ordinary rally attendees came up to them and told them spontaneously (I think that the predominantly old people who attended were interested in the presence of a group of young people). One of the real doozies was a woman who told the Lund student radio correspondent, in all seriousness, that Obama had a special ‘factory’ where pregnant women were forced to have abortions so that doctors could dissect the foetuses to extract stem cells from them … And that was just *one* of the nutty comments being made.