A few days ago I was listening to a call-in show on the local (Seattle) NPR station when I heard a caller say Dennis Miller is a left-winger. The host of the show said, "Really? You think he’s a left winger?" and then the caller said "Yes I do because he’s against big government and... blah blah blah." And the NPR host, who’s mostly an idiot, focused on the blah blah blah and never came back to that question about Dennis Miller.
At one time in my long and miscellaneous career, I did some stand-up comedy. I started out doing five minutes at open mikes and worked my way up to being a feature (which means I sometimes drove about 300 miles and got paid about $100 for about 30 minutes of comedy before the headliner did 45-60 minutes). I’ve worked with several dozen comics who are now famous. I’ve even hung out with and traded clever remarks with two people who were once considered David Letterman’s favorite comics (George Miller and Mitch Hedberg). They’re both dead now, but you can look them up on YouTube. I’ll tell you more about comedy below.
Let’s consider Dennis Miller, right-winger. Here’s a video of Dennis Miller on Jay Leno. You can tell he’s trying to be funny about Saddam Hussein, but he’s a complete and utter failure:
Was that pathetic or what?
Next, have you ever seen Glenn Beck do his stand-up comedy in front of an audience? He thinks he's funny. He thinks he knows how to do stand-up. The following video is very hard to watch. He’s talking about his 16-year-old daughter going on her first date (chaperoned by Glenn Beck and his muscle-bound bodyguard). I feel so sorry for his daughter:
So the question is, why aren’t conservatives funny?
Who’s another example? Jeff Foxworthy. "You might be a redneck if ‘the dishwasher is loaded’ means your wife is drunk." HA! A sexist joke about women (who wash dishes). Not funny. Sorry, no video.
Or Bob Hope: "What, are you one of those guys from the Village People?" HA! Homophobic joke! And it’s been ten years since they were famous! I think it’s good that he attempted to entertain the troops. Although I think the troops were just waiting to see the nearly naked Playboy bunnies. Bob Hope was never a funny stand-up. Even if he was accidentally funny, the credit should go to his joke writers. I don’t think Bob Hope ever wrote a funny joke on his own.
The only exception is P.J. O’Rourke. He hates government, but he’s more of a libertarian than a right-winger. Maybe libertarians can be funny. He’s a writer, not a stand-up, so here are a couple of quotations from him:
Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
I don’t agree, but I’ll give him credit for being clever. He can turn a phrase.
Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope.
Now that’s fucking funny. Two points for P.J. O’Rourke.
And you know what else is funny (just for an example)? Mark Twain complaining about the German language:
In the first place, I would leave out the Dative case. It confuses the plurals; and, besides, nobody ever knows when he is in the Dative case, except he discover it by accident -- and then he does not know when or where it was that he got into it, or how long he has been in it, or how he is going to get out of it again. The Dative case is but an ornamental folly -- it is better to discard it.
In the next place, I would move the Verb further up to the front. You may load up with ever so good a Verb, but I notice that you never really bring down a subject with it at the present German range -- you only cripple it. So I insist that this important part of speech should be brought forward to a position where it may be easily seen with the naked eye.
Anyone got a theory about the humorlessness of right wingers?
UPDATE: It started as sort of a rant, but the diary got lots of comments. I feel as if I made a lot of new friends. And there are lots of good theories about why right wingers aren't funny.