Opinion by Hal Brown
I don’t know how many Trump cultists watch late night comedy. The Guardian asks the question “why can't rightwing comics break into US late-night TV?.” A right-wing website covering entertainment comes to an entirely different conclusion: “Revealed: Why There’s No Conservative Late Night Shows,” notable having as their first sentence “Late night television is as ideologically diverse as a Daily Kos convention..”
It occurred to me that if Trump cultists saw this video they would think it was a true attack against President Biden and laugh at it for all the wrong reasons..
Not that you need a reference, but no less a credible source than The Mayo Clinic tells us that when it comes to relieving stress, more giggles and guffaws are just what the doctor ordered. This is a no-brainer. In actuality laughing is good for both ideological camps as far as relieving stress. Mean spirited laughing at people may be good for the body and mood but I think it is bad for the soul whether defined spiritually, secularly, or both. I suggest Trump cultists are pretty much soulless.
What takes a more thought is deciding if there’s a difference between how people’s politics defines what they find funny.
I am biased against Republicans. My mind might be opened a crack to let some evidence that they have a healthy sense of humor but this had better be backed by some serious research. I’m not about to believe conclusions reached by a sociologist or political scientist equivalent of Dr. Scott Atlas.
My sense of what Republicans laugh at is mean spirited pratfall humor where you laugh when you see depictions of people tripping over tables and bleeding to death. I don’t mean Dick Van Dyke stumbling over an ottoman in the opening to his show:
The differences between what liberals and conservatives find funny has been an area of study by academics. For example this 2009 journal article: The Irony of Satire: Political Ideology and the Motivation to See What You Want to See in The Colbert Report.
Abstract (emphasis added):
This study investigated biased message processing of political satire in The Colbert Report and the influence of political ideology on perceptions of Stephen Colbert. Results indicate that political ideology influences biased processing of ambiguous political messages and source in late-night comedy. Using data from an experiment (N = 332), we found that individual-level political ideology significantly predicted perceptions of Colbert's political ideology. Additionally, there was no significant difference between the groups in thinking Colbert was funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements. Conservatism also significantly predicted perceptions that Colbert disliked liberalism. Finally, a post hoc analysis revealed that perceptions of Colbert's political opinions fully mediated the relationship between political ideology and individual-level opinion.
Much has changed in the past decade or so from when the following article was published in Wired: “Scientifically Speaking, Who's Funnier: Democrats or Republicans? However you slice and dice the presidential debates, there's l little question that Barack Obama won on the comedy front. But do liberals really have a lock on funny?” This article compared Barack Obama to Mitt Romney who, while not known for his sense of humor, never made fun of reporters with disabilities:
Some conclusions from the 2012 article:
He (an expert) did, however, find some differences in how the Democratic and Republican candidates joked around. Democrats, for example, tended to rely on the kind of humor and laughter that was inclusive and convivial. "The Democratic Party is a highly egalitarian party," says Stewart. "Anyone can get in or drop out. So you really have to be charismatic like Clinton or Obama to draw people in." Obama was particularly good at this in the 2008 season: Stewart found that in the debates, he often flashed smiles of genuine amusement and engaged in loose-jawed laughter, the sort of visual signals that suggest, "Join me, I'm here to play."
The article concludes:
But what about how average Democrats and Republicans go about their daily lives: In general, do liberals have a better sense of humor than conservatives?
To find out, Duke University psychology and behavioral economics professor Dan Ariely and Mount Holyoke College student Elisabeth Malin in 2008 told 22 jokes on various topics to 300 people, half liberal and half conservative, and asked them to rate their funniness. Not too surprisingly, the conservatives were more apt to enjoy jokes that reinforced traditional racial and gender stereotypes – including a zinger about a guy choosing a game of golf over his wife's funeral.
But here's the thing: Conservatives also gave higher ratings to absurdist quips from Jack Handey's Deep Thoughts, the sort of stuff usually associated with cerebral East Coast liberals. In fact, right-wingers found all kinds of jokes funnier than their liberal counterparts.
Maybe, then, the claim that Republicans aren't funny is as empty as that chair Clint Eastwood yelled at during the 2012 Republican National Convention. And maybe conservatives really are ready for their own version of Stephen Colbert or Lenny Bruce. All they have to do now is find the right funnyman (or woman) for the job.
To some extent this contradicts my bias, but in my defense the research was conducted in 2012 with conservatives of the pre-Trump era. I believe that the problem with studies like this was that they lumped run-of-the-mill conservatives with people who today would be Trump cultists.
It took considerable Internet searching but I managed to find information which addressed what Trump cultists may find funny: “A new study finds that the typical right-wing authoritarian isn’t a very funny person.” This is from Oct. 2020.
This is the conclusion:
Results: your standard right-wing authoritarian isn’t very funny
Right-wing authoritarianism had a significant negative relationship with humor; people who scored high in RWA generated responses that the raters considered to be much less funny.
RWA also correlated negatively with openness to experience, and positively with conscientiousness. As the researchers expected, openness correlated positively with humor production, and conscientiousness correlated negatively with it.
These findings, the authors write, “strongly suggest that people high in RWA are less funny, defined as the ability to create humorous ideas, even when global personality traits with established ties to RWA, humor, and creativity are controlled for.”
The authors also add that their findings “should be viewed in the context of the sample, which was young, enrolled in a university, and predominantly female.”
They suggest that future studies should look more closely at the components of right-wing authoritarianism that impair humor creation. One possible mechanism is that RWA correlates with cognitive rigidity and seriousness, versus flexibility and playfulness.
In sum, the authors write, “the findings suggest that people high in RWA just aren’t very funny.”
I think you can substitute Trump cultist for right-wing authoritarian in the excerpt above.
We, meaning 99.9% of the people reading this, are experiencing an unusual combination of emotions: sadness over the state of the country and fear of what may happen if the far-right, the Trump cultists who may manage to succeed in their attempts at voter suppression. Combine two feelings with our knowing that even if Democrats and never-Trumpers who value the core values of American democracy prevail there will be a group of millions of Americans who believe outlandish conspiracy theories and are certain that the election was stolen and who are consumed by hate towards us.
Addendum:
If you really want to delve deeply into the study of humor much has been writing about it from Freud in the 1905 book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious to this long 2006 academic paper “Real Buddhas don't laugh: attitudes towards humour and laughter in ancient India and China.”
The later has one of my favorite examples of a unique “joke” which is an often quoted battle of puns between two zen masters:
‘I am an ass.’
‘I am the ass’s buttocks.’
‘I am the ass’s faeces.’
‘I am a worm in the faeces.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’m on my summer vacation!’
Another academic article, “Laughing in the Face of Climate Change? Satire as a Device for Engaging Audiences in Public Debate” prompted me to ask myself whether Trump cultist types even “get” satire.
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