National overview
Samantha Bee wrong about comedy
“This is the test of a good religion or you can joke about it,” GK Chesterton wrote. Those who hold their beliefs strong can laugh at the world, their problems, and themselves. Those who do not have confidence in their beliefs can not laugh at all, for fear that the whole thing will lapse. The same, of course, applies to political beliefs, which are often now a mere pretext for religious ideas. Comedian Samantha Bee recently remarked that she can not mock Joe Biden, just as she mocked Donald Trump, and admitted that she pulls her strings when it comes to the 46th president: You are like, okay, well , we can if we make jokes, we can make jokes about the infrastructure plan, but overall I’m: ‘Wow, that’s great. Why would I deliberately undermine something that seems like a great idea, across the board? Like, I do not have to make jokes just to make jokes. I like to make really targeted jokes. I think there are more worthy targets now. Bee’s remarks are perhaps the best example of what went wrong with left-wing comedians as of late: They think the point of comedy is to make ‘really targeted jokes’, ‘undermine things’, or to ‘target’ things at which they – and presumably – their audience – disagrees. Over the past decade, late-night hosts have set aside their trusted, everyday brand of comedy and threatened to tell the crowd about their moral values. They went from chasing laughter – no matter who the point of the joke may be – to chasing applause. The result was anything but funny. Satire can certainly make a point and even bring about change, but comedy in its purest way simply poses a question. It does not have an agenda and does not care if it offends anyone, not even the audience or the person writing the joke. If you are incapable of laughing at anything and are not worthy of anything – especially in a politician like Joe Biden – you may be blinded by your own worldview. A president who has been in politics for five decades and promises hope and change. A politician who campaigned for the abuse of the Trump administration and once elected, he did the things his party once rejected. A president has announced a return to normalcy that now proposes ideas that threaten our norms and institutions on a much more fundamental level than Trump ever did. Good comedians set aside their point of view and write the best joke, the ‘point’ must be condemned. Let’s admit something here: conservatives can be pretty bad in comedy. Browse through the Twitter account of Mike Huckabee (God bless him) and you will find jokes that only your strange uncle will think. Hi, I must admit that I also wrote some stinkers on that day. But we have to be honest with ourselves. Conservatives tried and failed to present good comedy programs and films to counter the late night propaganda every week night from the left. The problem with many of these attempts is that they first had to make a point and second had to be funny. Nobody wants the conservative Saturday Night Live or the Republican Jon Stewart (or the Christian Onion for that matter) – they want good comedy. But now the tables have turned, and the left is increasingly becoming the party of self-righteous zealots, disciples of a left-wing religion about which they cannot laugh. The big pronoun debate is a goldmine of contradictions and absurdities, but they will not touch it. They devoted all their benevolence to delivering self-serious lectures about Trump to an audience that once agreed that he was bad. From the Simpsons’ painfully bad parody of the group that comes under Trump’s skin – watch at your own risk – to creepy tweets from late-night hosts and TikTok “comedians” who just lip-sync everything Trump says and calls it comedy, the leftist tells a bit of bad jokes, too. And it only gets worse as they internalize leftist ideas and are unable to mock liberals without risking alienation or cancellation. However, they have made up their bed, so I feel little sympathy now that they have to lie in it. Leftists often argue that comedy ‘should hit’ and ‘should speak truth’. Who is more powerful than the President of the United States? Or a Democratic-controlled Congress that throws increasingly unhindered ideas that threaten to undermine our democracy? Or a leftist movement that has taken over corporations, sports leagues, American business schools and schools from kindergarten to college? If the point of comedy is to make a moral point with every joke, comedians like Samantha Bee will quickly realize that they have simply become defenders of the business after all. Bee’s remark that Biden is not really a worthy target just implies that your audience desperately needs to agree with you. This is also obviously false; hypocrisy is ripe ground for satire, so politicians are always worthy targets – left and right. I want to be fair, of course. At the Babylon Bee we mock more with the Left than with the Right. I can understand Bee’s comments, coupled with the desire to have more fun with the opposition than anyone else. At the same time, my favorite pieces to write are those that squarely face our audience, that exclaim the hypocrisy of the Right, that mock the inconsistent life among Christians and our failure to live up to what we preach. I like satire which likes best of all. Ultimately, it’s up to us, the audience. We have a choice when we hear jokes that criticize what we believe. We can laugh and think, ‘I never thought of it that way’, and maybe change for the better, or at least have a healthy and humble sense of humor about who we are. Or we may choose to take offense, to cancel the comedians who would dare to criticize our dogma and demand that it be replaced by self-righteous moral lecturers who preach to the choir.