Is the right completely humorless?
Or is humour intrinsically left? (I know, spelling, Cdn vs. American...)
[I’m taking a break this week from the Originality series, not sure where it’s going, need more reading time. May be resumed next week.]
I posted this Note to Substack on August 7th: “Is the right completely humorless? Enquiring minds would like to know.” … Deafening silence. If you don’t know about “Notes” on Substack, I think you get to them via the homepage of the author of any stack you subscribe to but honestly I’m not sure.
So I searched up “humourless right wing” and came across this: excerpt from The Right Wing Comedy Complex on The Vulture. It’s a book review and makes a good point about humour being a tool of resistance hence more common, pervasive even on the social justice side of life. I’ve written before about parrhesia, speaking truth to power, and humour is often full of that, frankness that startles and refreshes.
“Tool” is not exactly the right word though because humour is more like theatre or music or art, it’s effects are neither calculated nor measurable. It strikes out for the truth, nebulous though that may be.
But after that strong start, I think the Vulture piece, and the book it’s about, miss the point. Dad jokes, racist and sexist and homophobic jokes aren’t funny to anybody anymore. A bunch of guys potted in a bar with their sleeves rolled up might laugh but I dare say nobody’s fooling themselves about whether they know better, or what they’d be doing in mixed company.
The book warns that “we,” the presumably enlightened, unbigotted, centre-left ignor conservative humour at our peril. I seriously doubt that.
There are many conservative newspapers and magazines, and yes, some of them publish cartoons. I did a bit of surfing around. Other than some pretty good, biting, caricatures of Ms. Harris, the tone is preachy, pendantic, and to me at least, just not funny.
One exception is Compact Magazine, which I’ve also mentioned here before because Scott Menchin’s work appears regularly. Menchin isn’t a humourist exactly so much as an editorial illustrator, but close enough, his work is clever and critical in how it captures something from the article it illustrates.
Compact skews right, you might say, insofar as it’s critical of the mushy, self-righteous left, but it describes itself as searching for “a new political centre.” It publishes a lot of work that is not easily categorized left or right, and would not find its way into print otherwise, not unlike Substack. I recommend it.
The Punchline
If you want to learn more about comedy, and who doesn’t? here’s a primer in comedic styles. Philosopher Alva Noë believes comedy to be the highest art form because it always relies on a meta-level of understanding, it turns what we know on its head. Art, he says is more than a tool, it is a “strange tool,” because it relies for its effectiveness on furthering what we already know. Noë asks us to consider dance. Learning the steps of a particular dance is not art but choreography, which innovates from a base of what steps are known is. (Read more about his book Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature.)
Of comedy you might say, if it’s funny, it’s always “original.” Hey, see how I did that, going back to the beginning? Get me my loom!
P.S.
I’ll leave you with a non sequitur if I may. This sketch came out of the weave thing but right at the beginning when I first sat down with the idea all I could come up with was knitting. Go figure. Something about wool, pulling the wool over, sheep….
