The Truth Behind ‘Conservative’ Humor
All good humor is based on truth, which is why so many self-proclaimed liberals don't get the jokes exposing their worldview on the People's Cube.
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“Liberal” bloggers achieved a swift scientific consensus as they familiarized themselves with the People’s Cube on this thread. That the consensus was scientific is evident from someone’s dropping a scientific word — “dissertation” — and the tendency to categorize everything in the world, including humor, into “liberal” and “conservative.” As we know, the world consists of two types: the ones who split the world into two types, and the ones who don’t. At least now we know who’s doing it.
Bloggers at the Constitution Club wrote:
I just spent forty-five minutes over at “The People’s Cube” trying to find something funny, via that elusive conservative humor, with no luck. Dave put it well, “when you have too much time on your hands”.
Now I know how PG feels when I post Sadly, No!. Not that it’s going to stop me.
Comment by Andre the Defiant — April 23, 2008 @ 11:10 pmI really have to move forward on my dissertation at some point about why conservative humor isn’t funny.
Comment by Wes — April 24, 2008 @ 5:28 amActually, Jesus did support redestribution [sic] of wealth, as Christianity is supposed to do in general.
Except the sadistic scum that call themselves so now, feel much better beating up homosexuals and then paying 50cent to a church or so.
Comment by V — April 24, 2008 @ 6:34 am
They attached a “conservative” label to the Cube and categorized it as “unfunny,” grouping it together with bigotry, racism, homophobia, and religious fundamentalism. Observe that nowhere on the Cube will you find arguments in support of those views. I never identified myself as strictly “conservative.” I never distanced myself from anybody. It’s the “liberals” who distanced themselves from me when they found out that I had a moral backbone.
I have always maintained that humor is funny when it strikes you as true. It’s a sudden realization of the truth that rises to the surface inside a bubble of silly laughter. But those who live in a different moral universe, feeding off different versions of the truth, will not be amused if jokes don’t strike them as true; nothing will surface.
Remember Gary Cooper in High Noon? (I watched it a few days ago.) His character made a moral choice to stand for what’s right against the wishes of the “world community.” The judge ran away, the pastor washed his hands, the friends stayed home, the pacifist Quaker bride left him, and the saloon was full of corrupt drunks and cowards who cheered for the bandits. And as Gary Cooper stood alone in the deserted street preparing to die for the truth, suppose the saloon crowd would start making jokes about how Cooper talks funny, how uncultured he is, how he’s playing a lone cowboy, how he’s doing things unilaterally, and how war on the bandits is, in fact, illegal.
Sound familiar? No matter how professionally crafted those jokes might be, they would not strike me as funny and I would not laugh at them because they would be morally offensive. Not only would they miss the truth — they would ultimately be against the truth. Because no matter what arguments the saloon crowd may present for moral relativity, the truth in this situation is only one — and you either strike it or not.
That’s why I never laugh at the jokes made by Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher, David Letterman, and the rest of them. They remind me of the offensive saloon cads in High Noon.
By the same token, the “liberals” who laugh at Colbert’s jokes won’t laugh at mine. But they used to laugh at my jokes when I hung out with them in Clinton-era New York, where morals were murky and the truth was “unknowable.” Everybody was free to choose their own version of the truth from the extensive menu — and nobody could force them to do otherwise. But then one day, against everybody’s will, the truth about our place in the world was revealed to us in all its clarity. There was no way to escape what happened on 9/11/2001. The 57 varieties of the truth shrunk to just one choice — and you could either take it or leave it.
Each of us continued to maintain the same set of values as before — and yet we became divided. What divided us was the moral choice we made or didn’t make. But not making a choice in that situation was a choice in itself. It put us on different sides of the ideological barricades.
I didn’t choose to be a “conservative” — my liberal “friends” chose it for me when they rejected me and I found myself standing next to a bunch of similar “rejects” whom I never met before, but who looked like interesting and intelligent people. They were all very different; what united them was a distinctive moral backbone. I will never let others define me on my behalf, but if being one of the intelligent people with a moral backbone is “conservative,” I’ll accept it as an honorable degree.
Oleg Atbashian, a writer and graphic artist from Ukraine, currently lives in New York. He is the creator of ThePeoplesCube.com, a satirical website where he writes under the name of Red Square.
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64 Comments
poul:dude. with all due respect and sympathy with your views, you’re painfully unfunny. sorry.
Apr 29, 2008 - 1:05 am Oliver Willis:Conservative humor always feels the need to explain its unfunniness because they always put the agenda first and the funny last, if at all.
Apr 29, 2008 - 1:12 am Ed Wallis:Comrade Red Square! “poul” and “Oliver Willis” must be sent to Absolut Retraining Camp!
I sorta pity these two above. Need more perspective in life. I’ve been around the D.C. area all my life, and it never ceases to amaze me how “humorless” people can react (actually, on both sides of the political fence), once they’ve placed their politics over their whoopee-cushions.
“Truth” tends to make for great humor, as the author suggests. Not so contempt.
Apr 29, 2008 - 3:47 am RE:“The first reaction to truth is hatred” — Tertullian
The People’s Cube is one of the most brilliant sites on the web. It is most appropriate for these Orwellian times. Thank you for many hours of enjoyment, Mr. Atbashian!
Apr 29, 2008 - 4:02 am JW:I agree about High Noon - it was a brilliant and gripping dramatisation of the need to stand up to McCarthyism. And it stands the test of time - it still has something to teach us about the importance of people standing up against those who try to silence dissent and who regard any criticism of the government as somehow unpatriotic. The people who made High Noon suffered for it - barred from jobs, let down by people more concerned for profit than for what is right - but they prevailed in the long run.
Apr 29, 2008 - 5:24 am Wes:OK, I never equated anything to bigotry or hatred of any kind. It’s just that almost all conservative humor is very heavy-handed, and there’s never anything funny about that. Oliver Willis got it exactly right.
As for the rest, your analogy would be more appropriate if Gary Cooper were going off to fight other, unrelated murderers while the first pack of them were able to formulate a plot to go attack the town. Which is actually a darkly funny concept in and of itself.
Apr 29, 2008 - 5:30 am frank g:I’ve been to your site, at the end of many long night shifts and it makes me laugh out loud. If I look at a million web sites, I will always remember The People’s Cube. Some day liberals (or communist true believers) will just be laughed off the planet for the decades of utterly failed ideas they continue to propose. The ultimate joke.
Apr 29, 2008 - 6:00 am Keith_Indy:What Jesus proposed (or the ancient Christian church practiced for a time) was WILLING sharing of goods. No one FORCED them to enter into that practice. They had the choice.
Satire often falls flat for the people being satirized.
So, if you don’t find it funny, then you must be who’s being satirized. QED
Apr 29, 2008 - 6:33 am Dan:You know what I think is really funny? Humorless folks trying to tell us what we should and shouldn’t think is funny.
Thanks, ThoughtPolice! You’ve shown us the error of our ways! We’ll go back to the socially acceptable chucklefests of Bill Maher, Jackass and Al Franken!
This criticism only stems from sad sacks still trapped in the humor gulag. Everyone else is too busy laughing.
PS - I went to a Craig Ferguson concert the other night. Conservative, patriotic humor at its height. Haven’t laughed that hard, that long, in years.
Apr 29, 2008 - 6:38 am RE:Conservative humor can only seem ‘heavy-handed’ to those who takes themselves far too seriously.
Apr 29, 2008 - 6:39 am ronan:Kamarad Oleg is the only one who has understood that liberals are so, so funny that he had to create a very special blog just for them …..
Apr 29, 2008 - 6:41 am Ed Wallis:JW, maybe you meant to refer to the hijacking and diversion of the “exposure of Communist infiltration” issue made by Democrats in the Senate and White House…?
See “Blacklisted by History” by Evans
Apr 29, 2008 - 6:48 am Henry gomez:Oleg, the people Cuba Funny with a capital F. No doubt about it. Keep up the great work exposing the hypocrisy of the left in a way that makes us laugh.
Apr 29, 2008 - 7:14 am The Hairy Beast:Constitution Club - just for the record - isn’t a liberal blog. There are ten members; three conservatives, two avowed liberals and the remainder fluctuate from issue to issue. In other words, it’s a mixed blog.
We have three rules:
1. Keep it relatively clean.
2. Keep it civil.
3. No loopy conspiracy theories.
Thanks for the pingback and thanks for all the laughs on (what the Beast considers) a very witty and well done site!
Apr 29, 2008 - 7:25 am Saltherring:Liberals would indeed be funny if they weren’t so pathetic.
Apr 29, 2008 - 7:37 am Wes:It isn’t satire I don’t “get”. Anybody with half a brain (which excludes all liberals, right? hahahahahahahaha) can understand the satire. It just isn’t funny. Look, there has been conservative humor, and I admit as much in later entries. But most conservative humor (and about 50% of liberal political humor) is the equivalent of a comic talking about how airplane food is bad.
I hate to do this, because I like the guy who runs The People’s Cube and he seems like a heck of a nice guy, and the stuff that doesn’t care about making a point is pretty good. But…
http://www.thepeoplescube.com/spread/thumbs/Thumbs_CheDead.gif
http://www.threadless.com/submission/82652/Support_the_Revolution
Second one is funny, first is not. Both attempt to make fun of the same thing.
Apr 29, 2008 - 7:51 am Wes:Oh, yay! Oleg didn’t do that shirt. Now I don’t feel guilty saying it sucks. Sorry for double posting.
Apr 29, 2008 - 7:54 am AWOL Civilization:The role of good satire in any era is to expose the silliness and pretentiousness of the intellectual fashions of the moment. In our era, those fashions are overwhelmingly “liberal” (for lack of a better word); i.e., the ossified, lifeless result of several generations of collectivist deconstruction of Western culture. One can embrace this world-view only at the cost of having one’s intellect drained of substance.
In laying bare this phenomenon, the People’s Cube has catapulted itself to the cutting edge of contemporary satire.
Apr 29, 2008 - 7:54 am The Hairy Beast:See, now you got Wes all worked up. And we’ll have to pay for it on our blog all day.
Apr 29, 2008 - 8:01 am Mookie:Satire and sarcasm are higher forms of humor. Which is why the adolescent brain of your typical leftist is unable to appreciate them.
Apr 29, 2008 - 9:03 am David Wynn:I would agree that humor finds its basis in truth, but I’m concerned with your assertion that there is only one truth. Neither worldview has a monopoly on truth, and September 11th does not boil the complexity of reality into black and white. To say so is to try and monopolize your version of truth without any real evidence to support it.
Apr 29, 2008 - 9:28 am richard miniter:Actually, Oleg, you are not funny. I went to your site wanting to laugh, but all I found was sophomoric attacks on Democrats and liberals. Sophomoric, unfunny attacks. About the only thing missing were jokes about Sen. Kennedy’s drinking…
When liberals manage to be funny (and I agree that Bill Mahrer is bigot, not a comedian), they start out noting a situation that has occurred to all of us… and they point out the absurdity… (and sometimes slip in a one-sentence plea for national health care, world peace or whatever).
When they attack Bush and other politicians, they are as unfunny as you are.
So watch some stand-up, read the Onion, listen to some vintage Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy… and stop yer whining.
Apr 29, 2008 - 9:43 am Ed Wallis:richard miniter: “About the only thing missing (at The People’s Cube) were jokes about Sen. Kennedy’s drinking…”
HEY RM: Just looking for Ed Kennedy?!…you didn’t look at the St. Patrick’s Day special…go back and enjoy The People’s Cube!
Apr 29, 2008 - 9:53 am The Hairy Beast:Oleg, if you are going to argue that your site is funny, it probably would have helped your thesis if you’d put some humor in piece you published here.
Apr 29, 2008 - 9:55 am Red Square:Thanks for all your thoughts.
The existence of an absolute standard for the truth (as in the High Noon example) is not always obvious and self-evident, and it takes an extreme situation for people to notice. There are people with enough character and reasoning ability to remember where the truth lies and use it as a guidance in their lives. There are others who quickly forget about it, or never see it at all, and claim that the truth is either unknowable, or is conveniently located in the most accessible places (their reproductive organs, an NPR broadcast, or the morning issue of the New York Times).
Considering these two views of the truth, the discussion about what political humor is funny or unfunny is meaningless due the impossibility to agree on one common standard.
It’s the same problem as with political coverage in the media: there will probably never be an agreement on one standard of the truth; therefore, there can never be “neutral” and “unbiased” reporting. The pretense at neutrality at the MSM is a harmful myth, and the success of Fox News may be explained by their decision to move away from that pretense and deliver news and opinions clearly labeled as “left,” “right,” and “centrist.”
Perhaps the best way to identify liberal bias in the MSM is to let the reporters look at the People’s Cube and see if they laugh at it.
Most of them probably won’t - which explains the near absence of conservative humor in the traditional media. People who honestly believe that the absolute truth is to be found in their own pants, will not find conservative humor funny or worthy of promoting - they’ll promote the empty and pompous Bill Maher instead and continue to remain under the impression that conservatives never laugh and don’t know what “funny” is.
Apr 29, 2008 - 9:59 am Red Square:Richard Miniter: thanks for the constructive advice, but perhaps you should come back to the Cube when you’re in a different mood.
To my other critics: more people have subscribed this morning to the People’s Cube mailing list due to this publication than there were negative comments on this thread. That’s a standard of value that can hardly be argued with.
And a question to David Wynn: how many versions of truth do you see in High Noon?
Apr 29, 2008 - 10:18 am Mookie:Mr. Minter may be on to something, unfortunately we’ve been “celebrating” our differences for so long that we’ve lost our commonality of culture. And as long as people like Mr. Wynn believe that truth is subjective (i.e. My truth is that the earth is round; your’s is that it’s flat) we’ll never get back to any kind of consensus - on humor or anything else.
Apr 29, 2008 - 10:19 am Red Square:The Hairy Beast: this article wasn’t intended to be funny or entertaining. I wrote it to share an earnest observation of what divides people in their reaction to humor. In my analysis, it happens to be the same thing that divides people’s reaction to the truth. You can agree with it or not; there’s nothing funny about that.
Another thing that this article wasn’t intended to do is, to defend the funniness of the People’s Cube or to explain why it’s supposed to be funny. That would be a really stupid thing to do. The growing membership of the Cube and long threads of comments that often span on several pages is an objective measure of its success.
You have surely noticed that I’m not even trying to sound funny on this thread. I’m used to coming to Pajamas Media in a serious frame of mind whenever I feel I need to cool down.
Apr 29, 2008 - 11:05 am mpgrunt787:Even if you didn’t get the site remember this: No on is a boob with the peoples cube! Well maybe if you post a the constitution club, Hey guys way to show us all how tolerant and open minded liberals are. Bunch of straightaphobes.
Apr 29, 2008 - 12:02 pm Narko:The High Noon metaphor is a rather interesting one considering that the bandit and cowardly townspeople represented McCarthy and those in the media who capitulated to him, respectively. You’d do well to read about the “conservative” reaction, especially that of John Wayne, who condemned the film as “un-American” and did his best to get it censored.
I’m not a liberal by any stretch of the imagination, but I disagree with you on the application of your principles, if not the principles themselves.
Apr 29, 2008 - 12:55 pm Heather:I found this really funny, actually:
Conservative humor always feels the need to explain its unfunniness because they always put the agenda first and the funny last, if at all.
For the last eight years, all “liberal” “humor” is a variation of “Bush is stupid! *wait for applause*”
Agenda, no funny.
Apr 29, 2008 - 2:26 pm John the Libertarian:Excellent post, Oleg.
For years I just believed liberals were humorless, that they were too dire and earnest and took everything way too seriously. But you have made a more clarifying point, that the subjectivity of humor (and, for that matter, art) does depend on one’s moral compass. And the High Noon metaphor was perfect.
Nice job.
Apr 29, 2008 - 2:46 pm John the Libertarian:p.s. And one of the best tests of humorlessness is Team America by Trey Parker and Matt Stone. The first half of the film pokes fun at neo-cons, which I thought was hilarious, and the second half satirizes Hollywood liberals, which had me crying I was laughing so hard.
Apr 29, 2008 - 2:49 pm Dennis:“I would agree that humor finds its basis in truth, but I’m concerned with your assertion that there is only one truth. Neither worldview has a monopoly on truth, and September 11th does not boil the complexity of reality into black and white. To say so is to try and monopolize your version of truth without any real evidence to support it.”
You seem to be mixing up worldview with truth; they’re actually much different.
Truth is a yes/no proposition. (Will you burn your hand if you put it on a hot stove? Yes/No) Worldview is whatever you want it to be.
Any given situation has only one objective ‘truth’. It’s not always easy to see what that truth is, though. Stoves are easy, people are difficult.
Too many people think that their worldview MUST be the truth just because it’s theirs. Doesn’t make it true but it sure can make things harder for anyone around them who’s not a ‘believer’.
Apr 29, 2008 - 2:50 pm Maksim:Oleg’s points is, there needs to be a grain of truth in the humor for it to be funny and “those who live in a different moral universe, feeding off different versions of the truth, will not be amused if jokes don’t strike them as true; nothing will surface”.
This is true, regardless your ideology. Liberals have a different morality (I’d say no morality) and believe in an alternative truth (I’d say falsehoods) than we Cubist, so I’m not surprised they would find The People’s Cube unfunny.
Regarding High Noon and McCarthyism: Yes Carl Foreman the screenwriter was a member of the American Communist Party and he was making a political statement about McCarthyism with the movie. That does not erase the theme of standing up against evil, even when it means going at it alone. Oleg using High Noon as a metaphor for his experiences is quite appropriate and accurate.
Apr 29, 2008 - 2:51 pm Tom W.:The best humor on the Web is provided by Australian conservatives.
Check out Tim Blair’s blog.
http://tinyurl.com/3touk6
I’ve heard that Australians read the most books per capita in the world. That might have something to do with it.
And Australian conservatives–maybe all Australians–famously don’t care what anybody thinks of them. Fearlessness has a lot to do with being funny.
Aussies also have the market cornered on creative insults. Reverend Wright was blathering about “the dozens” the other day at the Press Club. If he went up against an Aussie conservative in the dozens, he’d be instantly rendered a slowly dissipating pink mist.
Apr 29, 2008 - 3:32 pm Comrade Krotchsky:Comrade Red Square’s site is very funny. The Party says that everyone must view it and laugh accordingly. Not to do so is wrong-thinking capitalist-imperialist plot and violators of the People’s Will shall be drawn, quartered, and eaten by our trained army of carnivorous plants. Long live the Revolution! Down with those who oppose the Cube!
Apr 29, 2008 - 4:56 pm EDW:True, there aren’t a lot of funny conservatives in the entertainment media, but there also aren’t a lot of conservatives of any stripe. Lack of existence is a non-starter for humor. On the web, though, I can think of at least a few very funny satirical conservative sites:
Apr 29, 2008 - 5:51 pm Pinkie:Iowahawk
IMAO
Blame Bush
Scrappleface
The People’s Cube, of course
Oliver Willis
Mr. Atbashian writes that “humor is funny when it strikes you as true. . . . But those who live in a different moral universe, feeding off different versions of the truth, will not be amused if jokes don’t strike them as true; nothing will surface.”
IMVHO, that is the whole point of the article; the crux of what he is saying; he isn’t whining or complaining that liberals don’t find TPC funny. He is merely making a simple observation. Who really needs to lighten up here?
And I for one do find this article and the comments funny, because the comments coming from those who disagree with the author are only proving his point. It reminds me of when Pope Benedict quoted a Byzantine emperor from 600 years earlier, who said something to the effect that Islam is spread by the sword–IOW, join us or die. And how did Muslim extremists react? Why, by going out and proving his point!
Why, this is so funny . . . it should be on The People’s Cube.
Apr 29, 2008 - 6:42 pm mph:This much I know for certain — Jon Stewart is extremely unfunny. If someone is truly funny, you can disagree with their politics, but still find the humor in their insights. Stewart is simply, ridiculously, not at all funny.
Stephen Colbert knows this fact as well and it is obvious to see through their short interactions.
Apr 29, 2008 - 8:12 pm Galinar:Dear Oleg, I am not sure how much you are interested in the opinions of your fellow ex-SovietUnions, but all my friends and family are finding your site absolutely hilarious! I am actually using Cube to help developing sense of humor in my kids. Even 11 year old can grasp that idea of man-made continental drift (with maps attached) is brilliant. Great job and thank you.
Apr 29, 2008 - 8:34 pm Gregory:Tovarich Oleg;
Keep up the good work! For the Rodina! Dosvidanya!
Grigoriy Gordonovich.
Apr 29, 2008 - 10:43 pm John Samford:“Habit for Hamas” I laughed so hard it scared my rottweiler.
Apr 30, 2008 - 4:34 am biff diggerence:Anyone who doesn’t find ‘Peanut’ Carter a hoot has no understanding of Monty Python. Anyone that has no appreciation of the Python has no sense of humor.
Gary Cooper?
Heinz 57?
Trade in that Edsel, comrade.
Apr 30, 2008 - 7:51 am upchuckie_cheezits:Took a quick look at The Cube after skimming this post and some of the comments.
Childish, simplistic, labored, obvious, tedious, heavy-handed, and not that funny. The anti-Onion.
I don’t think it’s the ideas, it’s the execution.
If we consider satire as an art the Cube is the equivalent of a 3 year old finger painting.
Apr 30, 2008 - 9:20 am RiverC:The People’s Cube has that (among other things) type of meta-humor (you must find this funny, or the party will make you understand the funny) that is reminiscent of R.A.W… i.e…
‘The Motor Company’ (which is written ‘The Fnord Motor Company’.) The gag is, every person who sees it ignores the Fnord and acts like they don’t even heard the word ‘Fnord’. It is a kind of humor that goes beyond what some people classify as even possibly being funny, and so don’t get the joke. The People’s Cube rests firmly on this level (in my opinion) most of the time, so some people miss that.
Apr 30, 2008 - 9:44 am Judson:How quickly they forget - John Wayne - one of the trure gods of the right wing - hated High Noon - some Wayne quotes taken from emanuellevy.com “In that picture, four guys come in to gun down the sheriff. He goes to the church and asks for help and the guys go, ‘Oh well, Oh. gee.’ And the women stand up and say, ‘You’re rats. You’re rats. You’re rats.’ So Cooper goes out alone.”
“It’s the most un-American thing I’ve seen in my whole life,” charged the actor, for the rugged men of the frontier, who had battled the Indians as well as nature, would not be afraid of four villains. Instead, they would have united, as they had united “to make the land habitable.”
Wayne was humiliated by the movie’s last scene, showing Cooper “putting the United States marshal’s badge under his foot and stepping on it.” Walking away from his job, as Cooper did, was inconceivable to Wayne’s commitment to responsibility and public office.””
Apr 30, 2008 - 9:45 am pdxpunk:“If we consider satire as an art the Cube is the equivalent of a 3 year old finger painting.”
Apr 30, 2008 - 11:21 am John the Libertarian:So sayeth “Upchuck_cheezits.”…Uh, okay. Guess we can deduce from the wit of your handle that you are the be-all & end-all of humor.
EDW said: True, there aren’t a lot of funny conservatives in the entertainment media
Yes there are! Dennis Miller, but you have to sprint to keep up with him. Ron White, Jeff Foxworthy, Larry the Cable Guy - took me a long time to open myself up to their humor, but it was well worth it. Trey Parker/Matt Stone are more libertarian and a lot of their humor is based on conservative common sense. And Charles Krauthammer? That guy makes me laugh out loud with some of his wickedly satirical observations.
There just aren’t a lot of *declared* conservative humorists out there. To do so in the entertainment business fills them with the dread of coming out of the closet.
Honestly, every other Democrat I know doesn’t know how conservative he/she really is, and doesn’t want to know.
Apr 30, 2008 - 2:45 pm MATTLINC:“Remember Gary Cooper in High Noon?….. The judge ran away, the pastor washed his hands, the friends stayed home, the pacifist Quaker bride left him, and the saloon was full of corrupt drunks and cowards who cheered for the bandits.”
Not to split hairs there, Oleg, but Grace Kelly as “Amy Kane” comes back and shoots one of the Miller brothers in the back to save Gary Cooper “Marshall Kane”from a certain death.
Apr 30, 2008 - 3:11 pm Donna:Two of the funniest writers in print or pixels: P.J. O’Rourke and Mark Steyn.
Apr 30, 2008 - 5:39 pm Magnus:Oh come on folks–trying to explain to a liberal that its ok to laugh at yourself once in awhile is like trying to teach a serpent to paint. They’re just not equipped for it.
Apr 30, 2008 - 6:55 pm Javelin:“Remember Gary Cooper in High Noon? (I watched it a few days ago.) His character made a moral choice to stand for what’s right against the wishes of the “world community.” The judge ran away, the pastor washed his hands, the friends stayed home, the pacifist Quaker bride left him, and the saloon was full of corrupt drunks and cowards who cheered for the bandits. And as Gary Cooper stood alone in the deserted street preparing to die for the truth, suppose the saloon crowd would start making jokes about how Cooper talks funny, how uncultured he is, how he’s playing a lone cowboy, how he’s doing things unilaterally, and how war on the bandits is, in fact, illegal.”
Apr 30, 2008 - 9:25 pm Miss O:AS a metaphor about McCarthyism or Bush’s unnecessary war in Iraq, it fails miserably in the truth department. McCarthy was correct about Communist influence and those poor oppressed blacklisted writers were almost all dedicated Communists. As far as some right wing John Wayne(tough talking, draft dodging celluloid warrior) con using it as a metaphor for the Iraq war, since Saddam was not coming for us because he was no threat, it fails the integrity test too.
So exactly what is so funny?
The People’s Cube is moderately funny, if you are a right wing dimwit who lumps Hillary, Hitler, Obama and Stalin in one indistinguishable mass. Maybe as a Ukranian, he might want to satirize all the wonderful Ukranian nationalists and bigots who created so much mayhem before and after the October Revolution, like the ones who emerged out of the muck to kill the Jews for religious or racial reasons/
Perhaps the best way to identify liberal bias in the MSM is to let the reporters look at the People’s Cube and see if they laugh at it.
Most of them probably won’t - which explains the near absence of conservative humor in the traditional media. People who honestly believe that the absolute truth is to be found in their own pants, will not find conservative humor funny or worthy of promoting - they’ll promote the empty and pompous Bill Maher instead and continue to remain under the impression that conservatives never laugh and don’t know what “funny” is.
Hey - who said conservatives aren’t funny! That’s hilarious!
Oh - you were serious, maybe?
Most, and perhaps all, of the people you listed make fun of more than just conservatives. Moreover, they make fun of themselves, a good deal of the time.
That’s something sorely lacking with RW “comics” like Limbaugh, Coulter, etc.
Apr 30, 2008 - 11:21 pm upchuckie_cheezits:There’s your cackling bullies.
Dennis Miller funny? He was lame as a liberal, and his act is orders of magnitude crappier now.
I think we can all agree that the pinnacle of conservative humor, sharp, incisive, witty, and when you stop and think about it, all too true, there is — TA DAAA — Mallard Fillmore.
Apr 30, 2008 - 11:50 pm Christian:Humor has to do with personal frame of reference. The humorist establishes a context with his audience, leads his audience along the lines of said context, then surprises his audience by taking the context in a different direction. This isn’t the only type of humor, of course, but it’s the most common. Conservatives and liberals in the modern era very rarely laugh with one another because we are so far removed culturally from one another that we no longer share the same context.
Because of minimized personal contact and an unprecedented ability on the part of individuals to filter those with whom they interact we barely even share a common culture any more. When a liberal makes a joke about “Chimpy McHitler’s Illegal War For Oil” other liberals will laugh because they live in that sound chamber: it’s what they read on their blogs, hear from the commentators on the liberal news sites, talk about with their liberal-only friends. Likewise, when a conservative makes a joke about “HopeChange Obama and the Hope for Change” other conservatives laugh because their blogs, talk show hosts and conservative friends have been talking about the same thing. We’ve contextually established ourselves as liberals or conservatives, and therefore can no longer laugh at the same jokes in a political context.
It would be easy to mistake this for only laughing at what is true, because, of course, you believe the truth. In reality, we laugh at what is contextually relevant to ourselves.
May 1, 2008 - 12:20 pm Bible Nut:So, we are supposed to change? Why is it that conservatives are expected to change? Oh! I forgot, if we sell our souls to you and become slaves to liberal ideas, then there will be peace.
May 1, 2008 - 7:12 pm Bible Nut:Ooops. Sorry, the ‘you’ is supossed to by ‘them’. I get a little emotional when I read these things. Sorry.
May 1, 2008 - 7:17 pm Ivan Betinov:Humor is in the eye of the beholder, folks. I’m a 45-year-old white guy. I was raised in the south, the rural south, for that matter, and I just don’t get–for example–Def Comedy Jam. I don’t find many of the routines funny, and some of them I have found offensive. And in my outrage, do you know what I did?
I changed the channel. I didn’t send an angry letter to Russell Simmons, demanding he cease and desist. Didn’t write a nasty op-ed piece denouncing the show. Didn’t start a blog, didn’t grab a magic marker and make a sign, didn’t even call my neighbors and tell them not to watch. And until we achieve the Perfect World of Next Tuesday, you are allowed to read what you wish and ridicule it at leisure. If you don’t like the People’s Cube, if you find the writing purile and predictable, if it doesn’t strike you as funny…read something else.
A quick thank you to Galinar. Glad you liked the Incoherent Truth of Anthropogenic Continental Drift. I didn’t do the graphics (they took away my fingerpaints), but I did do the text.
May 1, 2008 - 10:58 pm poetryman69:So why did Dubya go to war?
A. To enrich his oil buddies
B. To enrich war profiteering corporations
C. To enrich his pet dog, I mean loyal
retainer Vice President, FUtus of Borg
D. To give his Cult the ritual human
sacrifices, maiming and dismemberments
they need to worship Satan
E. To create another Shiite nation
F. Dubya was a charter member of Numbnut Neo-Con Nimrods making the world safe for terrorism
G. Dubya was a charter member of Numbnut Neo-con Nimrod Numbskull’s making the world safe for big oil.
H. How do I love thee? Let me count the wars.
I. All of the above
May 3, 2008 - 3:52 am USpace:The People’s Cube is cool. I highly recommend their ‘Progressive Truth Generator’. The Left doesn’t like ‘conservative’ humor that points out the insanities of the Left. Those on the ‘Right’ laugh at a joke that decimates Leftist dogma.
I think the Left ‘gets it’ deep down, where the truth hides, but they don’t laugh at all because they are feeling that they are insulted or have been shown a painful truth they didn’t want to see. Quick verbal jabs at the Left are effective over time I believe. As with other flawed ideologies, Leftism must be mocked.
.
absurd thought -
God of the Universe thinks
the Right is always wrong
and the Left is always right
and facts don’t matter at all
.
May 3, 2008 - 5:10 pm lad:http://lulu.com/uspace
.
its photoshopped
the reflections are all wrong
May 25, 2008 - 11:03 am bgonzalez:Uspace has it right. One of the reasons those the left can’t find don’t find “conservative” humor funny is because they invest emotion in their beliefs rather than reason.
I’ll take on their movement of the moment as an example. Science education. Most urban areas of the country are solidly in Democrat hands and have been for decades. There are dozens of news stories every year about some new teaching method or group of teachers that are “outside of the box” on education. Yet every urban area in this country is a perpetual dropout machine. Yet it completely drives these same people insane that Southern or Mid-West states wish to challenge Darwinism by allowing other theories in the classroom - that are in some cases no more far reaching then Darwinism in some respects. What bothers them about it isn’t that some crackpot theories are going to infiltrate the education system, its already filled with theirs…. taxation creates wealth, human have more affect on climate than the sun, and corporations plot for ways to kill you its someone is challenging their domination.
Jun 22, 2008 - 12:23 am