Posted by
Andrews on Wednesday, April 16, 2008 5:32:08 PM
It is a bit off-topic, but I think I have stumbled on to something important, the main problem with political comedy. The more political they become, the less funny they are. And it is not just liberals, it works both ways.
Just think of pre-politics Dennis Miller, he was just more amusing. The more he takes sides in his political humor, the less funny he becomes. The same is true of George Carlin, who was always political and a bit too strident, but has become much less funny as he has started to preach more. Or take Michael Moore, now pretty much a maker of propaganda rather than comedy. It is hard to remember that he was once actually kind of funny. I remember watching
TV Nation and thinking "It's kind of amusing, a bit too preachy at times, but funny." The same applies to Lenny Bruce and his persecution rants of his later days or the period when Howard Stern obsessed about the FCC. They all suffered from adopting a strong political position.
Of course, humor is very subjective, so I am sure there are those who will disagree with my analysis, but I think my overall conclusion is accurate.
Just think about it this way, what is the least funny thing you can imagine? The jokes told by a religious figure. Has anyone ever heard a truly funny line from any priest, minister, pastor, rabbi, imam, or any other religious figure? I seriously doubt it.
And why not? Because these people have a very serious message to deliver, and it overshadows all else. Even their humor is subordinated to this message. That is why they have such trouble being funny.
Humor is a strange thing, but I think we can all agree things are generally amusing because they are absurd, or at least unexpected. From the unanticipated and inappropriate violence of slapstick, to the unexpectedly apropos words in puns, from the outright absurdism of Monty Python to the silly twists of knock knock jokes, all humor from the most childish tot he most mature rests on basically taking something familiar and adding the unanticipated.
That is why political humorists do so badly, and the same reason religious figures fail as well. The minute a minister opens his mouth, or a liberal or a conservative, we know what to expect. There is no chance he is going to deviate too far from his message. And that makes the chance for the unexpected much reduced, which, as I argued above, makes the chance for humor much reduced. And the more extreme one becomes in his political beliefs, the more predictable he becomes as well.
Perhaps some truly brilliant comedians can still find enough unexpected twists to make a joke, but it takes more and more skill as one becomes more political and, eventually, one's political views have become so narrow, and his statements so predictable, that humor is simply not possible any more.
It is no accident that we call dogmatic believers "humorless". I wish a few more comedians would take that lesson to heart.
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POSTSCRIPT
This entire essay was inspired by a
retrospective on the work of editorial cartoonist Herblock. While I was looking through his drawings I started to wonder why editorial cartoons are simply never funny. At best they are witty, or sum up issues in a novel way, but no one ever laughs at them. I then recalled a conversation I had years ago about how Michael Moore stopped being funny when he dedicated himself more to politics than humor and a later one about how George Carlin's entire recent act could be summed up by shouting "damn Republicans!" for an hour. All of which eventually led to the essay above.
I know the subject really doesn't fit with my usual blog topics, but I found it interesting, so thought maybe some of my readers would too.