 |
 P. J. O’Rourke, author, humourist and political pundit, is one of the few truly funny right-wingers, say both Jim Slotek and comic Lewis Black. |
Even before some troglodyte comedians on Fox News’ Red Eye turned common ignorance about Canada into slow-news-day fodder, I’d been pondering the connection between political comedy and journalism.
This, of course, has been the “meme” in our industry since Jon Stewart did what some enterprising, aggressive journalist ostensibly should have done — roast CNBC and its marquee carnival-barker Jim Cramer (and by extension, the financial media in general) for being too cozy with the financial elite whose behaviour they were supposed to be monitoring.
Then it occurred to me, the mantra we are taught to follow as journalists, (originally meant satirically in its 19th century context), that the job of newspapers is “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” is actually a pretty good rule for comedy too.
That is to say, if you’re out to get laughs by afflicting the afflicted — say, mocking the handicapped — you’re probably (a) in high school, and (b) a douchebag. If you’re comforting the comfortable while you’re at it, then you’ve probably got a career ahead of you as Rush Limbaugh (remember his jerking around to mimic Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s disease?).
To be honest, I wasn’t even aware Red Eye was still on when its host (I won’t dignify him by mentioning his name) decided to deride our military for needing a chance to re-tool after spilling its blood all over Kandahar. I used to watch Fox News, and its equally angry left bizarro world counterpart MSNBC, regularly, but I recently went through some budgetary winnowing of my cable bill, and dropped a digital package that carried them.
Truth be told, I miss them both. They were like pro-wrestling, with the angry shouting and the need to crush any moderate position with a polemic piledriver. My idea of fractious heaven would be to team Keith Olbermann and Sean Hannity on the same show and watch the monitors crack in the background.
|
But the thudding maladroitness of the “jokes” on Red Eye was no surprise. It was just as I’d left it when Rachel Marsden was the cleverest person on it. What it has me wondering instead is why don’t conservatives have any ‘funny’ to fall back on? Red Eye clearly isn’t it, and I’ve listened to Rush and frankly, the spastic-act is about as sophisticated as it gets.
There are, and have been, conservative comics I enjoy, and I commiserated about it this week with The Daily Show’s Lewis Black, who was here to promote his cross-Canada “Dual-Citizenship” tour. We both agree P.J. O’Rourke is probably the funniest right-winger out there. (Although the current movement to purge intellectual Republicans probably works against him).
A telling characteristic of his best insights is that they are actually apolitical, like the thought that things fall apart — in democracies and boardrooms alike — as soon as you realize you can vote to give yourself money.
“P.J. is very good,” Black says. “And I think (avowed Republican) Dennis (Miller) is still funny. I have to say, he came on Jon’s show with these jokes about Iraq from the other side of the fence, and both Jon and I agreed, they were pretty funny.”
One of my all-time favourite conservative humourists was the late Al Capp, who, though best known as the creator of the L’il Abner comic strip (where he’d depict counterculture heroes like Joan Baez as “Joanie Phony”), toured and lectured at universities. What I liked about him was that he despised self-righteousness, no matter which side of the political fence it came from. When asked by a young Republican about “the breakdown in morals on college campuses,” he replied, “The sanctimonious tone of that question doesn’t fool me. What this guy really wants to know is ‘if there is a breakdown in morals on college campuses, when is it getting here?’ ”
“Al Capp was terrific,” Black concurs. “He was what Rush Limbaugh should have been, a genuine populist. Y’know, every eight or nine months they do articles about the wave of conservative comics coming up. I don’t know who they are, and they never hit.
“It’s tough in the sense that Jewish comics, Italian comics, Irish comics, the Black comics, part of the impetus of their humour traditionally was that they were at the bottom. Where does comedy come from? It’s usually the person being screwed, not the person doing the screwing.”
Ironically enough, we didn’t used to feel we needed to take our cultural cues from comedians. Black remembers me as one of the first people who ever interviewed him, and my angle back then was how few political comics there were (besides Black, there was Will Durst and Mort Sahl in his dotage, and the list pretty much ended there).
Black feels the pendulum may have swung too far. “The Wall Street Journal called the other day, and the concept was politics and humour. And the woman started asking me about Wanda Sykes Hall doing Obama’s White House Correspondence Dinner, and how I’d done the Congressional White House Dinner.
“And as it was going along, the topic just started making me angrier. And I said ‘We comics really have to go back to being less important. It’s got to stop!’ ”
jim.slotek@sunmedia.ca