Over at Hot Air, Ed Morrissey notes that Stephen Colbert ran with Biden age jokes (and attacked him for the Saudi visit) the other night. He starts:
Has Joe Biden become so unpopular that late-night comics might actually move away from their clapter production and start being funny again? Bill Maher made this transition months ago, but the rest of the late-night comics have been as loathe to target Biden for pointed political jokes as they were with Barack Obama. Or so it has seemed, anyway; late-night TV comedy has been pointless for well over a decade as it went from being funny to being didactic.Now, this raises something I refuse to believe - that comedians who move to support of the current American Right are actually capable of being funny. I know, I know - I can readily be accused of suffering from the same problem as conservatives - letting political views influence what I allow myself to find funny. But I'm certain any objective observer would have to agree with me - with my main evidence being the absolutely woeful "Gutfeld!" on Fox, which I have watched sometimes recently on Youtube.
Despite getting some attention not so long ago for apparent ratings success (which I think has diminished again), he and the show is painfully unfunny. And weirdly, I noticed, he seems in his monologues to often try to do self deprecation of the "maybe I'm gay" kind, only to have it fail utterly. Why would he even try that with the type of audience he has?
As for Bill Maher - I had been meaning to say that his segments (increasingly frequent) where he just wants to attack the Left for wokeness and political correctness, and not talk much about the Right turning the country into Christian fascism (because that doesn't annoy him as much), have also been poorly written and pretty painful to watch. I was never a big fan, but he has become much, much worse.
It's not just a current thing - over my life, even when I voted Liberal, I knew that comedy sympathetic to Right wing politics has very, very rarely worked. I mean, I don't like all Left wing comedy either - I was never a fan of Max Gillies, for example, and more recently, I couldn't stand Tom Ballard's shows. But Left leaning comedy at least has the capacity (in a way Right wing comedy virtually doesn't) to be funny, even if it didn't always work for me. Right wing comedy especially doesn't work now, when the worst of the Right (and that's a disturbingly large part of America) has developed clear sympathy to religious fascism.
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I've noticed this happening in a different way with some of the most reflexively right-wing amongst my small circle of poets. (You know my sympathies lie with the right too, but when that is because of a conviction that government tends to be corrupt and it's power should be limited, it is - or should - be easy to cut off support for any one party when the corruption is obvious, as has happened in the right of recent years.) Whinging about women only poetry events and defending the most oafish conspiracy theories re: stolen elections and vaccine mandates. Partly it comes from letting the left set the terms of debate and reflexively reacting against them in blind partisan zeal, partly it comes from borrowing a whole language of protest and activism that had previously only really been seen on the side of the left.
"Whinging about women only poetry events and defending the most oafish conspiracy theories re: stolen elections and vaccine mandates."
What the fuck is wrong with you hey tim? I thought you had to be really intelligent to be a poet. I thought people like Kipling, Goethe, team Shakespeare and Coleridge were these megabrains. But you here show yourself to be completely idiotic. So much of a dope you don't know you can't get a voter SPIKE in an unrigged election.
Did you not know that Tim? Did this escape your tender grasp of what probability is all about? You can wish upon a star, but when watching an election, your election is lost whenever a mild swing SWING NOT SPIKE, can't account for a change of outcome. So if you see a spike, THATS RIGGED. Because there is never a spike and there cannot be a spike.
So lets have that admission that you are wrong right now and go and apologise to your poet friends for fucksakes. Because if you can't get that right when its so fucking easy, then you really aren't up to a discussion on the mass murder of Jew jabs.
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