The Left’s War on Comedy Is No Laughing Matter

If pure-hearted laughter is divine, the suppression of it is demonic. This could come to mind with our Left’s war on comedy, which really is happening. It also really is a campaign common to leftists.

Just ask USSR-born comedian Yakov Smirnoff, a man popular during the late Cold War period (the 1980s). As he quipped in an old Miller beer commercial, smiling, “In America, there’s plenty of lite beer and you can always find a party!”

“In Russia, the Party always finds you!”

He was joking, but not kidding. The Soviet Union practiced authoritarian censorship, and jokes had to be approved by a de facto “Department of Humor.” That was a colloquial name for a unit within the USSR’s Ministry of Culture. The latter’s job was to ensure the culture was communist.

And with socialism and communism gaining favor in the United States, so is their its penchant for suppressing good comedy. Writing about this Tuesday, commentator Armando Simon laments left-wing humorlessness. Citing Cuban dissident blogger Yoani Sánchez, he writes that she

stated that one of the things that first helped her to break through the indoctrination received at school of the cult of personality of Fidel Castro was her observation that Castro never joked, highly unusual for a Cuban.

Simon then continues:

We are in the midst of a Marxist upheaval going full throttle towards turning America into a Communist utopia. The symptoms are all there: self-censorship, censorship (aka “cancel culture”), political indoctrination of the military, indoctrination in the schools, network news deliberately becoming propaganda outlets, Balkanizing the population, etc.

Another symptom is the slow strangulation of comics and comedy.

Comedians are complaining of the toxic air that is stifling comedy. “Cancel culture” is being waged by insufferable, self-righteous fanatics always lurking in the background, ready to pounce on the slightest transgression. Cancel culture has gone after comics because of the hypersensibility of the chronically offended — in other words, the leftists. It is a type of censorship. Some of the people who partake of the cancel culture also do so for the sheer exercise of power at ruining other people’s lives and livelihood, amazed that it is so easy to do nowadays. The range of punishment varies. Just ask Andrew Dice Clay and Dave Chapelle.

Simon mentions some other cancel culture targets, too. A short list:

• In 2019, comedian Ahmed Ahmed made a joke about Muslims and terrorism — and ended up explaining himself to the cops after audience members called the authorities.
• Ex-Saturday Night Live writer Nimesh Patel was stopped during a Columbia University comedy set because snowflakes were “offended.” “Other comedians have stated that they refuse to work in those [academic] bastions of fanaticism,” Simon reminds us.
• Vox, BuzzFeed, and HuffPost demanded in 2019 that comedian-cum-commentator Stephen Crowder be deplatformed for offending hard-left vlogger Carlos Maza.
• Leftist entities have accused well-known satirical site the Babylon Bee of spreading “misinformation” and pushing conspiracy theories. Snopes even “fact-checked” the Bee.

The Balanced View

Now, things can get even worse. In many European countries, wrote Human Events in 2021, “anyone who makes jokes will at best be fined and, at worst, jailed.” This, however, isn’t entirely true.

They get punished for making the “wrong” jokes.

Likewise, Simon asserts that no “communist countries” ever produced comedic films. Actually, they produced plenty of them — but the authorities controlled what “humor” could be presented.

And this myth of wholly humorless leftists, without exception, is contrasted with another myth. That is, the assumption that “anything goes” is the only moral position regarding comedy. In reality, humor that is vulgar and/or salacious degrades a nation and thus should be socially stigmatized and condemned. After all, if entertainment doesn’t make society better in some way on balance, but only worse, it’s then pure vice.

The Aliens Among Us

More universally true is that, specializing in self-delusion (rationalization), leftists are detached from a fair degree of reality. This affects their sense of humor profoundly. I’ll illustrate this with a story.

Approximately 30 years ago I attended a local feminist conference concerning how our “patriarchal” society supposedly hobbled girls’ academic performance. Because I’d articulately refuted the speakers’ thesis using facts and reason during the commenting period, the organizers’ suspicion was aroused. So they approached me afterwards wondering what organization I represented (only myself). The group, perhaps four middle-aged women, remained civil, but their looks-could-kill countenances betrayed their feelings. Anyway, uninterested in my thoughts, they quickly begged out of the conversation. They offered to mail me literature on their positions and requested my address. Kidding, I answered, sure, “as long as you don’t send a hit squad to my house.” Their response?

Very seriously and sternly one of them replied, “We don’t do things like that.” Bizarrely, they didn’t get the obvious joke (and, mercifully, I didn’t get the literature).

This isn’t a one-off, either. Just consider the late Representative Patsy Schroeder (D-Colo.). Back in the 1990s, she emotionally claimed on the House floor that radio giant Rush Limbaugh intended to feed his mother “dog food.” Limbaugh had said that the day before, too — in the most obvious of jokes satirizing the Democrats.

And this dislocation from reality brings to mind something ex-Army Sergeant Charles Jenkins, an American defector who spent decades in North Korea, said about his hosts captors.

“In North Korea, when you lie they think you are telling the truth, and when you tell the truth they think you are lying,” he stated. “You learn real quick to say no when you mean yes, and yes when you mean no.”

The Power of Poking Fun

You can imagine that joking around with the North Koreans probably wasn’t a good idea. And what explains this behavior of people who truly are alien (to normals)? Once again, having lived a life of rationalization — denial of Truth — it has become alien to them. So they often don’t discern the Truth that makes a good joke funny. It also helps explain why they want to control humor. To wit:

It can be used to reveal Truth and expose lies. As a commenter under Simon’s article put it:

Leftism is so overflowing with inherent contradictions and logical fallacies, that it is pure gold in terms of raw material for comedy and ridicule.

As another wrote, too, “The reason Progressives hate comedy is because Satan hates being laughed at.”

The good news is that with the “preference cascade” phenomenon on the internet, a subculture of un-woke comedians has developed. A prime example is the UK-based (it’s amazing he isn’t in jail) Nicholas De Santo. He actually did a pro-life abortion set (below), making the case that pro-abortionists are worse than the Nazis. He made it work, too — and was funny.

And leftists well know, and fear, the power of humorous criticism. As late socialist activist Saul Alinsky wrote in his book Rules for Radicals:

RULE 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.

The people who seize firearms and would even ban hunting knives want to control all the potent weapons — including humor.