No, conservative jokes aren’t funny
A response to Tobias Stone’s Making Fun of Trump.
My grandfather was a hard shell Baptist who thought the Southern Baptist Convention was too liberal. He preached fire and brimstone from his pulpits as a circuit preacher and used red ink to mark out every unchristian idea in his Funk & Wagnell’s. (Several consecutive pages on “Evolution” were covered in red.) He was a literal man with no sense of humor and no patience for insubordination.
Before Prohibition, my grandmother drove her father’s car to deliver beer to customers. She was twelve. She claimed the women in her family were witches. She had a dry, wry sense of humor. How they connected is beyond me. She passed her sense of humor to her kids. My grandfather didn’t have a sense of humor to pass on.
My father, like my grandmother. was a rebel who wanted desperately to conform. He followed grandfather into the ministry. But he was seduced to the dark side (the Southern Baptist Convention) and he chose to lead choirs rather than preach. He drove truly fundamentalist ministers crazy could drop wicked one liners into the middle of the most devout theological discussion.
My uncles inherited some of my grandmother’s humor. They knew a great joke when they heard it, and could tell it over and over. However, like my grandfather, they believe the world is rigid and certain. They can tell jokes, but they’d never be hired as comedy writers. [1] I was raised with jokes about Blacks, Mexicans and women. None of them flattering.
I thought their jokes hilarious. When I was ten. Even when I was thirteen. Later on, after high school and college when I ended up stewing in the cultural melting pot with the same kids who were the butt of their jokes, I stopped laughing.
I came home from college in time to be bombarded with peanut jokes (Carter just won the Presidency). I’m sorry, the only funny peanut punchlines are in elephant jokes. Right wing howlers inevitably highlight race to make liberals look bad (such as Obama Waffles and “What kind of Black guy is Obama? He can’t dance because he has two leftist feet”), portray Democrats as hypocrites, and they relish terrible puns and any joke with Chuck Norris as the hero.
Conservatives can tell jokes, and it doesn’t matter that they’re offensive. Left-leaning comics go out of their way to offend too. Conservatives can’t write jokes. At least, they can’t lampoon liberal and progressive politicians and be funny.
The irony of conservative jokes about liberal hypocrisy? Comedy doesn’t revolve around hypocrisy, but irony. Conservatives don’t get irony. How do we know? They look in the mirror, listen to their pundits on FOX, then walk out into the world they deny daily and it looks just like what they saw in the mirror. Neuroscience explains this. The more time you spend in denial, the more the brain builds neurons that filter out contradictory information.
Comedy doesn’t revolve around hypocrisy, but irony. Conservatives don’t get irony.
Except P.J. O’Rourke
Except P.J. O’Rourke. P.J. O’Rourke is both Libertarian (a conservative who smokes pot) and funny. Any one who contributes to the Harvard and National Lampoons is funny. Isn’t it ironic, however, that with P.J. at the helm, people still thought the lampoon was a liberal rag?
One final joke
Three conservative comics walk into a bar. The first orders an Obama Drama, the second a Bloody Hillary and the last a Flaming Liberal. The bartender says, “Ten dollars a drink, and those drinks aren’t real.”
The fist comic says, “Those were jokes.”
The bartender says, “I see the jokes. It’ll still be thirty dollars.”
___________________________________________
[1] I take that back. One uncle was pretty funny until he found the Lord. After that I think Jesus burned out his funny bone. I’m not saying Christians can’t be funny. Jesus was one of the best wise-crackers in history. I suspect that something about absolute certainty disconnects the brain’s humor centers. That’s why there are so many unfunny liberals.
Yes, liberals can be humorless too. They call to mind the joke: “How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb? One. And it isn’t funny.”
