Why politics kills comedy

Humour is a strange thing. Back when Christopher Hitchens was both alive and still playing his assigned role of Naughty Little Provocateur, he attracted some controversy over an article titled “Why Women Aren’t Funny.” But the truth is that most people aren’t funny. It’s not just that they cannot elicit laughter in others, but that they themselves are often poor judges of comedy. 

This is why those with comedic gifts have the opportunity to command loyal audiences and sizeable paycheques for their work onstage or onscreen. And yet humour is also one of those things that we invariably democratise, in ways that we don’t with, say, athleticism. Most people believe themselves to be funny, or at least funnier than they are — a kind of Dunning-Kruger effect when it comes to humour. Dating profiles of both sexes routinely list “humour” among relevant traits either already possessed or desired in a mate. This sort of thing is usually harmless, though it can make for interminable dates or office meetings, as many a young woman or junior colleague can attest. Indeed, this gap between delusion and reality where comic gifts are concerned can itself be a source of comedy — think of Seinfeld’s Kenny Bania insisting “that’s gold Jerry!” or The Office’s David Brent holding his employees hostage.

The reigning real-life example of this phenomenon is probably Elon Musk (who, to be fair, does own the platform he reserves for his comedic stylings). Here is a representative example:

Me: How many radical leftists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Radical leftists: That’s not funny 😡

Me: 🤣

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 23, 2025

The joke itself is a hardy perennial, where here “radical leftists” has been substituted for the more common “feminists.” I apologise in advance for the faux pas of explaining a joke, but bear with me here. The standard iteration of this joke plays on the stereotype of the humourless feminist, while deriving an unexpected charge from the shift in perspective that comes during the punchline.

Musk has stepped all over it, however, by introducing his own personal reaction into the joke (Nancy Mace doubling down in the replies pushes the whole thing into some sort of absurdist comic territory). But this is not just an inability to intuitively grasp the nature of humour in this case; it is that any humour is interrupted by the subject’s incessant desire to insert himself into the joke. The joke itself is pushed aside by its teller’s interest in seeing himself — and being seen by others — responding to it. 

Just as kitsch is the enemy of authentic feeling, so too must it be the enemy of authentic humour

This is what the great Czech novelist Milan Kundera referred to, in a different context, as kitsch: “Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.”

Just as kitsch is the enemy of authentic feeling, so too must it be the enemy of authentic humour, which is necessarily spontaneous and for itself, and not concerned with its own effects on the subject. 

As it happens, Musk’s display here and elsewhere mirrors the more or less dominant mode of liberal comedy since at least the rise of the Daily Show, in which the jokes function as a complex form of social signaling, a phenomenon that more perceptive comics began to recognize as “clapter.” Clapter, of which John Oliver serves as the present standard-bearer, represents a kind of shared experience of kitsch; the jokes are primarily a means for both host and audience to collectively acknowledge their political and social affinities and only secondarily to make people laugh.

This mode reached its nadir with Hannah Gadsby’s much-praised Nanette, a comedy special that pretty much dispensed with jokes entirely. It is of course not incidental that the content of Gadsby’s special was highly political in nature, as were to a large degree the favourable responses to it. For politics inevitably makes great use of kitsch. As Kundera put it:

Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements. Those of us who live in a society where various political tendencies exist side by side and competing influences cancel or limit one another can manage more or less to escape the kitsch inquisition: the individual can preserve his individuality; the artist can create unusual works. But whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of kitsch.

What is interesting about the present moment is that we are witnessing a reversal of political power that nonetheless maintains this mode of comedic kitsch. We can see this with Elon and Nancy Mace above, or with the painfully unfunny satires of woke leftists. Or take, for example, a much-discussed pull quote from a recent New York magazine profile of the DC party scene during Trump’s inauguration, in which a “former Bernie supporter” (see what I mean?) claimed he “wanted the freedom to say ‘faggot’ and ‘retarded.’”

There’s no actual joke being made here, even one that happens to employ slurs; the anonymous speaker just wants to be the kind of person who might use them — like Eddie Murphy in Delirious, perhaps. The point is not to engage in humour that happens to be transgressive, but to be seen as the kind of person who engages in transgressive humour (while ideally avoiding the costs of real transgression).

Now, of course, the particular interviewees in that piece may have never been funny, who knows? But their cultural ascendance inversely parallels the observable decline of others who once were. Adam McKay and Armando Iannucci, for example, have produced among other consistently funny works, at least two unimpeachable comedies: respectively, Stepbrothers and In the Loop. 

These days, Iannucci’s public commentary, largely indistinguishable from the median Guardian columnist’s, sees him defending fact-checkers and railing against misinformation. This represents not just his abandonment of satire generally, but the abandonment of the more specific position from which he once relentlessly satirised the false pretences of expertise among political establishments on both sides of the Atlantic.

McKay, meanwhile, has transitioned into a climate change activist and his once formidable comedic gifts have become a kind of sacrifice to Gaia. One could already sense McKay’s fatal desire to be edifying in the credits sequence to the otherwise very funny The Other Guys, which was given over to a slideshow on corporate greed. The terminal point of such explorations is a film like Don’t Look Up, a global warming parable that hit viewers with all the subtlety of a mallet. 

As for what happened to them, Kundera has another discussion that is relevant here, in which he imagines an angel encountering a devil’s laughter for the first time and trying to imitate it. But the angel’s imitation misses something; he is impelled to seize upon laughter and turn it to some nobler purpose.

And Kundera laments how this impulse has become general. “Their imitation of laughter and (the devil’s) original laughter are both called by the same name. Nowadays, we don’t even realise that the same external display serves two absolutely opposed internal attitudes. There are two laughters, and we have no word to tell one from the other.”

Such is our condition today, regardless of which political tendencies are dominant. Donald Trump’s idiosyncratic brand of humour remains something of an exception to these tendencies on either end of the political spectrum. The writer Matthew Walther has already observed how many of his expressions have entered the vernacular. For myself, I have taken to saying “It’s my house, I’m supposed to be here!” to my wife with disturbing frequency. 

Yet it must be admitted that many of his funniest moments took place during the period in which he had become a politicised public figure but not yet a full-fledged politician. Though his enemies (Rosie O’Donnell, the Coca-Cola Company) were legion, they did not represent a particular party or faction, and his own pronouncements did not serve a clear agenda. And this is as it should be: for humor — real humour, the kind that bubbles up uncontrollably and permits no grand purpose — flees from such agendas. 

The last true devil in Kundera’s sense probably died with Norm Macdonald. Not because he was the first or only non-political comedian, or because he was entirely above politics himself, but because, of all the comedians whose careers coincided with our shift to permanent culture war, he retained the purest commitment to the comic spirit, frequently at the expense of his own career. It is why so many of his most memorable moments came during unexpected errors or when disrupting otherwise well-structured talk shows.

Particularly at a time when humour is either wholly constrained or constantly praising itself, there remains something enormously refreshing about a comic ethos that was neither in support of nor opposed to any given order but subversive of order itself. Just watch his face in those moments before he launches into it, when the only thing that really mattered was: what will he say next?