Sarah Silverman: Toxic conservative?

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on January 21st, 2006

John Birmingham, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald (“It’ll be all right on the night”) confirms a pet theory of ours– It was not television, but political correctness that killed comedy in the 1990’s, or at least seriously wounded it.

Read the whole thing for a provocative analysis of the current state of humor and for mentions of P.J. O’Rourke, Mark Steyn, Matt Parker and Trey Stone. And, of course, Sarah Silverman:

By establishing an exclusion zone around a whole category of topics that are ripe for exploitation by comics because of the very tensions they create, the left abandons the field to the enemy and often confuses itself over just who are its friends and who are its foes. Silverman, for instance, is often cited as an example of toxic conservatism, and yet her skewering of identity politics is as dangerous to reactionaries as to anyone. […]

The stand-out feature of Parker and Stone’s work, indeed of all successful comics, whatever their medium or subject matter, is confidence. Confidence that their joke is inherently funny, even if millions of people refuse to agree. And confidence of course is a defining characteristic of the right in its resurgent form. […]

The left, on the other hand, has indulged for so long now in the guilty pleasures of relativism, protected by a value system that says discussion of certain topics is off limits, that any sense of confidence they might have had at one time has now entirely disappeared. And with it their sense of humour.

Except for that crack about “so many stand-ups are bipolar,” an interesting dissection of humor.

When it comes to humor, Katherine MacKinnon is just as dangerous as Ralph Reed.

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