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This is a hypothesis that I’m working on, not an explanation, so don’t jump on me just yet.  I haven’t seen An American Carol, which is some new movie by David Zucker that’s meant to be a “right-wing comedy.”  Rotten Tomatoes has the thing ranked at 15%, and the reviews seem to be almost-uniformly negative.

They advertise this piece of crap on the radio twice a day, and it got me thinking–WHY wouldn’t it be funny?  What, exactly, is going on here?

So, I’m constructing a hypothesis, that I may or may not bother to one day prove.

Okay, first of all, it’s a David Zucker movie and, let’s be honest, David Zucker hasn’t made a funny movie in seventeen years (I’m giving him since 1991′s The Naked Gun 2 1/2, but this may be overly-generous).  So, maybe David Zucker just isn’t very funny.  This is plausible, but there’s a few things that require explanation.

1) Kelsey Grammer is in the movie, and he’s pretty funny.  Why didn’t he make some jokes?

2) David Zucker isn’t the only person to fail catastrophically at right-wing comedy.  Remember the Half Hour News Hour?

The problem, of course, with The Half Hour News Hour is that when you do a right-wing satire of the news, it just ends up looking like the regular news.  And the regular news is only funny when filtered through Jon Stewart’s mad brain. (Otherwise, it’s kind of terrifying.)

All right, so, let’s say that agenda-based satires don’t seem to work.  We can partly attribute that to the fact that they’re agenda comedies themselves–comedy, by it’s nature, is meant to tell us to not take things seriously.  But an agenda necessarily has to be taken seriously.  So, the more agenda you have, the less comedy you can fit in there.

(Kevin Smith suffered from the same problem with Dogma; the more he had to say about religion that he wanted people to care about, the fewer jokes he was able to make.)

If that’s the case, then, theoretically, there should be an equal number of liberal agenda-based comedies that fall flat, right?  Well, maybe not.  There aren’t altogether that many conservative-satires being made these days, and David Zucker seems like the only person interested in it.  Maybe David Zucker is the only one retarded enough to think that you can make a comedy with an agenda?

This brings me to South Park.  South Park is a funny show, and it usually makes me laugh.  Sometimes, though, it lampoons things that I take fairly seriously (i.e., my own, personal liberal agenda), and I have a harder time being amused at that.  Now, we know that the guys that do South Park will basically go any which way they can to get a joke–they are biased only in favor of being funny.

If we accept this funny-based-bias as being true then the breakdown of South Park episodes should be firstly, mostly agenda-neutral (i.e., “Make Love, Not Warcraft,” and that one where they hire the Chinese guy to build a giant wall to keep out the child-kidnappers), and then a roughly equal proportion of episodes that lampoon deeply-held Conservative beliefs as there are episodes that do the same to Liberal beliefs.

And yet, it doesn’t seem to quite pan out that way.  There seems to be a bias towards liberality–certainly social liberality, anyway.  There has never been an episode of South Park where the point of the episode was that gay marriage should be illegal, for example.

So, if we accept that South Park is essentially neutral in favor of comedy, that would suggest that liberal-idea-based comedies are funnier than conservative-idea-based comedies, and how can that be?

There was a theory that someone, somewhere, came up with that posited that humor is part of our minds for this reason:  sometimes cavemen were startled by sticks.

No, really, it’s a good theory.

See, the caveman is walking around with his buddies, and he sees a stick that looks like a snake.  So, what does he do?  He makes his Scared Caveman Noise (for the sake of argument, “OOOOOOOGA!”) to let his buddies know that they’re in danger.  But then he sees that the snake is really just a stick.  How does he let them know that the danger is passed, and there’s no reason to be alarmed?  He laughs.  (I believe that cavemen probably laughed the same way we do, but maybe a little more forcefully.  Kind of like a braying donkey.)

If that’s the case, then I’m dead right that the point of comedy is to not take things seriously.  And that means that any form of extremism ought to be a valid subject for satire–anything that someone takes seriously, especially if they’re terrified of it!, ought to make for good laughs when we jab it with our humorous pins.

Why aren’t there an equal number of right and left extremists, then?  Well, the truth is that American politics has been leaning farther and farther to the right in the past few decades.  Richard Nixon tried to pass a universal health insurance bill thirty years ago, and it was shot down for not being liberal enough.  Now?  It’d be shot down for being too liberal (Hillary Clinton’s healthcare plan, which was far more conservative than Nixon’s, was itself too liberal for Congress).

What all this means then, is that the Republicans have been moving closer and closer to extremist forms of politics, while the Democrats have been occupying the center more and more often.  That’s why the episodes of South Park that make fun of PETA, for instance, don’t upset most Democrats–those PETA guys are nutty, and Democrats all know it.  They’re extremist politics, and that’s not what the Democrats are really into–the Democratic platform just looks extremist to the continually farther-right-leaning Right.

Ultimately, the Democratic platform doesn’t have very much that it expects you to be afraid of, especially from a social standpoint.  And without being afraid of something, there’s not much humor to be had in defusing it. (The exception to this, of course, is global warming and, indeed, South Park has made at least one episode mocking global warming activists, and, indeed, I did get my knickers in a twist about it.)  Basically, left-wing satire works because it’s not left-wing, it’s center(-wing), and can therefore make fun of its extremist, inherently ridiculous right-wing counterparts.  But right-wing satire doesn’t work, because it’s only option is to attack the far left, and most liberals already don’t take those guys seriously.

Therefore, David Zucker, in response to the radio ad for your new movie (which ad, bizarrely, included no quotes from the movie, jokes, reviews, or even a synopsis; just a man saying that right-wing movies were practically illegal in Hollywood, and that this one was “positively hilarious”): right-wing comedies aren’t illegal in Hollywood.

No one makes them because they’re not funny.

This entry was posted on October 8, 2008 at 10:27 am and is filed under Braak, poetics, Politics with tags Braak, God-damned Republicans, poetics, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.