Comedy used to be a satirical weapon for the left. Now it's a recruitment tool for the right

SAM DINGMAN: Late last year, we noticed an intriguing event listing at ASU: a comedy show, hosted by Turning Point USA.

It featured stand-up from right-wing comic Alex Stein. And a conservative writer, R.C. Maxwell, who chatted with the crowd about the virtues of being a “happy warrior” and offered advice on how to make fun of Democrats.

The event caught our eye because it felt like part of a larger trend we’ve been tracking here at The Show: the rightward drift of comedy. It wasn’t so long ago that comedy was practically synonymous with the left. But things have changed — and we’ve been trying to figure out why.

So, not long ago, I spoke to Nick Marx, a professor of film and media studies at Colorado State University, and the author of a book called “That’s Not Funny: How the Right Makes Comedy Work for Them.” To understand how we got here, he told me, we have to go back to the early-2000s.

NICK MARX: There was a great belief that by simply getting everybody to watch Jon Stewart every night that we could mobilize the progressive base to enact policies that we supported. What I think happened in 2016 and what we've really seen over the last decade is that that hasn't been the case, right? Comedy is not here to save the world and in fact it has become a tool of the political right, the types of people that comedy was supposed to set out to undermine.

DINGMAN: I am old enough to remember the height of the Daily Show's influence and of the Colbert Report's influence during the George W. Bush administration. For folks who are listening who maybe don't remember that or were alive for it but have sort of forgotten it because of the fog of everything that has happened since then, remind us a little bit about the influence that these satirists had.

MARX: One of the buzzwords of the sort of Trump era has been mis- and disinformation. That phenomenon really starts seriously in the early 2000s with the run up to the Iraq war and the sort of ongoing justification of it by the W. Bush administration. So Colbert and Stewart were really the sort of leaders of the media world on the left who were willing to call BS on the lies that the administration was using.

And this stood in contrast to a center- and right-leaning media apparatus that was supporting, believing, buying into the story for war that the Bush administration was selling. So they were kind of a voice of reason amid all this sort of insanity that was surrounding us at the time.

DINGMAN: Yeah, yeah. I'm as you're saying that I'm reminded of Colbert's invention of the word truthiness.

MARX: That's right.

[CLIP PLAYS]

STEPHEN COLBERT: Because you're looking at a straight shooter, America. I tell it like it is. I calls them like I sees them. I will speak to you in plain, simple English. And that brings us to tonight's word: truthiness.

MARX: The idea that something, it doesn't have to be right as long as you believe it and as long as you can kind of sell it convincingly to people, right?

DINGMAN: Yeah. And now we have the "Through the Looking Glass" version, where Trump routinely accuses legitimate news organizations of making things up out of whole cloth and calling that fake news.

MARX: Right. We've got competing versions of reality now, right? People just sort of choose to believe the set of facts that suit their political agenda. That very much has its roots in the sort of Iraq conflict 20 years ago. And Stewart, Colbert calling that out.

DINGMAN: Yeah. And can I ask you, one of the other seminal comedic moments from the left directed at the right that I remember from the early- to mid-2000s as being a moment where comedy really played a role in shaping public perception was Tina Fey's Sarah Palin impression.

[CLIP PLAYS]

TINA FEY (as Sarah Palin): You know, Hillary and I don't agree on everything.

AMY POEHLER (as Hillary Clinton): Anything. I believe that diplomacy should be the cornerstone of any foreign policy.

FEY: And I can see Russia from my house.

MARX: I think 2008 very much solidifies politicians and comedy as a sort of media phenomenon, first and foremost. I think you really see that as the starting point for Americans' understanding of presidential politics and the people who populate that universe as things they encounter on their television screens first and as things with material outcomes and policy outcomes second.

Chelsea Smith, University of California Press

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DINGMAN: We started our conversation with you talking about how beginning with that 2016 election is when the effectiveness of left-leaning comedy and the directionality of where comedy was aimed started to shift a little bit. How did that shift take shape?

MARX: The first thing that happens is that formula grows a little bit stale. "The Daily Show" loses Stewart. They cycle through a few hosts. We've got news-comedy hybrids all over the cable television dial and all over our social media. So I think that formula starts to wear thin, and people get kind of used to it and aren't sure that it is the thing to attack the right with anymore.

At the same time, the media world continues to fracture and continues to create hyperspecific audience groups along political ideology, race, religion, age, ethnicity. So that's another trend that's long been in place. The opening becomes very ripe then for someone to try and succeed with conservative and right wing comedy coinciding with Trump's rise to power.

DINGMAN: How much of this do you think has to do with the fact that Trump sort of campaigned in his first term. Like an insult comic.  I mean, calling Jeb Bush low-energy Jeb.

[CLIP PLAYS]

DONALD TRUMP: Am I talking or are you talking, Jeb?

JEB BUSH: I'm talking right now. I'm talking.

TRUMP: You can go back. You're not talking. I know you're trying to build up your energy, Jeb, but it's not working very well. Look, we need a toughness.

BUSH: Donald, you're not going to be able to insult your way to the presidency. That's not going to happen. And I do have the strength.

MARX: The permission structure that Trump creates in his sort of insult comic address is one of giving license to the rest of the country to kind of do the same. For much of the Obama era, there was a move towards polite kind of identity politics. We're very concerned with saying the right things and identifying people in the right way.

Trump throws water on that and says, “I'm going to be sort of unabashedly brazen, hateful, divisive at times.” And that's the power of comedy, right? It very strongly creates in-groups and out-groups.

If you extend that out to many of the conservative figures who are both political activists, part of the entertainment world, this is all they do.

This is their sort of entire reason for getting in front of a microphone every day. It's to say what's wrong with liberal political ideas and not offering necessarily anything substantive in place of that.

DINGMAN: Yes. This makes me think of somebody like the Fox News commentator Jesse Watters.

[CLIP PLAYS]

JESSE WATTERS: The Democrats, what they've done is they've feminized themselves in order to win elections, and then they lost the election, and then they lost their manhood. I have rules for men. They're just funny. They're not that serious. Like, you don't eat soup in public. You don't cross your legs, and you don't drink from a straw.

And one of the reasons you don't drink from a straw is because the way your lips purse, it's very effeminate.

DINGMAN: So let me ask you, Nick, one of the reasons we were interested in talking to you today is because there was an event here recently at ASU, a stand-up comedy that was sponsored by Turning Point USA, which is of course a very far right political organizing group.

Rather than having a rally or a debate event like they have held there in the past, they instead had a stand-up comedy show with this stand-up comedian named Alex Stein, who is a very provocative, very right-wing comic.

And as we've been talking about, there's not necessarily anything new about comedy and politics swimming alongside each other. But it did seem maybe a little bit new to me, on the right at least, this idea of saying 'We're going to have a comedy event, but it's also going to be a political safe space for you to come out and find like-minded people."

MARX: There's plenty of media audience research indicating that Gen Z college students especially do not seek out or want political information from conventional sources. If you overtly identify as political, that's kind of a turnoff. And so what you've seen many political projects do, especially on the right, is precisely what you said: brand initially as, oh, having a friendly debate.

This is what Charlie Kirk specialized in, and Steven Crowder, people like that. Or saying we're going to have a comedy event, and at the same time you'll of course find like-minded, whatever, family-focused or faith-based people to interact with. So the less that you're overtly branding something as political, I think the more attractive it is to the next generation of voters.

And that's certainly a demographic group that the right has been trying to attract as its voting base ages.

DINGMAN: Yeah, well, and I just have to say from my own reporting here in the area, I remember going last year to an ASU College Republicans event, like an official meeting of the ASU College Republicans. And I think there were seven people there.

And from what I've seen in the reporting of this Turning Point comedy show, there were 100 people there. So that's a pretty big difference.

MARX: I'm going to guess based on the conversation, Sam, we're maybe around the same age. Are you an elder millennial like me or thereabouts?

DINGMAN: I sure am. I sure am, yeah.

MARX: Yeah. I think there's something about the millennial impulse to politicize culture or to say, before you can enjoy culture, you have to know its politics and deem whether or not it's good or bad. I think as someone who interacts with college students every day, Gen Z doesn't think like that. They don't know or care about what the politics are of the culture they're consuming is.

They're just more concerned that there's a kind of steady stream of it. Like if there's somebody I like, I want more of it and I'm going to continue to spend time with this person.

DINGMAN: Interesting. So in the case of comedy: funny first, politics second.

MARX: Correct. And funny to many young people is something that grabs attention, it is provocative, it cuts through the clutter of all the other things vying for their attention. And that is tailor made for folks with right-leaning attitudes to kind of swoop in and do and say whatever to grab that attention.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Due to an editing error, a photo caption was updated to correct the spelling of Nick Marx's name.