Factually! with Adam Conover - Thinking Seriously About Comedy with Nick Marx and Matt Sienciwicz

Episode Date: August 31, 2022

Comedy is one of world’s oldest, most popular art forms, but almost no one thinks seriously about what comedy is or what it’s for. Is comedy inherently liberal? Does it actually convey truth, or is it just for entertainment? And what do we make of the rise of right-wing comedy in America? Researchers Nick Marx and Matt Sienkiewicz, authors of the new book That's Not Funny join Adam to discuss these topics and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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with some fun people. Head to patreon.com slash adamconover. Now on the show this week, we're going to talk about comedy. So I do comedy, as you know if you listen to the show or if you've seen me live. And I've loved comedy my whole life. It's been the north star of all of my creative enjoyments and ambitions throughout my entire lifetime. And one of the strange things about comedy is that no one has ever really taken it seriously, for obvious reasons. Comedy is not a very serious art form. Comedy does not take

itself very seriously. But for most of my life, people never talked about comedy as being something that was at all important or even worth discussing, worth, a review of in the paper, worth writing an academic paper, analyzing it, worth thinking about in any clear, consistent way at all. I mean, there were great comics who influenced culture, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, folks like that. But, you know, there was also a lot of watermelon smashing, and that's what most people thought comedy was. But in the mid to late 2000s, that started to change. With the rise of political comedy shows like The Daily Show and all of the emphasis on Saturday Night Live during the 2008 election

and the Colbert Report, this idea began to grow that comedy was a satirical force whose power could topple dictators and reveal our hypocrisies. Comedy became seen as this kind of vital moral force. And in 2010, this trend almost sort of became a political movement and reveal our hypocrisies. Comedy became seen as this kind of vital moral force. And in 2010, this trend almost sort of became a political movement with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's Rally to Restore Sanity and or Fear. This was an actual rally that was covered on C-SPAN and every major news network,

and it had an actual political goal to reduce partisan bickering and actually get things done generally. I mean, that's an oversimplification. But, you know, it was a real cultural moment around these ideas. But, you know, looking back on it, it seems pretty clear that it failed. I mean, the world of 2022 clearly has more fear and less sanity than 2010 did. And it's hard to argue otherwise.

Jon Stewart spent the better part of 15 years mercilessly mocking Fox News and Fox and Friends, but, you know, that show is still on the air, and he is not. And Colbert is still on television doing his thing every single night, but no one really believes anymore that Colbert is destroying Trump with his impression at 11 30 p.m. on a Wednesday. In retrospect, it's apparent that we expected too much from comedy. Comedy can enlighten, it can reveal, it can entertain, but maybe it can't actually change the world in a real way that matters. Not the way that politicians and generals and armies do anyway. But on the other hand, it's not as though comedy does nothing. It's not as

though it's contentless. It's not as though it's contentless. It's not as though it has no effect on the world around it. I mean, there are comedians who, when criticized for, you know, sucking, they'll say something like, Nah, it's just jokes, man. I'm just trying to make people laugh. It doesn't mean anything. And, look, they can say that if they want,

but in my opinion, if you're a comic and you say that, you're either a shitty comic or you're lying. Comedy works because it expresses a truth about the world as seen by the person speaking. And the audience laughs because they recognize that truth in a way that takes them by surprise. And this is true even when comedy is cloaked in layers of irony. You know, when a comic like Anthony Jeselnik, who's incredible, makes a joke about killing a baby, you laugh because the premise, the truth that he's expressing is that one shouldn't kill babies, right?

But like any art form, comedy can also be used to express ideas that not everybody agrees about or that most people would consider wrong or harmful. I mean, there is such a thing as racist jokes. We've all heard them. And sometimes a racist joke is told not in an ironic way where the premise is that racism is wrong. Sometimes a

racist joke is told by someone who thinks it's funny because they believe that racism is true. And the audience laughs at it because they also agree that racism is true. There's a long history of comedy like this in America, and I'm not the kind of person who says that we should censor it, but we need to accept that it exists. Contrary to what some very stupid commentators used to say in the late 2000s, comedy is not inherently liberal. It's not inherently anything. For every possible opinion, political affiliation, and taste, there is a joke that confirms it, and there is a comic out there telling that joke, regardless of whether or not it is true, helpful, or harmful. Comedy is not inherently on a side. But people have trouble seeing that, because our national conversation

about comedy is so stunted. And the reason it is is because not enough people spend the time to really dig into what comedy is and how it works in our society. I mean, it is one of the most elemental art forms, right? Laughter is an automatic human response to certain types of information presented in a certain way. We just do it. It's part of what it means to be a human.

And yet we understand so little about it and what it is for in our society. But there are a few people now who are finally doing the research on what this art form actually does, and we have a couple of them on the show today. Matt Sinkowitz is an associate professor of communication at Boston College, and Nick Marks is a professor of film and media studies at Colorado State. Together, they wrote That's Not Funny, How the Right Makes Comedy Work for Them, and you can pick up that book at our special bookshop at factuallypod.com slash books. But before you do that, listen to this interview with them, because it was absolutely fascinating for me as a comic to talk to some people who have spent so much time studying and understanding what comedy is and

how it works. Please welcome Matt Sinkowitz and Nick Marks. Nick and Matt, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. So look, I'm a comedian. I'm also someone who likes to read a lot. I like to read a lot of media commentary and theory and stuff like that. And so it's kind of bothered me that comedy is not a topic that is particularly well covered in academia or frankly anywhere else, even in journalism. I remember being, you know, when I was in college looking for like the best philosophical work on comedy and finding like a couple of books by some really old philosophers who like wrote analyses of like street jokes and

like what philosophy could tell us about those like that's not very relevant to comedy today i'm curious why uh why do you write about comedy what what do you think is interesting and valuable about investigating it yeah no it's a great question and it's one uh that you do have to answer every so often uh you know somebody will ask, how can you write about comedy when there's this and that happening in the world? Uh, there's a number of ways to go about answering it. Uh, one it's, it's fun. It's a good job. It's, it's fun to, to write and talk about comedy and watch comedy. Uh, but there's another layer of course, right? So many of our serious ideas of our most important thoughts get sort of buried or packaged in comedy in different places that, you know, comedy can, and I love when comedy is just for fun, but it's also a place of our most important thoughts get sort of buried or packaged in comedy in different places. You

know, comedy can, and I love when comedy is just for fun, but it's also a place where serious political ideas, serious personal ideas, and psychological ideas, you know, they all come through comedy as well. And you're right, there's a lot of like old dusty books about comedy, and some of them are great. I mean, reading Freud, you know, unpack jokes about, you know, Dixon, whatever is, is still fun. Uh, but you know, 100%, it's, it's not a place where, uh, you know, sort of the most serious of academics tend to go. Maybe, maybe I just outed us. It's not the most serious, but we do take comedy really seriously. Uh, and you know, it's that combination. It's fun, but it's also a place where these deep ideas kind of come rushing in surprising and interesting ways. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's this thing that comedians will say sometimes,

and it annoys me a little bit. It's like, oh, comedians, we're the modern day philosophers. Literally, I think it might've been Chris Rock. I saw a quote from him recently, and he said, we don't have philosophers anymore. Instead, we have comedians. And I was like, well, we actually do have philosophers. I interview them on this podcast all the time. There's many, we've interviewed Quill Kukla and other working philosophers on this show. But this is a claim that comedians make to be doing philosophy or dealing with ideas on stage. And I, in fact, when I started doing comedy, I remember I had this sense I wanted to go to grad school for philosophy. And instead, I became a comedian. And I remember thinking, oh sense I wanted to go to grad school for philosophy and instead I became a comedian.

And I remember thinking, oh, I can work with ideas in kind of the same way that I did, you know, as an undergrad, you know, maybe doing comedy going forward. I can like talk about real things. And that's true. I do feel that I do that. But almost nobody actually talks about what comedians are actually saying. actually talks about what comedians are actually saying. Nobody actually pulls it apart and says, okay, what are the ideas here? Why do you think that is? I think notoriously, as you mentioned with the Chris Rock example, comedians hate to be sort of pigeonholed. They hate to have their ideas sort of interpreted back to them for very justifiable reasons. It supposedly kills the joke when you over-explain it or have academics like us try to explain it. I think where Matt and I come in and where we see our role as a sort of explainer of

jokes or an analyzer of comedy is to understand what's being said and attach that to how it circulates culturally and economically. So we think about why it is that jokes and comedy and joking have become such an influential force, not only culturally, so shaping the way that we talk to one another online or political discourse, as Matt was alluding to, but also that entire film franchises and cable channels and streaming outlets can build brand identities around comedy as well. So it's tough for us as analysts of it to sit back and sort of isolate things from those contexts. We think those bigger contexts are just as important often as the words and the jokes themselves. Yeah. I mean, it's really fascinating because the other thing you also

notice your comedians say is that jokes have no deeper content to them. They'll say, hey, it's just a joke. It doesn't matter. We're just joking here. Comedians only say things to get a laugh. And that also seems transparently untrue to me, that jokes do have a context and a meaning and an impact behind them, whether or not the comic even knows that they do. There's a lot there that there's a lot of meaning that is being expressed and being given to people that's so rarely pulled apart. So what do you find the largest trends in comedy have been over the last couple decades? What is the impact that you feel it's having? I know that's a big question. Where should we start? Yeah, well, you know, so we've been writing recently about

sort of the role that it's played in politics and sort of, you know, like real sort of straightforward politics. We're thinking about political satire, the impact that comedy has had on coalitions of, you know, left-wing Americans, right-wing Americans, centrist Americans, and so on. I mean, I think that that's part of a bigger story. I think to answer your question, the number one trend that I would point to is one that is not unique to comedy, but has really interesting ways that it comes out in comedy. And that's just the narrowing of audiences. And whether that's narrowing of audiences for news coverage for, you know, Netflix, like everybody gets their own individual Netflix show, right, as opposed to, you know, whether that's snaring of audiences for news coverage, for Netflix.

Everybody gets their own individual Netflix show, right, as opposed to sort of these broadly watched things. So it plays out everywhere. But one place where it plays out really interestingly is in comedy, where whether it's political comedy, you have comedy more and more aimed towards smaller and smaller segments of that political spectrum. And also that goes on the taste level, too. There's more opportunity now for really experimental comedy. segments of that political spectrum. And then also that goes on the taste level to, you know,

there's more opportunity now for really experimental comedy. So, you know, you've been involved in some of that yourself. You know, things streaming shows, like I've always wanted to be to meet a Ryan Seacrest type and, you know, something like BoJack Horseman. You know, I don't think that would have made it on Fox in 1990, but it certainly was a great fit, the big hit on Netflix. And part of that has to do with this sort of ability to target an audience more tightly. I think that a lot of great experimental stuff and interesting and new stuff comes out of that. That's a big headline. But also you get really niche stuff that can play off of people's particular interests. And some of those interests, you know, as we write about in our most recent book can be, you know, can be spaces where a certain brand of offensive comedy becomes very popular amongst a small group of people or sort of fringe political

ideas can be packaged in comedy as well. So I guess to answer the big question, it would be the sort of micro or at least smaller targeting of comedy in a way that both changes the kind of experimental comedy you can get, but also sort of political targeting and other ways where, you know, speak to a broad group, you speak to sort of smaller groups. Yeah. I mean, there's been this big shift I felt in my own career from, you know, broadcasting to narrow casting where, you know, when I got started as a comedy fan, I was just interested in what was on Comedy Central, late night shows, things like that. Those are going to very broad audiences. Now, the late night shows that still exist sort of feel like they're dinosaurs and that appealing to that many people all at once, while still sort of like

a wonderful thing to try to do is becoming less and less possible. One of the effects of that seems to be that budgets are going down everywhere, that the less audience you're reaching, the harder it is to make a comedy show that costs a million dollars an episode to make. Instead, everyone's narrowcast into a small audience on TikTok for free. But let's talk about your new book. Your new book is about right-wing comedy. Your new book is about right-wing comedy. A really interesting thing that I noticed is that about 10 years ago, maybe a little bit more than that,

people used to say regularly that there was no such thing as right-wing comedy. People would say, oh, there's Jon Stewart and people like that. This is sort of more overtly liberal comedy. But occasionally Fox News would try to have a right-wing comedy show that would fail very quickly and people would say, ah, see, right-wing comedy is just impossible. And there'd be theories about that, that, you know, liberal comedy is about punching up and right-wing comedy would be about punching down and that it would therefore never be funny.

And I remember at the time going, well, that's clearly not true. There is comedy that's like inherently has a conservative or reactionary or backwards looking or whatever you want to say. There's comedy that was a, this feels right wing in its undercurrents to me, but it was, it seemed to be invisible to people. I'm not, I don't think many people are saying that anymore. What has changed about the comedy ecosystem that has led to, you know, you guys writing an entire book about right-wing comedy. Yeah. So, uh, two important things, the first that Matt mentioned and that, that you've, you've mentioned, uh, the, the narrow casting of audiences. So we got used to this, uh, increasingly kind of fragmented media space being occupied by smaller and smaller portions of,

uh, comedy viewerships, uh, such that it kind of left out in the cold an entire sort of 40% of Americans who identified as politically conservative and right-wing. All of our mainstream comedy institutions, be they late night shows, SNL, The Daily Show, had those sort of left liberal skewing politics. And nobody had really tried to court that smaller segment of conservative viewers. You mentioned the half hour news hour is the failed Fox News daily show from 2007. And I think many on the left, Matt and I consider ourselves among that group, held that up as evidence of saying, see, they tried it. It didn't work, therefore, comedy has this inherent liberal bias. Well, as things in the media ecosystem change and as audiences continue to get fragmented,

they're still left underserved by this comedy programming. Lots of people try in the interim until eventually something hits. And a whole bunch of somethings end up hitting, as Matt and I describe in That's Not Funny. So you've got Greg Gutfeld on Fox News, who is an out and out late night comedy host on par with Fallon and Colbert and indeed on many nights is beating them in the ratings all the way down to, you know, sort of YouTube streamers, obscure podcasters who, while they're not on the same level ideologically necessarily as Gutfeld and Rogan, go to some pretty dark, ugly places. And you can get there by listening to the more mainstream voices.

Yeah, that's right. So there's that whole shift that takes place in the media realm. And then, of course, there is the political shift that's taken place in the United States over the past decade or so. You know, I mean, we could all point to one guy, we could talk about Trump and sort of what Trump represents. So we could talk more broadly about polarization and these sorts of ideas. So just as the media has become more fractured, so has American politics, one, I think, become, you know, polarized in some really significant way, and also really redefined what conservatism is or right wingness is in the United States. You know, from a cultural perspective, when we look at a character like Trump, he doesn't remind us of the, you know, first Bush or second Bush in terms of sort of cultural approach. He doesn't remind us of sort of the National Review buttoned up style of conservatism or right wing

American politics. So just as the media system is looking for, you know, sort of smaller groups, smaller audiences, making it perfectly viable to, you know, go after this right-wing comedy space that hasn't been approached, we also have an overt effort on parts of the American right to become more culturally engaged and also to give up on some of the sort of cultural conservatisms that held back certain approaches to comedy. Yeah, I think about like the conservative politicians that I grew up, you know, that were made fun of on The Daily Show when I first started watching it, like the early 2000s.

And it's like the Jesse Helms or the Strom Thurmond types. You know, it's the it's like these very old sort of stolid, decrepit politicians who didn't know how to crack a joke and they weren't funny. But the weird thing, it took me a long time to realize after Trump was running, but Trump was funny to the people who liked him and still is like, I think about how sure you remember he, he, he hosted, or he spoke at the Al Smith dinner, which is like a political dinner, kind of similar to the white house correspondence dinner where like he had to read prepared jokes and he like bombed very poorly. He did a very bad job. And of course he never hosted, he never appeared at the white house correspondence dinner, which is like this opportunity where politicians normally make jokes. But that that's a form of comedy. That's like a late night show like a monologue style joke and he would never did that but when he like made fun of the disabled reporter and he like did that little face and made that like little gesture

that a whole lot of people said hey that's not funny too like the title of your book a lot of people said that's offensive well at the time like a a lot of the crowd laughed, like the crowd he was speaking to laughed when he did that. They thought it was very funny. And so did a lot of the folks watching at home. And I, I, it took me a couple of years to realize, but I looked back and said, oh no, that is, that is, he is funny to his audience. Um, not to me, but, uh, I, and, and so it took me a while to realize that that was, oh, that's the conservative movement, like starting to use comedy in a real way. Yeah, no, 100%. I mean, he's, he's an insult comic, right? I mean, that's, which is a tried and true form of comedy, right? Don

Rickles. Yeah. No, I mean, a lot of that is, and, and, you know, I mean, I like Don Rickles, but sometimes it's, it's just funny to be brash and be transgressive, right? He'll do that. He does crowd work, right? He will point to people in the crowd he doesn't like and sort of mock them in a way that a stand-up comedian might in order to neutralize a threat. And he also is just plain from a, I guess, I mean, this is a judgmental, it was often just his speeches are weird and strange. And they offer opportunities, you know, for him to go in and out of things that people find funny, but also for comedians like Greg Gutfeld to play with his words. Right. He is a sort of cultural figure that leaves things ambiguous intentionally.

And playfulness is part of that story. You can think of like Cove Thief, if you remember that ridiculous moment, right? Cove Fefe. Right, whatever it is, right? I mean, this is just a blunder, right? Where he tweets out some vagary, right? But he sees it as an opportunity for a joke, right?

He sees it as an opportunity to say, I'm going to take this seriously because, you know, that's playful. Again, none of us, I think, here probably this seriously because, you know, that's playful. Again, none of us, I think, here probably think he's a funny figure, right? But he's finding opportunities to go against the norms of the system, to invite people to be playful, to interpret him playfully, and to be plain mean. And you put that combination together, it looks an awful lot like a comic. And one of the bigger projects of the book is to get our fellow left liberals,

especially, to move away from that initial reflexive reaction to it of, that's not funny, that's just being mean, right? And to understand the bigger context of the political climate he's operating in, that, as you said, he is being funny for his sort of in-group, for the people that are on his team already and to sort of fortify the bonds among them. So his is very much a humor of superiority. As Matt said, they very quickly identify a common enemy, whether it's the Looney Libs or Rosie O'Donnell or the disabled reporter, whatever the case is. And we're going to punch at them. You're on my team. Stand behind me. We as liberals might not see that as the smart sort of ambiguous referential satire that we

got used to via Jon Stewart on The Daily Show for many years, but it is that same comedic function of very quickly creating in-groups and out-groups. Yeah. Let's talk for a second. Since you mentioned Jon Stewart, again, I came of age as a comic, you know, Jon Stewart was like my Johnny Carson figure is what I always say. Like he was the guy who sort of opened the possibility for me of what you could do in comedy, that you could do comedy that talks about the real world in a smart sort of honest way that actually in many cases ended up moving the needle of culture in many ways. But that created a certain set of ideas

about what comedy was capable of. Satire became very hot in the media sphere, especially around 2008 to 2012. You know, Tina Fey, Sarah Palin, and all of that. There was a big media moment around satire as an idea that created a certain set of assumptions about what comedy was for and what it could do. And I think a lot of us look back at that time and go, man, was that was any of that

correct? You know, like did did Tina Fey was Tina Fey actually making fun of Sarah Palin or was she playing into what Sarah Palin was doing? I think we're all starting to have those thoughts. And, you know, often I think when I look back at Jon Stewart retiring, to me, it almost looks like he retired because he failed. That he spent, you know, 15 years hammering against Fox News and eventually looked around and went, wait, Fox and Friends is still getting the highest ratings in cable no matter what I do. And that's sometimes how I think about it. Right. Not to not to denigrate him at all. But how do you look back at those sort of set of ideas that developed around, you know, this very liberal form of satire in, you know, the late 2000s, early 2010s?

Yeah, I think I'll defend the Colbert-Stewart generation of post-Iraq war sort of liberal comedy in the 2000s as extremely important, right? He was adept at and showed audiences how to be critical of media. So that's the first and most enduring contribution I think he taught audiences is to say, look at this thing. Now look at this thing. They contradict one another. You're being lied to, or this is bullshit, right?

I think the failure of Stewart and maybe why we look back, not necessarily on him, but as on our younger selves is kind of putting too much faith in that is that I think many folks, many liberals, myself included, conflated watching Stewart and Colbert with actually doing a politics, right? You know, just like posting and laughing at him and, you know, washing my hands for the

day saying, well, that's that. Now, like, we've got a black man as president, progressive politics will continue along this demographic line. And we won because we're the funny ones. But we weren't watching all along that right wing forces, especially online, are watching those shows too, and learning about how to speak comedically, how to sort of insert humorous discourse into the political realm. I'll let Matt maybe sort of tack on additional. Yeah, no, I mean, I think you're exactly on it, Adam, in that this is the formative moment of what we call the liberal complex about comedy. Certainly, there's longstanding ideas that there should be a relationship between comedy and sort of, well, let's use an academic word, counter hegemony against it within comedy that, you know,

some people call that punching up this sort of thing. That's longstanding, but there was this perfect storm in the early two thousands that you're pointing to where you had a media industry, which was extremely excited about, uh, put using comedy to address this hard to reach group of kind of left liberal, mostly young males, comedy central. They were all about this. You also had a president in George W. Bush who gave plenty of opportunities to, you know, part of his brand was that he was mockable in some way. You had these two transcendent talents. It's really much more than two. The whole Daily Show crew in that early 2000s is just, I mean, just a murderer's row, like just an incredible group of talent. All of this stuff comes together in the early 2000s. And it does, I think you got

it right. It culminates in Sarah Palin, this character who was almost impossible to believe how mockable she was when things started. This moment was the moment where I think a lot of people who consider themselves liberal said, ah, okay, this is so successful because liberals are funny, because liberals have a sense of humor and conservatives don't. successful because liberals are funny, because liberals have a sense of humor and conservatives don't. And, you know, we could argue whether that psychology has any validity to it, but the context made it look that way in a much more forceful way than it ultimately would. What it meant was that there was an opportunity for the liberal world to create satire. And there was a headstart because all of the other institutions, the SNLs, the late night shows, all of them had this sort of, you know, kind of liberal-ish left center bent, right? This moment comes, the Daily Show is a phenomenon, Colbert is, it rolls into it. And then there's a desire for people our age, I think we're

roughly, you know, in the same ballpark on age, say, ah, this defines it. Let's freeze this. Let's assume we own this space and we don't have to worry about it anymore. And then as time moves on, the media industry changes, the right wing of America adapts new strategies. The right wants to get rid of its stodgy persona. And then all of a sudden, it's not just that there are these successful shows from the past, but they become a blueprint and things that people from across the spectrum, from the center to the right to the far right, start using the tricks of The Daily Show. And Fox, which failed so badly to do this in 2007, they drip and drop it into their schedule. They start adding comedic stuff for the last decade or so, and they catch up because it's not an inherent thing about liberals.

It's a set of circumstances. Yeah, I mean, when you watch Fox News, watch any one of their opinion hosts, they're making fun of everything and everybody all the time. thing about liberals. It's a set of circumstances. Yeah. I mean, when you watch a Fox news, watch any one of their opinion hosts, they're making fun of everything and everybody all the time. At the very least, they're doing the kind of comedy adjacent stuff that, you know, I think of like a Rachel Maddow type host, or there's always a little bit of a smirk and a little bit of making fun of, uh, the teabaggers, like that kind of thing. Um, that like, they're all just doing all the Tucker Carlson laughs all the time on a show. And I believe he makes his audience laugh. But look, I want to talk about what the

essential differences are between what we might call conservative and liberal or right wing, left wing comedy. But we got to take a quick break. We'll be right back with more Nick Marks and Matt Sinkowitz. OK, we're back with Nick and Matt talking about comedy so i want to ask uh sometimes as a comedian when i watch another comic i get a sense of i feel that this joke is maybe a little bit i don't know if i want to say right wing i don't know if i want to say conservative but you know you can sort of feel the differences on a on a really basic level in the comedy. I'm curious if, you know, you have any analysis of, you know, a joke that might not have any overt political content. You're not making fun of Ted Cruz or whatever or talking about climate change. But, you know, if there are sort of deeper patterns in what you might call left wing or right wing comedy or anything in that world. call left-wing or right-wing comedy or anything in that world? Yeah. I mean, it's of course difficult when you're not, I mean, everybody's going to, going to argue with you. We've got a book that we describe it as a book about right-wing comedy. Uh, but you know, it's got a range of

stuff in it and what it means to be right-wing is, is, is a range of ideas that have some connections and some differences. Um, so it becomes difficult to sort of blanket target, you know, sort of what defines one or the other. We tend to look at it sort of as an industrial question. Like there's a group of people who are broadly are, you know, that their comedy is against the libs, and they appear in each other's podcasts, and they retweet each other. And they might not agree on everything, but they sort of work in a constellation. So that's how we define right wing comedy. But that's kind of a how they do business as opposed to how they do comedy kind of question, right? We're talking about how guys appear on, you know, uh, you know,

somebody from this part of the right wing world appears on the podcast of somebody from a different part of the right wing world. That said, I think we can definitely talk about types of comedy that, that do, uh, yeah, that's sort of like, uh, either, either if you dig deep, you can see the ideology or maybe it's, it's something a little bit vaguer. One thing that we point to in the book is something, uh, we call paleo comedy, which is comedy that is not necessarily, uh, uh, you know, about a political issue, but the format of it is like, is like a, is like a form of comedy that, that that's from a previous era i i think i know what

you're talking if i can offer an example yeah uh tim allen who is a great comic um you know been working for decades uh is also a conservative politically we know that he's very vocal about that um and he did i used to watch home improvement growing up um he has his show last man standing which i think has been on for many many years now and it is a specifically it's a home improvement style sitcom it is a format that people now identify as being you know people say this is retro um but the show is very very uh popular and it also has a little bit of a political valence to it, right? Because it was canceled by one network and it was picked up by Fox, I think. And they saw it as explicitly, hold on a second, there's a, I don't want to say red state audience, but maybe, I don't know how they thought of it, but there's an audience that still wants this kind of thing. And I think we

can look at that and say, all right, there's an overall, this feels kind of conservative as a media product. And the paleo word certainly comes in there. Yeah, that's one of our key examples. Oh, okay. Yeah, that's exactly right. No, Tim Allen is the example par excellence of paleo comedy. Somebody who the jokes themselves can kind of go any way, but the packaging, the form of how he delivers them asks you to look back to a pure, simpler time when things were just as I liked them, when men and women had their gender roles set, when there were four cameras on this soundstage and we're going to add canned laughter later on, right? And so that form is supposed to signify industrially, Matt used that word,

to audiences, to network executives, to advertisers, that we're going to go after a slightly older, more conservative skewing audience because their values align with watching this type of culture. Whereas the younger, more liberal audiences, we've pegged them to the parks and recreations over and over again, right? And therefore the jokes tend to take on that sort of knowing, winking, satiric format. That is the complete sort of opposite formally of what you see with this now kind of lumbering dinosaur of a multi-cam sitcom in Last Man Standing. Yeah. And I don't even need to watch the show to tell you that, you know, the title of the show, Last Man Standing, what's the premise? It's about an old fashioned guy and his whole family and the world around him is changing and gender roles are shifting. And he's the last old fashioned man. It's right there in the title, what the project is.

So that's a really obvious one. But, you know, I've always felt that here's my own version of it. When people used to say there's no such thing as conservative comedy. Well, I always feel like when you look at stand up comedy, very simple example, that liberal or progressive comedy is the comedy that's saying like, hey, why does the world have to be this way? The world is – why do we have to do things the old-fashioned way? Can't we do things a little bit differently? Why is this? And conservative comedy is the comedy that goes, why has everyone got to change everything all the time? Weren't things nice before?

Like, come on. Oh, everyone's – why is everyone so heated? Just chill out and have a Coke and, you know, go to sleep. And those are like two very basic comedic standpoints towards the world. Anger at the status quo or defense of the status quo. I can sort of see a deeper political undercurrent in it, even if the comedian itself is not going out there trying to like support right wing or left wing causes. I'm like, I think I can, I think you're sort of pushing forward a very deep political undercurrent in your work. Do you, do you find that at all or no? Yeah, no, I think that's, that's absolutely right. And I mean, that can bleed over into more overt political ideas. You know, there can be comedians who are a little bit tough to place politically, if you just sort of just

look at content, but the kind of things you're describing, if they come out, you know, like a Bill Burr type character, where the way that he does his comedy is very much to me sort of throw back. And there's like a suspicion of certain elements of changing society you know uh whether or not you want to call it conservative or not depends on you know are you looking for a consistency uh or just sort of a feel right so i think you can you can find that in certain places you can also of course find the like railing against change in comedians who are much more overtly political so So you can look at like a Steven Crowder or these sorts of characters who, and this is one, you know, say what defines conservative comedy. I think this sort of less easily pinpointed stuff you're talking about is very much true.

There's also sort of these areas that they get into, right? So transgender stuff, right? In our book, we're constantly coming across characters who want to talk about that as a way of sort of railing against change, right? And attitudes regarding gender. And so, you know, that can be done very subtly in ways that you might find, you know, funny and interesting if it's a standup comedian working traditionally, or in some of these more extremist spaces online, you can find it to sort of in a much more ugly version but all with the idea of saying that you know yeah there's this fundamental idea that we're going to mock change or we're going to sort of resist it in some sort of way and just sort of like how you're targeting that uh impacts how the comedy comes out yeah it's really interesting and burr is one of

the most interesting comics to me for that reason because he does play that role sometimes of like whoa whoa whoa everything's moving too fast for me but also he's he's not uh he's someone i have trouble getting a beat on in terms of that because he's for sure i think so good of a comic and has genuinely i think a complex worldview um yeah i agree okay so the point i was trying to get to is that you know during the earlier period of the 2000s that we were talking about when people were saying there was no such thing as conservative comedy i always felt there was but it was it was a little bit hidden it was a little bit underground you know you had the the comics who maybe had conservative actual political viewpoints weren't really sharing them explicitly in the way that the liberal comedians were

now i feel like that's no longer the case and i'm assuming you do as well because you have a book you wrote a book about it so talk talk me through how conservative or right-wing comedy sort of came out of the shadows and became something that you now have just straight-up pro Trump comedians who are stand-up comics and are touring, and then they've got in the middle of their set, they've got 20 minutes of, hey, isn't Trump great material? How did that change come about? Yeah, so the central structuring metaphor of the book is that of a complex, like a mixed-use retail residential complex that might reside off the side of an interstate where there's like a mall and condos built on top of it. And the idea when you enter that space is to stay within it and have as many of your needs satisfied as possible. It's got a big box store. It's got a possible. It's got a big box store.

It's got a bar. It's got a restaurant later on. So Greg Gutfeld in Fox News represents the Walmart or Target, the anchor store of this retail complex. Any conservative comedy fan can go there and generally have that scratch itched, right? They get the headlines. They get him riffing with politicians

and other conservative comedy guests. And then he throws to the rest of the Fox News schedule, whether that's Tucker or whoever else. Then you move on to somebody like Joe Rogan, who's the more sort of down and dirty, you know, late night crowd, right? He's getting high with his guests. He's taking them into more sort of libertine, libertarian spaces where the traditional sort of old school conservative ethos doesn't apply as much. So Rogan is very much targeting the next generation of conservative comedy fans and Republican voter base, right?

That sort of Republican coalition as it ages needs to replenish its ranks. And Rogan is a great spokesperson for the sort of younger male, maybe politically ambivalent future voter who likes what this guy has to say about drug legalization, but he thinks pronouns are bullshit too, man. Like, why can't we just sort of identify according to the normal way of doing things? So our point is that these folks hang out together in the same media space. They guest on one another's shows. Rogan has had many of the people we talk about throughout the book on as guests, whether that's Stephen Crowder or Gavin McInnes.

Gavin McInnes also is a regular on Greg Gutfeld's show or was before he landed this week nightly show. So the connection we try to make is that you can find any number of entry points into this world of right wing comedy. But once you're there, you'll inevitably move on to the next thing. It's very good at moving you to these other sorts of whether it's old school comedy and paleo, whether it's something more libertarian leaning in Joe Rogan, or as we get to at the end of the book, the truly nasty, evil, fascist, adjacent podcasters that don't appear on any sort of normal cursory Google. And I think to sort of identify exactly the change there, right, it's again back to that idea of new media outlets.

That in order to, you know, the pre-existing, before we talk about the era of, you know, streaming video, podcast, YouTube, et cetera, right? Then there's a few structuring institutions, central institutions through which you become a famous viable media comic. I mean, the touring comics a little bit different, but basically you're trying to get on SNL. Uh, you're trying to become a correspondent on the daily show. You're trying to, uh, get onto, uh, uh, you know, standup specials,-up specials, do a spot on late night, these sorts of things. For a long time, that was how you became a known, viable, real professional comic, at least in the media sense. Those institutions had structuring things and their own politics to them, and it was not as open to overtlyly open right wing spaces. The era of new media that Nick just described through this complex metaphor has these different entry points, which are far

less gate kept. I don't know if that's the right way to say it. But they're the gatekeeping function of it is much lower, which you have is the smaller and they don't have nearly the reach this podcast, these YouTube channels, but they have significant, if smaller, reaches, and they're desperate for content, and they're desperate to be a brand, right, to be a certain kind of political comedy. And so, you know, you can get an entry point through these smaller spaces. You don't have to get on to Johnny Carson, right? You can become a, you know, a person who guest hosts on Steven Crowder's show or or something along these lines. These sort of smaller but starving for content and not, you know, not insignificant podcast.

That gives an opportunity for people to develop brands on the right side of the political spectrum in an open and overt way. Whereas I think they would be more likely in the era of, you know, sort of big mainstream media to hide some of those conservative leanings and not go overt with them, you know, if that makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think what you're saying is that the liberal media complex that, you know, conservatives used to rail against was real, at least as far as comedy is concerned, that, you know, you had a situation in the mid-2000s where you had very overtly liberal political comedy that was like you know complex and interesting and and uh i enjoyed watching but was also like it was very overt about its political aims and and what it was trying to get across

to a certain extent i mean i mean john stewart very much was like hey i'm just the average joe here you know and and was very much against extremism along all sides, which is something we could go into further detail about. But you, you know, a person like the folks like you're describing couldn't like do overtly political right wing comedy and expect to get on television had to be cloaked a bit. It had to be, I think, about like like a Nick DiPaolo, who's a comic who is, I believe, a vocal conservative. But, you know, if you watch his comedy from 2006, he wasn't like overtly talking about those things on stage because that wasn't the sort of thing that would play well in the larger media ecosystem that you needed to make a living. that you needed to make a living. And now that all the gatekeepers have come down, or at least many of them have come down,

now we have new gatekeepers that are algorithmic largely, whether you end up in the YouTube comments or whatever, in the YouTube recommendations or the TikTok algorithm, et cetera, but that those gatekeepers no longer exist in quite the same way. And so it's allowed people to be themselves in a way that they were not able to before. Do you feel that's accurate? Yeah. Be themselves or either, either be themselves or

brand themselves in ways that gives them their own lane in space. I mean, DePaulo is a great example, right? Cause yeah, he, he did operate almost entirely in sort of the mainstream comedy world, late night shows, comedy central. Uh, but but you know he went on to you know eventually just release his stuff straight to youtube and you can see a political difference right um when it doesn't have to go through that that space um so you know i think some of it absolutely a guy like dipolo not that i know him personally but you get a sense that you get a sense that he was like white knuckling this the whole time right like he wanted to be more conservative right and he was holding back yeah i want to the whole time, right? Like he wanted to be more conservative, right?

And he was holding back. Yeah. I want to say there are exceptions to this. Like, you know, the show, for instance, Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn. Yeah, that's true. I did not watch that show religiously when it was on, but, you know, Mark Maron has since talked about how, you know, this was like right after 9-11 and the Iraq war years. And he was like, I'm the token liberal on a show

that is like largely pretty conservative and, you know, was like in favor of those things. But it wasn't, it's even if you go back and watch that show, it wasn't as blunt as like the Daily Show was at the time, even though it was like sort of a home for political. There was also, by the way, talk radio stuff like Opie and Anthony, Howard Stern adjacent comedy, that kind of thing.

But it does feel like there's been a shift and it's because we have new forms of media on the internet that, that it has. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. I Nick, do you want to take that or? Yeah, absolutely. I mean the, the, the old school channels that Matt was referencing earlier that were gate kept are no longer as a prominent way for comedians to break into media, so that now conservatives have their own institutions, maybe not on par in terms of pure viewership as SNL and The Daily Show, but in rallying a voting base, an audience base of like-minded folks behind them, so that they can go to all these other shows. They can say, check out my appearance

on such and such podcast. They're very good, again, at sort of moving people around this sort of interconnected space and finding new and the next comedy product that your algorithm brings up to your feed. That's really fascinating. Well, we got to take one more really quick break.

We'll be right back with more Nick and Matt. really fascinating. Well, we got to take one more really quick break. We'll be right back with more Nick and Matt. We're back with Nick and Matt talking about right wing and left wing comedy. So let's end by talking about like, really, where are we today? Like, what do you guys think is most remarkable or most worrying about the state of comedy today on this sort of hyperactive, algorithm-driven, audience-siloed new media environment we're in. I mean, I currently am trying to make my way through it, right? I went from being on cable TV and on Netflix during the week when Netflix's audience is suddenly cratering

and trying to figure out, like, okay, should I be on YouTube? Here I am on my podcast on make it blah blah it's like a very it's a strange new world that we're in um and what is most notable about it for you guys in terms of where comedy is at yeah i mean so it's really interesting on that one level at least maybe maybe not if you're in if you're making a living it sounds very uh nerve-inducing. But to study it, it's an interesting moment. I mean, if there's going to be worrisome elements, it's the insistence, and it's understandable from an economic perspective, in these algorithmic spaces towards pushing things towards extremes and pushing away from consensus media towards fracturing media, right? Getting engagement, you know, that the

best viewer is the one who really agrees with it. And the next best viewer is the one who really hates it. And anybody who's sort of in the middle is not not that valuable. Whereas you could go way back in time, if you go back to like, you know, the television, the network era, right, it was all in the middle. Nobody loved it. Nobody hated it. Everybody watched it. Right. And now you've got this thing where it's pushing towards those uh and you know you know you know part of what we talked about is the opportunity for conservative comics uh to now express themselves but there's also just a drive to pick that lane people who might be more you know i don't want to say centrist like but just sort of not not not divisive right there, right? There's a, a, an incentive to drive

towards divisiveness. Sometimes that can point to really ugly spaces, which, you know, we may or may not want to talk about, but at the very least, uh, you know, somebody who has the talent to speak broadly might not have the opportunity to speak broadly, uh, with their comedy and therefore has to pick sort of a specific lane or angle, uh, which I think could be a big loss. comedy and therefore has to pick sort of a specific lane or angle, which I think could be a big loss. Yeah, that the sort of I think of like Brian Regan as the sort of like mainstream comic par excellence, to use your example earlier, that he's a guy who you can see that he tries to play in literally every single room in the country and he's very successful at it. And he's extremely funny. He's one of the funniest comics working today. But I've also seen him sort of struggle with that a little bit as media gets more, you know, yeah, more extreme, more pushing in one direction or the other. It becomes more difficult to do comedy in that way.

start to push them in one direction or the other. I've seen them start to change what they're saying because of what they're getting in their Twitter replies or, you know, even better, what people are telling them on their Patreon subscriptions. Even I have a Patreon subscription now, right? And I now, you know, now people send me messages and they say, hey, I'm a little, I don't know if I like that thing that you said.

This hasn't actually happened to a great extent. But, you know, if a supporter of mine on Patreon messages me and says, hey, I didn't like that thing that you said this doesn't actually happen to a great extent but you know if a patriot if a if a supporter of mine on patreon messages me and says hey i didn't like that joke that or you know you know what is really funny is when you do xyz that means a lot more to me than when an audience member used to do it at like a 500 person theater you know um and uh i've seen that happen to other uh i've seen that happen to other comics as well. I've seen people start to sort of like get pushed towards one lane or another. And, you know, there's a lot of like chit chat in green rooms about like, is this comic doing that on purpose or are they just being sucked in by the audience? Do they really feel this way? Or are they just doing what, you know, generates, uh,

subscriptions or what? Uh, It's a really interesting trend that hadn't really existed before. Yeah, Adam, I love the way you put that, that the audience is sort of pushing comedians to those same extremes that Matt just identified. So I think what you're talking about there is the economic incentive no longer exists to rest in the middle.

You're being pushed by the money and by the audience to either extreme ideologically. The're being pushed by the money and by the audience to either extreme ideologically. The other thing that I've noticed about comedy trends is that this is where we go to do our politics now, because so much of our sort of activist efforts, our representatives are not able to accomplish anything, you know, substantial or material that makes a difference to many people's lives, we turn to culture in order to fight and resolve our ideological differences. And we're only just grappling with what it means that comedy is one of those primary

areas that we're doing it, right? So we've had different cultural forms where people are expressing themselves politically. But for the longest time, as we've been talking about, for two decades, we assume that comedy was this purely liberal space. Now we're having a whole sort of entrance of folks who disagree with that principle, who feel free to message you to say like, hey, I don't like those jokes. I'm going to push you a little bit more into this direction. And I think that's a cycle we're going to continue seeing as we approach, especially election cycles coming up in the midterms and certainly in 24. Well, so let me ask this then, because we, uh, this, I think this is a good discussion to have towards the end of this, because we were talking earlier about like

what was the actual political force of the mid two thousands, John Stewart, Tina Fey, political satire. And this feeling that many have is like, oh, that was it just generated a lot of smugness and it wasn't actually political action et cetera, et cetera. But we're also talking about how, hey, the rise of right-wing comedy seems politically powerful. And so what do you

feel in your research is the actual political impact of comedy, if any? Can comedy actually move the political needle in a big way? And if so, how and why? Yeah, no, I mean, it's a great question. It's one that you're never going to get a 100% you're sure of an answer to. No, you're going to give me one right now.

You're going to give me a really definite answer. I can tell. I feel it. Yeah, but nonetheless, nonetheless. No, but I do think there's ways in which we can see it. I mean, for one, I mean, I don't think as much as we look back on that Stewart era and see its flaws, you know, I mean, Jon Stewart was the leader of the Democratic Party for all intents and purposes in the early 2000s. Nobody wanted to go to a John Kerry rally, right? But people went to these Jon Stewart events

and like giant numbers. And, you know, I think it was impactful in certain ways. The ways in which I think right wing comedy can be impactful, and I think we see evidence, at least early evidence that it is, is on a couple of levels. One has to do with what you might call coalition building. Any, especially in a two-party system, right, any coalition of, whether it's voters or just sort of citizens who align along the two parties, there's going to be a lot of contradictions within one party. And, you know, the American right has this in obvious ways. You've got these sort of free market libertarian types. You've got Christian values, conservative types. You've got sort of libertine, uh, uh, nationalist Trumpy

types. And on the one hand you say like, well, how do these people get together? Right? Like they're, they, they shouldn't agree on much, but if you go through the stuff we look at in the book, you'll find the way out there, libertarian, totally sort of amoral kind of guy on the Christian conservative Babylon Bee podcast. And on one level, you'd be like, what do these people have to say to each other? But comedy brings them together, right? Part of it's just making fun of the libs brings them together. And we can go across the paleo comedy guy versus the troll online, right? What did they, I don't have a lot to say to each other, but they can sort of come together and make fun of the libs.

So that's part of it is kind of binding this coalition. And, you know, ideally, I mean, Stuart might've done some of that on the left too. It's sort of a different question. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, center left people all the way to people who later would vote for Bernie Sanders were Jon Stewart fans, even though Stewart himself had his own political position, it brought everybody got to make fun of the, I don't know, the Rick Perry's of the world together.

Right, right. So that's the first thing, right? Is bringing that together. Yeah. The other thing that right wing comedy does, in addition to sort of papering over the ideological differences among the right wing coalition, is it recruits young men. So there's a long history between media channels like Comedy Central targeting young men with their shows, right? This sort of 18 to 34-year-old demographic with disposable income, and they're

driving the conversation on taste and fashion and music and everything else. That sort of lingering association still applies today, and it's being used by these more sort of adventurous, offensive, aggressive forms of libertarian humor from folks like Joe Rogan and the Legion of Skanks, these podcasts that have a solidly young male listenership. They bring them in and they introduce them to more maybe sort of mainstream right- wing political causes. So for the longest time, if we think of Jon Stewart as being able to attract that kind of young liberal into the Democratic voting base, I think we're going to see that same thing

happening with right wing comedy, where you get like our 18 year old college students, they show up in our classrooms and they say their favorite podcast is Joe Rogan. That's a possibility to kind of attract and retain them to future sort of conservative and right-wing political causes. Yeah. I'm always curious though, how many of those people who listen to those podcasts actually get a political message from it, right? A lot of people who enjoy, look, people from all across the political spectrum do enjoy Joe Rogan. No, for sure. Uh, and that, that is sort of what I'm curious about is how, how comedy affects people's individual political beliefs as well. I think what you're talking about, the social function of it is absolutely true.

But I also think about, you know, when you, uh, when I think about my own emotions, how I felt watching Jon Stewart when I was 17 years old, I was like, oh, this is a guy who I like generally. I trust him. I find him funny. He's making fun of something. What is the inherent truth value of making fun of someone? What is the argument that is being made when you're making fun of someone? It's they're wrong and I'm right.

I'm a normal person. They're a weird person. Normal people this weird people think that and is so it's sort of like a deep normalization of a particular worldview that i can think that sort of like slips in sometimes like you know john stewart is there making fun of uh well i forget who he's making fun of sarah palin and he's also making fun of Dennis Kucinich, right, who he sort of always portrayed as a loony lefter, you know, yelling, and like, okay, yeah, I'm a normal guy. I'm not one of those weirdos. And it's sort of a, it's why people talk about comedy making people smug, because it sort of ends up being dismissive of the people who are being made fun of.

But that also strikes me as like, it can create a sort of deep up being dismissive of the people who are being made fun of. But that also strikes me as like, it can create a sort of deep political identification with a certain in-group and a certain out-group that like, I'm a normal person, everyone else is weird. I feel like that's an emotion that comes from standup. Does that track for you at all or no? You're scholars, I'm just doing this off the top of my head. Yeah, no, I think it does. The diffuse nature of the media now makes it harder than looking at Stuart. Stuart, you could sort of break down exactly how he said something. He had a big audience. You could sort of break it down. Now you have to look at connections. I mean, Rogan's a tricky one, right? Because I don't know what his personal politics are, but what he is

more than anything is a collector of young male demographics, particularly young men who tend to not want to identify with mainstream sort of political and cultural ideas. But if you look at his guest list, yeah, he has people across the spectrum. But there is more that I would – I think it's quite clear that the sort of – the larger gateway – there might be a gateway in both directions. The larger one is more towards Jordan Peterson world. And I think that that's fairly clear. You can look at it mathematically or just sort of see what makes the news for him. He's a complicated guy in and of himself. But that world, I think, does have exactly what you're talking about.

And that's what you would call sort of a mocking of wokeism, right? Whether or not you like that term or you can accept that term, right? If there's a thing that connects the Christian conservative and the libertarian and the Jordan Peterson listener and all this, it's that these people on the left are crazy because they're worried about pronouns, right? They're crazy because they're concerned about the names of sports teams being offensive or these sorts of things, right? And they're very much positioning themselves on the right as the sane people who see that we shouldn't worry about these things, that this is a, you know, sort of a lunacy on the

left, right? In a way that, again, I'm not going to make a, I'm not making a moral comparison, I'm making sort of a strategy comparison, that just like, like, Stuart wanted to normalize a certain centrism, central leftism as being sort of sane and everything else being aberrant, right? They want to, on the right, through these different places, a lot of which are comedy, they want to say that there's a certain sane view of the world and, you know, the stuff that they're able to, you know, associate with the left, with concerns over race and anti-racism, concerns over transphobia, these things are aberrant and weird and the normal people are gonna be on the other side of it. So I think you're exactly right.

I think it's doing that, but instead of one voice giving it to you, it's sort of this sort of like buffet of people giving it to you in different flavors. Right. So let's end here. We talked a lot about this sort of mistaken impression about comedy that a lot of people in the media had in the mid-2000s.

And I honestly think a lot of comedians also had a mistaken impression of, like, what comedy does, what it's for. And so to me, the rise of right-wing comedy is very clarifying, that, like, it teaches us something about what comedy is and what its possibilities are. That's actually broader than what I thought and what many people thought in the mid two thousands. You know, the idea that comedy has an inherent liberal bias, I think we probably agree is not true at this point. But what,

what can we say that comedy is instead? You know what I mean? Like, like what, what can we say that comedy is instead? You know what I mean? Like what new insight can we get about comedy from that rise that might allow us to talk about it more productively or even practice it more productively? Do you have any advice for me as a comedian that I can use to improve my success and earnings

in the difficult comedy marketplace of 2022? I think I'll answer that first really boringly by saying it's a form of interpersonal communication, first and foremost. We're studying it in the book as a sort of media phenomenon, as something that drives media economics and political decisions. But you know that being as a standup comedian,

as somebody who likes to joke with their friends, that is a way to form a bond with someone else or a way to form a sort of enemy out of someone else, right, by joking at them and getting people on your side. normal playfulness that's inherent in the comedy form itself when we get so wrapped up in whether or not Andrew Schultz or whatever is, you know, doing the new right wing Jon Stewart thing. So it's a very quick way of making friends or making enemies on a very local level, I think. Yeah. Yeah. I would add to that just, you know, Nick used the word playfulness and there is, you know, and then sometimes it's hard to say about some of this right wing stuff, because some of the morality of it's so ugly. But they have a don't give a damnness about them, a playfulness, which is very attractive to people and has also doesn't have a right or left wing orientation, right? You know, sort of being being willing to to try it in a different way, not worrying about offending if you know that what you're doing is not, you know, is not in any way is not if you know that your intentions are right, being able to to give yourself some extra space and not be self-censorious, not worry about what every negative response you might get would be, I think we would say that the left has developed a tendency towards being very worried about what, you know, the unintended consequences of humor,

right? And humor is full of unintended consequences. You know, being playful, as long as you're confident that what you're doing is, you know, in some sort of positive direction, whatever that is, I think that, you know, the right wing comedy world doesn't worry about stuff, and they benefit from that. I'm not saying to become an amoralist, but I'm saying that there can be a tendency today to be really worried about how every single person is going to take something. I think that's a non-sustainable way of doing comedy. I think if your intentions are in the right way, you know, playfulness and adventurousness. And even if you step on a toe or two is the only way to get by and do both interest in comedy and reach that audience authentically.

I love that message. The only problem for me is as someone who tries to understand what comedy does, then I, and I don't believe it's value neutral. I believe that comedy does do things in the world. Then when I'm doing comedy and someone tells me, Hey, wait, this comedy, it might be doing XYZ. That could be hurting people. It's hard for me not to go, OK, well, I want to I don't want to I don't want my comedy to do that. You know, but at the same time, I absolutely agree with you. I mean, the spirit of comedy. I think one of the deeper things that it does is it has I don't give a shit feel to it. It has a you know, there's just a little inherent fuck you that this is you know, this is what I'm going to say. And you can't stop me. And why would you? And, you know, this is we're having fun here. I think that's an essential piece of it.

And those two things are like difficult to balance sometimes. And I'm probably just making myself less funny just by even talking about this right now. Because I should be saying, well, fuck you guys. Who cares what you think? Like, this is funny to me. But here I am. I'm the type of comedian who talks to two professors about like what comedy is and does politically uh which i don't know maybe i'm hamstringing myself just by having this podcast episode right now i don't know what you think

uh you should have us on every week is what i know until until we sell out of books at least you should have us on every week. Look, there's different styles of comedy and, you know, you're interested in, in being analytic about is like great for us. It's really interesting for us. And I don't think these are, I think these are not, uh, these things are not in contradiction, right? You can study something and then come to the conclusion that, okay, what I've learned is how in some ways to let go of things, right? Doing analysis is not, doesn't have to be a, you know, a way to paralyze yourself. Yeah, I mean, you know, I wouldn't, I wouldn't, yeah, what can I say? Part of your brand is being somebody who is thoughtful for sure. And that's important. But that's like the, that's where it jumps from, from that point forward. Once you, once you've come up with the thing that you are wanting to say, I do think worrying about its ramifications across, I mean, that's part of the problem with the, with the replies, right? With the comments, you know, I mean, you know, you used to get them in very broad strokes.

Did people come to the show? Yeah, there's a whole audience all at once. Did they laugh, right? Did they come to the next show um you know i mean everybody does this we get teaching evaluations right you'll get 99 it's great and one like you know why why does he why is why is his voice so weird or whatever you'll just think about why your voice was so weird for the entire you know too much feedback is deadly right um and so i think one thing i would i i would think would be helpful would just be the idea that think about how the broader strokes, forms of feedback were so useful and maybe put those in contrast to this micro feedback that we get today, particularly when it's about people being offended. Comedy is going to step on toes. If you don't mean to hurt, you got to give yourself some space.

Yeah. Oh, that is extremely good advice and you know what I need to hear that before I go do my upcoming dates in Nashville Spokane, Washington, Tacoma, Washington tickets available at adamconver.net slash shortdates well I can't thank you guys enough

for coming on the show, this has been fascinating for me as a comic, the book is called That's Not Funny, you can get it I assume wherever you get books or at our special bookshop factuallypod.com slash books. Thank you guys so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having us, Adam. Thank you.

Well, thank you once again to Matt Sinkowitz and Nick Marks for coming on the show. If you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did, check out their book That's Not Funny at factuallypod.com slash books and join our factuallypod.com slash books, and join our Patreon at patreon.com slash adamconover, where you can get every episode of this show ad-free. I want to thank our producer, Sam Roudman, our engineer, Kyle McGraw, and everybody who supports this show on Patreon at the $15 a month level. That's Adrian, Alexi

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