Shut up and tell jokes

By W. James Antle III
web posted March 22, 2004

The intersection between celebrity and leftist politics is so well-
established that it is pretty much a given that conservative music
fans and moviegoers will end up admiring performers whose
politics they loathe. That is, unless they insist on only listening to
Lee Greenwood (I'm not sure even contemporary Christian
music is exactly a liberal-free zone) and watching Chuck Norris
films. Popular conservative commentator Laura Ingraham wrote
a New York Times best-seller about the phenomenon entitled
Shut Up and Sing.

Of course, what conservative Republican celebrities lack in
numbers they more than make up for in political success. Arnold
Schwarzenegger is governor of California, the state that sent
GOP song-and-dance man George Murphy to the U.S. Senate
and began Ronald Reagan on his path to the White House.
Charlton Heston as head of the NRA had far more practical
influence than either Barbara Streisand or Jane Fonda ever
possessed. So the propensity of entertainers to dabble in politics
is not something strictly limited to liberals.

Comedians are the latest group of performers to try their hand at
politics and have found themselves often treated as credible
spokesmen for their causes, a lofty status that has eluded all but
a select few of their celebrity counterparts from other fields.
Actress-comedienne Janeane Garofalo was the public face of
Win Without War, one of the more mainstream advocacy groups
opposing a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Al Franken has been
spearheading the effort to raise the liberal presence on talk radio
and has scored a best-seller with his Lies and Lying Liars Who
Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Garofalo has
been a co-host on CNN's "Crossfire," representing the left side,
while Franken has debated National Review editor Rich Lowry
on something like even terms about their respective books.

As someone who became interested in politics because of our
first Hollywood movie actor president – I can concur with author
Peter Robinson that Ronald Reagan changed my life – I am
much less bothered by celebrities' political pronouncements than
many of my compatriots on the right. Granted, occasionally I find
myself thinking it would be nice to listen to a rock group I enjoy
without hearing them denounce me as a misogynistic fiend for not
sharing their enthusiasm for legal abortion and I must confess to a
certain irritation with the experience of forking over $9 for movie
tickets to listen to pampered millionaire actors lecture me about
the evils of my race (white), sex (male), religion (Christian) and
unwillingness to have half my income taxed away from me to be
redistributed to the Third World. But other than that, if Courtney
Love decided to come out and endorse John Kerry for president
tomorrow, I would find myself hard pressed to care.

But there is something that does bother me about the whole
trend of celebrity political activists: It's just not funny. Even
talented comedians tend to sound like your garden-variety,
foaming-at-the-mouth ideological fanatics when they go on a
political crusade. People who believe they can save the world
with a government program in my experience generally don't
have a very good sense of humor. Something about acquiring this
belief later in life now seems capable of draining away whatever
sense of humor people who are actually funny have.

Nor is this something limited to the left. The thought actually
occurred to me while watching a snippet of comedian Dennis
Miller interviewing journalist Eric Alterman. Alterman is an
occasionally interesting but usually insufferable character who
labors under the delusion that his fanaticism constitutes some
kind of iconoclastic intellectual breakthrough. For example, he
argues that there is no liberal media because the media generally
isn't as liberal as he is (by that standard, I could argue that it is a
myth that "FOX News" leans right). But Miller has been given a
political, as opposed to purely comedic, platform and Alterman
was on his show talking about the Bush administration's candor
and the Iraq war.

Now, it's no secret I wasn't much of an Iraq hawk, but Alterman
was just repeating the standard talking points on these questions
and I could have found fault with more than a few of his
comments. Yet he at least was making actual arguments and
attempting to engage in a rational discussion. Miller turned in a
petulant and embarrassing performance, refusing to really debate
his guest and at one point just wishing for end of the "f—king
segment."

It was a temper tantrum and, worst of all given Miller's
considerable talents, not at all funny. Instead of skillfully
lampooning Alterman or engaging in a witty back-and-forth, he
alternated between sulking and acting offended that people with
liberal opinions exist.

For the sake of comedy, ideologues should leave their politics
out of their routines. Sure, there is a long tradition of radicalism in
stand-up. Similarly, some people argue that good comedy is
inherently conservative. But this works best when the material is
distinguishable from a candidate's speech. Comedians are most
effective when they have either a healthy detachment from their
subject or a whimsical view of it. Once you have seriously
devoted yourself to a cause, this becomes difficult to achieve.

When Franken talks about what he sees as the dishonesty of
right-wingers he isn't voicing healthy skepticism; he's angry. His
best material relied on the ability of people to laugh at
themselves, a gift he tends to lose when his topic is politics.

The same goes for Garofalo, who is an interesting case. Cute
without being attractive in the conventional Hollywood starlet
sense (a characteristic that made the 1996 film The Truth About
Cats and Dogs, in which she co-starred with Uma Thurman, a
success), she specialized in the sort of cynical (in a good way)
humor that became popular in the 1990s. But when she ventures
into politics, she displays a self-righteous shrillness at odds with
her comedic personae and becomes about as funny as the late
homeless activist Mitch Snyder.

Late-night talk show hosts like David Letterman and Jay Leno
are notoriously bipartisan in their political ribbing. Similarly, while
it is usually evident that Jon Stewart and others on Comedy
Central's "The Daily Show" aren't exactly conservatives, their
lack of stake in political outcomes makes their ridicule of people
across the political spectrum funnier than those whose comedy
amounts to little more than Democratic National Committee
press releases accompanied by laugh track.

This isn't to say that there aren't any funny liberals or
conservatives. There are also many people who skillfully
caricature and ridicule their opponents. Rush Limbaugh has done
this masterfully throughout his career and there are signs that
Franken is groping toward a knack for this type of humor from
the liberal perspective. But note that P.J. O'Rourke and Jonah
Goldberg do not do stand-up. Wit can be a component of
political commentary, but ideology isn't effective at driving a
comedy routine. This distinction is more important than it might
first appear.

But the partisan comics are not to be deterred. It has been
reported that Franken has his eyes on elective office, possibly a
U.S. Senate seat, in Minnesota while Republicans have talked
about drafting Miller in California. Who knows what Michael
Moore, that prominent booster of Wesley Clark's presidential
ambitions, has in store for the unwashed masses of red-state
America.
 
An audience is an audience, and there does appear to be an
audience for joke-slingers moonlighting as politicos and pundits.
But if they are looking for laughs, aside from the knowing
chuckles of people who already agree with them, they ought to
consider other subject matter. These comedian-commentators
are just too damn serious.

W. James Antle III is an assistant editor of The American
Conservative and a senior editor for Enter Stage Right. The
views expressed above represent his alone.

Enter Stage Right -- http://www.enterstageright.com