Comedy, Like Reality, Has a Liberal Bias

Lewis Black is irate. "The last year and a half is by far the toughest time I've ever spent as a comedian," he confides to the audience in his HBO special, "Red, White and Screwed."

"It used to be easy -- one or two things might happen in a week. And now, something will happen, and I'll read about something and I go 'I'm going to make that funny,' and then" -- here he starts to yell and pace -- "the next day, 30 other things would fucking happen! Who can keep track of this shit? I don't even have a ports of Dubai joke, and we're on to immigration." The audience hoots in sympathy.

Perhaps this abundance of absurdities helps explain the recent boom in political humor. In May, the Washington Post reported that the number of Bush jokes on the late-night network shows had doubled, hitting Clinton/Lewinsky-era levels. Explicitly progressive comedy is also on the rise -- from the cheery vitriol showcased on Air America, to a host of viral videos, to the recent national tour of a new stand-up troupe, Laughing Liberally. At the same time, Comedy Central satirists Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart have become the era's most effective media critics, drawing distinguished guests from left, right and center, and providing a spirited space for public debate.

This evolution of political comedy has everything to do with the collapse of public trust in our truth-telling institutions, hastened by the right's sustained attack on what one GOP insider dismissed as the "reality-based community." ("Reality," quips Colbert in full conservative drag, "has a well-known liberal bias.")

We now routinely watch the mainstream media with the expectation that we're being spun, but when did we start watching comedy for the real deal?

According to Boston College professor Paul Lewis, author of the forthcoming Cracking Up: American Humor in a Time of Conflict, the role of comedy in public culture has been on the rise since the '80s.

"These are tough, competitive, complex times in U.S. humor production and consumption," Lewis writes, "times in which the significance and nature of jokes is a matter of debate and in which the effort to shape public opinion by way of ridicule and satire has become a serious project."

In his book, Lewis examines how conservative media figures like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter have effectively dismissed and diminished progressive ideas and politicians by making them the "butt" of taunts. Such derisive humor works in tandem with serious policy initiatives to sandbag losers in what Lewis earnestly terms "butt wars."

This project of attacking liberals has unified a diverse and contentious coalition of fundamentalists, free marketeers and career Republicans in ways that little else could. "Bugging liberals, you see, being bugged by liberals, is not incidental to conservative culture, but rather is constitutive of it," writes historian Rick Perlstein in a recent New Republic article.

Now, the tables are turning. Bush was spared much mockery in the wake of 9/11, but with his popularity tanking, the "butt-in-chief" is again fair game. Bush-bashing has become a cottage industry. And a new book by Air America's Sam Seder and Stephen Sherrill, F.U.B.A.R.: America's Right-Wing Nightmare extends the trend, launching a wholesale attack on the conservative brand.

Katie Halper, a founder of Laughing Liberally, dismisses charges that partisan humor is "preaching to the choir." Instead, it serves the political purpose of rallying the progressive troops. "It's very cathartic," says Halper. "Besides, people who are doing pavement-pounding work deserve their own spaces."

In addition to drawing progressive applause, the Laughing Liberally tour has succeeded in bugging conservatives. "Over the course of the show," complained David Finnigan on National Review Online, "eight comics spent about two hours repeating tired complaints about President Bush, punctuated by at least 105 profane words."