![]() are getting advancement through their careers by saying, “This stuff is good comedy. Because we’re scholars, we first noticed a tendency among our brethren over the last 20 years or so to celebrate Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert or Samantha Bee - the sort of progressive wing of political satire. Nick Marx: This has a couple of aspects to it. But what are those liberal audiences missing about conservative comedy when they dismiss it offhand? Ward: When liberals do come across instances of conservative political humor, the most common response is, “That’s not funny.” That kind of humor isn’t eliciting a lot of laughs from liberal audiences. They’re less overtly political, and they’re more conservative in cultural feel - people like Bill Burr, for example, who want to play off a kind of grumpy old man conservativism as part of their comedy. Then older-school, right-wing comedians, people like Dennis Miller, or Tim Allen. Matt Sienkiewicz: It took quite a while for the conservative comedy world to find that what we call “the big box store,” the tentpole, the thing that announced that conservative comedy was part of the American landscape - and Greg Gutfeld was ultimately the answer to that. Ian Ward: I suspect that some readers will share my first reaction to a book about conservative comedy, which is, “There is conservative comedy?” Could you sketch the landscape of conservative comedy and identify some of its major figures? ![]() This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. ![]() ![]() “This is a politically powerful, economically profitable thing that we might pay attention to.” “Our project was to kind of shake fellow liberals and academics by the shirt collar and say, ‘You’re missing this, you’re misdefining on purpose, or you’re burying your head in the sand,’” Marx said. In other words, the left’s unwavering belief in its comedic monopoly isn’t just wrong - it’s also bad political strategy. According to Sienkiewicz and Marx, conservatives are also using comedy to bring new voters into the conservative coalition and build ideological cohesion among existing right-leaning constituencies. The growth of the conservative comedy industry isn’t just important in the context of the culture war. Want to read more stories like this? POLITICO Weekend delivers gripping reads, smart analysis and a bit of high-minded fun every Friday. “This thing that we thought we have owned for the last 20 years has been leaking, and the borders are slowly getting shifted.” “ are ceding ideological territory in the culture wars to the right via comedy,” Marx told me, noting that once-beloved liberal comedians like Stewart are struggling to find their footing in the treacherous landscape of post-Trump humor. They’ve already caught them - and, in some cases, surpassed them, even as the liberal mainstream has continued to write conservative comedy off as a contradiction in terms. The findings of their inquiry, which they detail in their new book, That’s Not Funny: How the Right Makes Comedy Work for Them, might come as a surprise to devotees of the Daily Show: Conservative humorists aren’t merely catching up to their liberal counterparts in terms of reach and popularity. For the past three years, Matt Sienkiewicz, an associate professor of communication and international studies at Boston College, and Nick Marx, an associate professor of film and media studies at Colorado State University, have immersed themselves in the world of conservative comedy.
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