Whereas the Right will use images and GIFs, either alone or with a pithy one-liner or the like, the Left, so fearful of being devoured by their fellow Wokusts for ideological impurity, often have a whole paragraph or two of carefully worded text accompanying an image. It’s an explained ‘joke’ and so just doesn’t work!
You’re lucky if they can keep it to two paragraphs.
If they use paragraphs.
A convoluted essay-length reply is standard.
SD
Simon Denis
2 years ago
The left is aggressive and imagines everything is a question of “power”, even comedy. The rest of us know that the moment a joke is aggressive, it is no longer a joke.
I’m not sure your view that jokes cannot be aggressive and still be jokes holds, or even how you could hold such a view. Case in point Don Rickels, whose entire schtick was insulting audience members. George Carlin went so far as to say, “Comedy is a socially acceptable form of hostility and aggression.” Woody Allen expressed a similar view in the persona of one his movie characters, noting the stand-up comedian’s description of a successful performance, “I killed them.”
And where do you imagine the “socially acceptable” comes in, if not from the relative absence of “bite”? So the remark offers less than it promises by making a qualification do the work of an effective self-contradiction. The same goes for “insulting” the audience. This is something Dame Edna used to do, but from a position itself so palpably absurd that the remarks were at least as amusing as expressions of the speaker’s vulgarity or self-aggrandisement as they were as objective depictions, in which they always fell far short of saying something personally vicious. Had she called an audience member with an obvious mental handicap “stupid”, for example, nobody would have been amused. Now the examples you cite may have done just that – in which case they are no more than instances of the non-comedy comedy which the left is so busily touting, these days.
P.
Paula Williams
2 years ago
The more an artist focuses on sending some message rather than providing entertainment / art, the more the latter declines.
Indeed. The artist’s role is to create something of interest. The audience can take it or leave it.
The successful make piles of money, the rest have to find other ways of making a living.
It’s tough but honest.
Forgive me making an unrelated point but it’s the same with religion. They should say “hey folks, this is what we believe and if you don’t like it, you can sling yer hook”.
FM
Francis MacGabhann
2 years ago
Like Nietzscheans, the left can sneer but they cannot laugh. No one has ever met a jolly Nietzscheite, or a happy leftist. (With apologies to GK Chesterton, the greatest meme artist of all time)
‘ …many conservatives live a sort of coded existence in public life, the equivalent of taqiyya, the Shia Muslim practice of shielding your true opinions. They can either learn to keep their views quiet, or heavily-qualified, or they can become social pariahs.’
A little thought occurs to me based on the above.
Many wokeists would doubtless condemn societies that compel women to cover their faces in public (or risk a beating by the religious police, or worse).
Yet they want a world where people are compelled to cover their thoughts in public (or risk a beating by the woke-religious police, or worse).
So, wear a niqab over your thoughts: taqiyya for the West!
Funny, clever, on the nail. I’ll try to credit you when I repeat.
P.
Paula Williams
2 years ago
There are two types of comedy : the political kind and the funny kind.
PK
Prashant Kotak
2 years ago
Nigel Farage, Britain’s most successful politician of the early 21st century, has always employed a particularly English jocularity to sell what was a controversial platform, laughing us out of the EU eventually
Nudging, behavioral psychology, control of education, propaganda… all the tools have been used to centralize power and influence. Does the left have anything left to try besides jailing and killing their opponents? It seems like they may have reached their limit in France. In the USA the country is so divided it boggles the mind. A trip to Seattle and a trip to Ellensburg is like visiting two different countries and it is just a small car trip over a mountain range. At least in the USA I don’t think the left won the culture war. I think they split society in two.
CJ
Cheryl Jones
2 years ago
Nigel Farage is ‘unpalatable’ apparently for wanting to leave the EU (as if that is somehow a forbidden path) – but the EUs attempts to ban memes, as if they are gateway drugs to fascism, and the ‘sanctimonious bores’ who simply can’t meme, are far more unpalatable to most normal sane people.
GA
G A
2 years ago
Finally!! A piece in the (almost) mainstream media that understands memes.
That EU report was proof that the left can do humour, however. If unintentional humour counts…
MH
Matt Hindman
2 years ago
From politicans’ Twitter accounts, to PTA meetings, to corporate offices, to school playgrounds, and even to washed up, preachy rock stars one truth has remained supreme. Humorless, self righteous idiots are the most enjoyable people to make fun of.
Last edited 2 years ago by Matt Hindman
CC
Cathy Carron
2 years ago
The question unanswered is why is the Left so utterly humorless? We have lived on the Upper West Side in NYC for almost 40 years, right around the corner from the comedy club, ‘Stand Up New York’. We have visited this club regularly over the decades and the comedy has never improved over the years and at the moment it is abysmal or even non-existent; It’s like watching SNL (Saturday Night Live) on the telly every week hoping it’s going to get better, but it never does. And while the Left gets triggered by every so-called ‘indiscretion’ against trans, LGBTQABC, etc’ they certainly have no qualms about ageism and attacking the elderly. One night at ‘Stand Up’ recently, every comic noted our age (65 and 69) – cracked the most banal jokes about my white hair ‘matching the wall paper’, that my husband could be in a Cialis commercial, etc, etc….it was dreadful – I actually felt bad for the comics who were so untalented, uncreative and just plain boring. Never have young people been so uninspiring and dull as they are now. If we could only raise Joan Rivers & Don Rickles from the dead.
Last edited 2 years ago by Cathy Carron
SS
Ferrusian Gambit
2 years ago
They might not be mutually exclusive ideas though. Sanctioned aggression is after all a release from social norms in itself. Jokes are a way to channel aggression in a way that reduces tension by making it socially compulsory to take it in good part.
Last edited 2 years ago by Ferrusian Gambit
HB
hugh bennett
2 years ago
Gee-Whizz I nearly lost the will to live, i was in, “I`ve started so I will finish mode”, by halfway ! He could have just written the final paragraph, no just the final sentence… and made the point….
My impression was that he is trying to perform a delicate trapeze act of simultaneously being in on the joke but also retaining an ironic distance to it that results in the article having slightly convoluted and prolix quality.
Last edited 2 years ago by Ferrusian Gambit
CB
Christopher Barclay
2 years ago
Remember that they’re just waiting for the chance to throw you in their Gulag and to smash your face in with a rifle butt and if you still insist on telling a joke they will accuse you of punching down and take you out and shoot you.
DR
Dustshoe Richinrut
2 years ago
“When I was a child, …”: is that another way of saying “back in the old days”? I’ve seen this phrase used more than once by, if I were to be charitable, older writers hoping to hark his or her readership back into a time long ago, just before … ITS time, but not so long ago, … not long long ago, in case by going back long long ago, we might like the great British traditions, the social norms of their day, find them refreshing, so refreshing that we see instantly the nihilism, yes indeed the nihilism that is the misery guts humour today, all that misery including the moaning of memes coming to a ridiculously tiny screen near you, under your nose, in the palm of your hand, in fact. I would not completely poo-poo that EU report.
What would, in this day and age, be music to my ears is hearing “Now when I were a lad, and I’m going way way back, way before your time, ….”. And I would like to know. That type who went way way back busted a few taboos in his time, for sure. But he still wore his jacket and tie and kept shiny shoes. It’s a bit of a taboo to be well dressed today.
Now what’s ‘appenin’
T’s’not Charlie Chaplin
T’is more miserable than that
and Charlie’s old hat
Charles Chaplin, (Charles Chaplin? I bet that made you larf), was the most famous man in the world. At one point. Maybe even in the mysterious lands of the East, where jaunty piano tunes emanated from a solitary picture house or two?
“If the likes of Wojack are popular, it’s partly because the cultural atmosphere feels quite heavy at times, …”. Oh yes, rather! Rather stuffy, I say! Indeed so!
“…, so much so that many conservatives live a sort of coded existence in public life, the equivalent of taqiyya, the Shia Muslim practice of shielding your true opinions.” Isn’t that just wonderful?
In the midst of all the ugliness and ill-refinement of humour, sarcastic and mocking, online, as well as the despair alright that runs rife and lies behind it all, the looking on the bright side of life, once a wee bit of a British institution from music hall onwards, will be wiped from our memory (if the nation ain’t careful), and old Charlie will end up in the dustbin of history and we’ll never see his or his type’s consoling ways again. At the rate things are going! The gladdening of hearts used to be achievable, you know.
JH
Jon Hawksley
2 years ago
This article did demonstrate to me how little involved I am in social media, is second hand knowledge sufficient to understand its influence? What did suprise me was “The same is true in Britain, where the Right has limited political power and the Left has unlimited cultural power;” For this to be true the term Right must be further to the right than my usage and Left must cover the middle ground where cultural power now seems to lie.
AP
Al M
2 years ago
“The name stems from the common Right-wing belief that the consumption of soy reduces testosterone“
?
Like others who have posted on this thread, my aversion to social media seems a perfectly rational course of action.
I would have thought the ONLY rational course of action.!!
VS
Galeti Tavas
2 years ago
Saturday Night Live, proof the woke butcher humor totally. Anti-comedy anti-humor..
The output of the ‘Entertainment Industry today is the ultimate look at Woke mindset: disturbing, unfunny, mean spirited, dark, cruel, dull, stupid, propaganda, SJW, immoral, illiterate, historically butchered,….. If you judge a group by their works, then the Entertainment industry output is a huge indictment against Liberal/Lefty/Wokeism.
I again got free Prime membership for 2 weeks when I bought my 6 pack of 5 gallon, food grade, airtight seal, buckets to pack away 75 pounds of rice and beans (done right lasts 30 years) to withstand the coming Biden legacy – and I could not find ONE thing on Prime I would like to watch which was not an old classic – and I had seen the classics, so watched nothing and canceled the mess. Even free it is not worth the price of that modern drek.
PL
Peter LR
2 years ago
But which came first: the noise or the ability to process abstract coded information?
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A Rabi once told me, “Be wary of people with no jokes and an exaggerated interest in how others live their lives”
This is a strange comment given this piece of advice is fairly concrete and with a meaning that is eminently limpid.
“Clear”
but clear
Is this what the kids call a self-own?
It is that the Left can’t meme.
Whereas the Right will use images and GIFs, either alone or with a pithy one-liner or the like, the Left, so fearful of being devoured by their fellow Wokusts for ideological impurity, often have a whole paragraph or two of carefully worded text accompanying an image. It’s an explained ‘joke’ and so just doesn’t work!
You’re lucky if they can keep it to two paragraphs.
If they use paragraphs.
A convoluted essay-length reply is standard.
The left is aggressive and imagines everything is a question of “power”, even comedy. The rest of us know that the moment a joke is aggressive, it is no longer a joke.
I’m not sure your view that jokes cannot be aggressive and still be jokes holds, or even how you could hold such a view. Case in point Don Rickels, whose entire schtick was insulting audience members. George Carlin went so far as to say, “Comedy is a socially acceptable form of hostility and aggression.” Woody Allen expressed a similar view in the persona of one his movie characters, noting the stand-up comedian’s description of a successful performance, “I killed them.”
And where do you imagine the “socially acceptable” comes in, if not from the relative absence of “bite”? So the remark offers less than it promises by making a qualification do the work of an effective self-contradiction. The same goes for “insulting” the audience. This is something Dame Edna used to do, but from a position itself so palpably absurd that the remarks were at least as amusing as expressions of the speaker’s vulgarity or self-aggrandisement as they were as objective depictions, in which they always fell far short of saying something personally vicious. Had she called an audience member with an obvious mental handicap “stupid”, for example, nobody would have been amused. Now the examples you cite may have done just that – in which case they are no more than instances of the non-comedy comedy which the left is so busily touting, these days.
The more an artist focuses on sending some message rather than providing entertainment / art, the more the latter declines.
Indeed. The artist’s role is to create something of interest. The audience can take it or leave it.
The successful make piles of money, the rest have to find other ways of making a living.
It’s tough but honest.
Forgive me making an unrelated point but it’s the same with religion. They should say “hey folks, this is what we believe and if you don’t like it, you can sling yer hook”.
Like Nietzscheans, the left can sneer but they cannot laugh. No one has ever met a jolly Nietzscheite, or a happy leftist. (With apologies to GK Chesterton, the greatest meme artist of all time)
Slavoj Zizek?
Good essay, with more than a grain of truth.
‘ …many conservatives live a sort of coded existence in public life, the equivalent of taqiyya, the Shia Muslim practice of shielding your true opinions. They can either learn to keep their views quiet, or heavily-qualified, or they can become social pariahs.’
A little thought occurs to me based on the above.
Many wokeists would doubtless condemn societies that compel women to cover their faces in public (or risk a beating by the religious police, or worse).
Yet they want a world where people are compelled to cover their thoughts in public (or risk a beating by the woke-religious police, or worse).
So, wear a niqab over your thoughts: taqiyya for the West!
Funny, clever, on the nail. I’ll try to credit you when I repeat.
There are two types of comedy : the political kind and the funny kind.
I still go back and view NFs bit of Rompuy Pompuy when I feel like a good laugh at the Eurocrats:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHvTq6Bf_pg
Hilarious!
Nudging, behavioral psychology, control of education, propaganda… all the tools have been used to centralize power and influence. Does the left have anything left to try besides jailing and killing their opponents? It seems like they may have reached their limit in France. In the USA the country is so divided it boggles the mind. A trip to Seattle and a trip to Ellensburg is like visiting two different countries and it is just a small car trip over a mountain range. At least in the USA I don’t think the left won the culture war. I think they split society in two.
Nigel Farage is ‘unpalatable’ apparently for wanting to leave the EU (as if that is somehow a forbidden path) – but the EUs attempts to ban memes, as if they are gateway drugs to fascism, and the ‘sanctimonious bores’ who simply can’t meme, are far more unpalatable to most normal sane people.
Finally!! A piece in the (almost) mainstream media that understands memes.
That EU report was proof that the left can do humour, however. If unintentional humour counts…
From politicans’ Twitter accounts, to PTA meetings, to corporate offices, to school playgrounds, and even to washed up, preachy rock stars one truth has remained supreme. Humorless, self righteous idiots are the most enjoyable people to make fun of.
The question unanswered is why is the Left so utterly humorless? We have lived on the Upper West Side in NYC for almost 40 years, right around the corner from the comedy club, ‘Stand Up New York’. We have visited this club regularly over the decades and the comedy has never improved over the years and at the moment it is abysmal or even non-existent; It’s like watching SNL (Saturday Night Live) on the telly every week hoping it’s going to get better, but it never does. And while the Left gets triggered by every so-called ‘indiscretion’ against trans, LGBTQABC, etc’ they certainly have no qualms about ageism and attacking the elderly. One night at ‘Stand Up’ recently, every comic noted our age (65 and 69) – cracked the most banal jokes about my white hair ‘matching the wall paper’, that my husband could be in a Cialis commercial, etc, etc….it was dreadful – I actually felt bad for the comics who were so untalented, uncreative and just plain boring. Never have young people been so uninspiring and dull as they are now. If we could only raise Joan Rivers & Don Rickles from the dead.
They might not be mutually exclusive ideas though. Sanctioned aggression is after all a release from social norms in itself. Jokes are a way to channel aggression in a way that reduces tension by making it socially compulsory to take it in good part.
Gee-Whizz I nearly lost the will to live, i was in, “I`ve started so I will finish mode”, by halfway ! He could have just written the final paragraph, no just the final sentence… and made the point….
My impression was that he is trying to perform a delicate trapeze act of simultaneously being in on the joke but also retaining an ironic distance to it that results in the article having slightly convoluted and prolix quality.
Remember that they’re just waiting for the chance to throw you in their Gulag and to smash your face in with a rifle butt and if you still insist on telling a joke they will accuse you of punching down and take you out and shoot you.
“When I was a child, …”: is that another way of saying “back in the old days”? I’ve seen this phrase used more than once by, if I were to be charitable, older writers hoping to hark his or her readership back into a time long ago, just before … ITS time, but not so long ago, … not long long ago, in case by going back long long ago, we might like the great British traditions, the social norms of their day, find them refreshing, so refreshing that we see instantly the nihilism, yes indeed the nihilism that is the misery guts humour today, all that misery including the moaning of memes coming to a ridiculously tiny screen near you, under your nose, in the palm of your hand, in fact. I would not completely poo-poo that EU report.
What would, in this day and age, be music to my ears is hearing “Now when I were a lad, and I’m going way way back, way before your time, ….”. And I would like to know. That type who went way way back busted a few taboos in his time, for sure. But he still wore his jacket and tie and kept shiny shoes. It’s a bit of a taboo to be well dressed today.
Now what’s ‘appenin’
T’s’not Charlie Chaplin
T’is more miserable than that
and Charlie’s old hat
Charles Chaplin, (Charles Chaplin? I bet that made you larf), was the most famous man in the world. At one point. Maybe even in the mysterious lands of the East, where jaunty piano tunes emanated from a solitary picture house or two?
“If the likes of Wojack are popular, it’s partly because the cultural atmosphere feels quite heavy at times, …”. Oh yes, rather! Rather stuffy, I say! Indeed so!
“…, so much so that many conservatives live a sort of coded existence in public life, the equivalent of taqiyya, the Shia Muslim practice of shielding your true opinions.” Isn’t that just wonderful?
In the midst of all the ugliness and ill-refinement of humour, sarcastic and mocking, online, as well as the despair alright that runs rife and lies behind it all, the looking on the bright side of life, once a wee bit of a British institution from music hall onwards, will be wiped from our memory (if the nation ain’t careful), and old Charlie will end up in the dustbin of history and we’ll never see his or his type’s consoling ways again. At the rate things are going! The gladdening of hearts used to be achievable, you know.
This article did demonstrate to me how little involved I am in social media, is second hand knowledge sufficient to understand its influence? What did suprise me was “The same is true in Britain, where the Right has limited political power and the Left has unlimited cultural power;” For this to be true the term Right must be further to the right than my usage and Left must cover the middle ground where cultural power now seems to lie.
“The name stems from the common Right-wing belief that the consumption of soy reduces testosterone“
?
Like others who have posted on this thread, my aversion to social media seems a perfectly rational course of action.
I would have thought the ONLY rational course of action.!!
Saturday Night Live, proof the woke butcher humor totally. Anti-comedy anti-humor..
The output of the ‘Entertainment Industry today is the ultimate look at Woke mindset: disturbing, unfunny, mean spirited, dark, cruel, dull, stupid, propaganda, SJW, immoral, illiterate, historically butchered,….. If you judge a group by their works, then the Entertainment industry output is a huge indictment against Liberal/Lefty/Wokeism.
I again got free Prime membership for 2 weeks when I bought my 6 pack of 5 gallon, food grade, airtight seal, buckets to pack away 75 pounds of rice and beans (done right lasts 30 years) to withstand the coming Biden legacy – and I could not find ONE thing on Prime I would like to watch which was not an old classic – and I had seen the classics, so watched nothing and canceled the mess. Even free it is not worth the price of that modern drek.
But which came first: the noise or the ability to process abstract coded information?