ALL COMEDY....:

Interview with Brian C. Anderson, author of South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias (Orrin C. Judd, 4/25/05, Spero Forum)

Q: One of the things that connects various media that you cite in the revolt against liberal bias is the use of humor to skewer political correctness and the Left's dogmas, is there something about comedy in particular that makes it a better weapon for the Right than the Left?

BA: Humor is a powerful weapon for the Right these days in part because the cultural establishment in this country has been liberal for so long—and it almost never pokes fun at itself. For decades of network programming, it’s always been the priest or the businessman or the general or the adherent of traditional values who turns out to be the bad guy, the repressed maniac, the hypocrite, the butt of humor. The liberal do-gooder, the social worker, the progressive teacher, the wise, straight-talkin’ minority—they’ve all been celebrated, held up as paragons of meaningful life.

Reality isn’t like that. Liberals in entertainment and the news media have created a kind of ideological construct, a narcissistic bubble just begging to be burst. The liberal do-gooder might be driven by rage and resentment, might be a kind of micro-fascist; the minority might be a racist thug; maybe the social worker abets self- and community destroying behavior. Perhaps not all businessmen are evil! Maybe some of them legitimately practice business as a moral calling, as Michael Novak argues. Maybe the general is both moral and a hero. Maybe the priest is holy.

That’s why South Park is so satirically powerful—it pops that liberal bubble and let’s some truth in: tolerance can be carried to the point of oppressiveness; rights can be extended in ways that are morally indefensible; anti-business protesters can be mindlessly misguided; hippies are selfish narcissists. My book offers plenty of examples. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, South Park’s creators, go after conservatives too—I don’t mean to suggest they’re across-the-board right-wingers. But going after the Right is nothing new. What is new, especially in television humor, is skewering the Left so savagely.

As I mentioned earlier, a key reason the Left hasn’t done well in talk radio is its lack of humor. Jonah Goldberg, a pretty funny guy, makes the point that liberals have this "Coalition of the Oppressed" as their constituency, and if a liberal humorist targeted blacks or gays or animal rights activists, he’d be bombarded with complaints from his "base" saying: "How dare you laugh! That’s not sensitive!"

Conservatives have—or should have-a keen understanding of man’s propensity for evil, of the complexity of human motivations in a fallen world. They thus should have a proper dose of cynicism in their worldview, which makes it easier to laugh at human foibles, their own included.