All Comedy is Conservative

THE GREATEST PUNCH LINE IN HUMAN HISTORY?:

Russell Kirk’s Tragic Sense of Life : Far from unthinkingly celebrating an illusory “golden age,” conservatism at its best always recognizes the tragic sense of life. (Miles Smith IV, 2/03/26, Law & Liberty)

Conservatives, Kirk knew, had to live with tragedy more than golden ages, and it was that knowledge of tragedy that made someone truly conservative. MAGA seems too blinded by acquisitiveness and economic neo-mercantilism to be aware that this moment, too, will come to an end, most likely with tragedy rather than a golden age. In the foreword to the seventh edition of his opus The Conservative Mind, Kirk warned that modern humanity, “enslaved by our readily gratified lusts, reduced to fatuity by our own ingenious toys,” ignored to its peril “the mene, mene, tekel, upharsin upon our wall.” Kirk understood that, paradoxically, only a conservatism aware that it too will inevitably fail might stand a chance of lasting through the ages.

Since the American Revolution, conservatives in the United States have embraced the inevitability, or at least probability, of tragedy both in their literature and politics. The nineteenth century golden age of American literature, interestingly enough, was predicated on tragedy. Melville in Moby Dick posited that “all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.” The very idea of greatness, in Melville’s literary economy, was a disease.

Tragedy and tragic figures, in fact, marked American literature more than golden ages or heroes did. Hester Prynn and Dimsdale, Captain Ahab, Billy Budd, Poe’s Roderick Usher, Kate Chopin’s Edna Pontellier, Edith Wharton’s Lily Bart, Ethan Frome, Jay Gatbsy, Faulkner’s Quintin Compson, Llewelyn Moss of No Country for Old Men, and others inform the American literary psyche and have historically affected how Americans understood their place in the world. Seventeenth century Puritan New Englanders, no strangers to the effect of letters both sacred and secular on their political order, spurred themselves to action by hanging over their heads the fear that they would serve as a tragic lesson in civil and moral disobedience. John Winthrop’s “City on a Hill” did not portray the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a golden city on a hill, prosperous and well, and a beacon to the world’s hopeless, but a Christian commonwealth whose failures would be placed on a pillar for all the world to see. That politics and society might be tragic did not mean that life was not without levity. Mid-twentieth-century science fiction luminary Philip K. Dick quipped that “It really seems to me that in the midst of great tragedy, there is always the horrible possibility that something terribly funny will happen.” American composer Steve Allen smilingly suggested that “humor is tragedy plus time.”

“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

BREVITY…:

Covering the Cops: The world of Miami’s top crime reporter. (Calvin Trillin, February 10, 1986, The New Yorker)

In the newsroom of the Miami Herald, there is some disagreement about which of Edna Buchanan’s first paragraphs stands as the classic Edna lead. I line up with the fried-chicken faction. The fried-chicken story was about a rowdy ex-con named Gary Robinson, who late one Sunday night lurched drunkenly into a Church’s outlet, shoved his way to the front of the line, and ordered a three-piece box of fried chicken. Persuaded to wait his turn, he reached the counter again five or ten minutes later, only to be told that Church’s had run out of fried chicken. The young woman at the counter suggested that he might like chicken nuggets instead. Robinson responded to the suggestion by slugging her in the head. That set off a chain of events that ended with Robinson’s being shot dead by a security guard. Edna Buchanan covered the murder for the Herald—there are policemen in Miami who say that it wouldn’t be a murder without her—and her story began with what the fried-chicken faction still regards as the classic Edna lead: “Gary Robinson died hungry.”

All connoisseurs would agree, I think, that the classic Edna lead would have to include one staple of crime reporting—the simple, matter-of-fact statement that registers with a jolt. The question is where the jolt should be. There’s a lot to be said for starting right out with it. I’m rather partial to the Edna lead on a story last year about a woman about to go on trial for a murder conspiracy: “Bad things happen to the husbands of Widow Elkin.” On the other hand, I can understand the preference that others have for the device of beginning a crime story with a more or less conventional sentence or two, then snapping the reader back in his chair with an abbreviated sentence that is used like a blunt instrument. One student of the form at the Herald refers to that device as the Miller Chop. The reference is to Gene Miller, now a Herald editor, who, in a remarkable reporting career that concentrated on the felonious, won the Pulitzer Prize twice for stories that resulted in the release of people in prison for murder. Miller likes short sentences in general—it is sometimes said at the Herald that he writes as if he were paid by the period—and he particularly likes to use a short sentence after a couple of rather long ones. Some years ago, Gene Miller and Edna Buchanan did a story together on the murder of a high-living Miami lawyer who was shot to death on a day he had planned to while away on the golf course of La Gorce Country Club, and the lead said, “. . . he had his golf clubs in the trunk of his Cadillac. Wednesday looked like an easy day. He figured he might pick up a game later with Eddie Arcaro, the jockey. He didn’t.”

These days, Miller sometimes edits the longer pieces that Edna Buchanan does for the Herald, and she often uses the Miller Chop—as in a piece about a lovers’ spat: “The man she loved slapped her face. Furious, she says she told him never, ever to do that again. ‘What are you going to do, kill me?’ he asked, and handed her a gun. ‘Here, kill me,’ he challenged. She did.”

Now that I think of it, that may be the classic Edna lead.

COMEDY BINDS US:

Laughter regulation in solitary and social contexts varies across emotion regulation strategies (Vanessa Mitschke, Annika Ziereis, Sriranjani Manivasagam & Anne Schacht, 2025, Communications Psychology)

Regulating amusement is crucial in social contexts where expressing amusement may be inappropriate or disruptive. Yet little research has directly compared the effectiveness of different strategies for laughter regulation. Across three experiments, we examined how distraction, cognitive reappraisal, and expressive suppression affect laughter-related facial expressions and amusement ratings during exposure to jokes. Laughter regulation was operationalized by means of facial electromyography (fEMG) and subjective ratings of funniness as proxies for the expression and experience of amusement. In Experiments 1 and 2 (n = 40 each), distraction and expressive suppression most strongly reduced facial activity, whereas reappraisal produced smaller but consistent effects. However, only reappraisal reliably decreased funniness ratings, suggesting selective effects on the cognitive evaluation of humor. Experiment 3 (n = 41) introduced social laughter feedback and revealed that the presence of another’s laughter impaired expression control and increased funniness ratings, indicating that social cues shape both emotional expression and experience. Together, these findings show how distinct emotion-regulation strategies modulate amusement and laughter expressions in response to humorous stimuli and highlight the contextual sensitivity of laughter regulation in socially dynamic settings.

HONESTY ABOUT THE fALL…:

In Defense of Dark Humor  (Rebekah Bills, September 25, 2025, Providence)

Despite the punchline’s references to the evils of child marriage and pornography, I found it wickedly funny and—perhaps to assuage my own conscience—have been pondering the role of dark humor ever since. In a recent discussion, Lorraine Murphy, professor of English at Hillsdale College, described how all great stories, comedies and tragedies, demonstrate a “willingness to look at the darkness.” Truly memorable stories acknowledge the brokenness of our world and humanity’s immense capacity for evil. Humor, especially satire and dark humor, plays with the incongruence and deviation from how things are and how they ought to be. It highlights the absurdity of evil in ways plain English can’t. Likewise, my former coworker’s joke hit on an ugly truth, momentarily laying bare the evil that my colleagues and I dealt with every day. The crude joke mocked an evil that, except for rare moments, was compartmentalized and handled with detached professionalism. It dared to “look at the darkness” through the guise of levity. 

Throughout the Western literary tradition, humor has historically been a means of acknowledging the darkness present in the human condition, often by exposing moral failures and hypocrisies.

…is one of the features that makes all comedy conservative.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

The Forgotten Soap Opera That Took on the New Deal (David Beito, 8/20/25, AIER)

In December 1934, The American Family Robinson came to the radio airwaves. The new show, like many of its competitors, featured a combination of mystery, family life, romance, drama, adventure, comedy, and intrigue. But it also had something unique to offer. Unlike other radio soap operas, The American Family Robinson openly celebrated free markets, private property, and self-reliance.

The American Family Robinson was part of a strategy by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) to sway public opinion against the New Deal. Acting through a front group, the National Industrial Council, industry interests created a radio soap opera weaving together entertainment, promotion of entrepreneurship, and opposition to big government. […]

The American Family Robinson is set in the fictional town of Centerville. The main characters are Luke Robinson, who edits and publishes the town’s newspaper, the Centerville Herald; his wife Myra, who hosts her radio show, their daughter Betty, and Betty’s husband, star reporter Dick Collins. In nearly every episode, Luke good-naturedly and patiently explains (in a manner anticipating the sagacious Judge Hardy in the later hit movie series) the importance of thrift, low taxes, property rights, self-reliance, and limited government.

The production was helmed by professionals including Martha Atwell (a rare example of a female director) and the script-writing husband-and-wife team of Douglas Silver and Marjorie Bartlett Silver. The actors had extensive stage and radio experience. On the strength of the writing and characterizations, the show developed a significant fan base. Many tuned in for the intricate plots, including cliffhangers about murder and kidnapping, as much as for the ideas.

A particular favorite among listeners was William “Windy Bill” Winkle (played with aplomb by Shakespearean actor Joe Latham), Luke Robinson’s mooching brother-in-law and self-invited house guest.

Lord love the Interwebs, via which we can still listen to the series.

COMEDY PRICKS OUR GANFALON BUBBLES:

The power of fun (Daniel Inman, 15 September, 2025, The Critic)

What made Bakhtin so radical was his insistence that the comic and the grotesque reveal truths that are inaccessible to the institutions of solemn authority. In carnival laughter, the mask and the parody, he saw not an escape from reality but a deeper engagement with it. The “grotesque body”, as he described it — eating, drinking, laughing, exceeding its boundaries — stands in contrast to the polished, self-contained body of rulers and institutions. Through carnival, societies give voice to the unsayable, expose the temporary nature of all power, and remind themselves that no order is permanent — through laughter “the world is seen anew, no less (and perhaps more) profoundly than when seen from the serious standpoint” (Rabelais and His World, Trans. by Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press (1984)), 66). The grotesque, in this sense, is not distasteful but positively subversive and regenerative. […]

Perhaps one of Bakhtin’s most unsettling insights, however, is that carnival never stays carnival for long. The laughter, parody, and inversion that once mocked authority always carry within them the seeds of their own ossification. Once victorious, the jesters so often become the judges: movements born in joyous defiance harden into new orthodoxies, policing their own rituals of seriousness with the very severity they once ridiculed and leaving those in authority struggling to understand the new terrain.

SKEPTICISM IS REALISM:

Grumpy Old…Men? (Jeannette Cooperman, July 3, 2025, Common Reader)

But curmudgeons grow people up, too.

Lou Grant, shirtsleeves rolled up, scowling across his desk at Mary Tyler Moore. Abe Vigoda as Fish on Barney Miller; Redd Foxx as Fred Sanford, Hugh Laurie as Dr. Gregory House. Samuel Johnson, John Adams, even the man called Ove. I loved those guys. Too much sweetness, too much palaver and perky optimism and influencer smarm, and you need an antidote. Grumpiness is honest, and there is often wisdom beneath its crust. I regularly pull out Montaigne as a yardstick: “Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.” Samuel Johnson stopped me cold by observing, “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” Thomas Szasz stopped me, too, when he defined happiness as “an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.” H.L. Mencken presaged Trump’s sales of golden sneakers with the weary aphorism: “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.” And Voltaire left us an even sharper lesson: “To succeed in claiming the multitude you must seem to wear the same fetters.”

Politics is a curmudgeon’s favorite playground. In his Devil’s Dictionary, Bierce defined political life as “a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.” He defined “alliance,” in international politics, as “the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted into each other’s pocket that they cannot safely plunder a third.” He defined history as “an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.”

Curmudgeons, you see, have standards. Sherlock Holmes could not abide being fooled, and Statler and Waldorf suffered no foolish puppets. Mark Twain rolled his eyes at idiocy of all sorts, and Lewis Black skewers it. “Curmudgeon” once implied that you were a “surly, ill-mannered, bad-tempered fellow,” which certainly explains why women could not qualify, as none of those adjectives are sanctioned for us. But environmentalist Edward Abbey noted in self-defense that the label’s meaning had evolved “to refer to anyone who hates hypocrisy, cant, sham, dogmatic ideologies, the pretenses and evasions of euphemism, and has the nerve to point out unpleasant facts and takes the trouble to impale these sins on the skewer of humor and roast them over the fires of empiric fact, common sense, and native intelligence. In this nation of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, it then becomes an honor to be labeled curmudgeon.”

What saves a curmudgeon from bitterness is the acceptance that man is Fallen and those standards will not be met much.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Flag-Waving Russian Forces Troll Trump After Crumbling to Putin (Tom Sanders, Aug. 18 2025, Daily Beast)

Russian forces were spotted mocking Trump’s capitulation to Vladimir Putin during their peace summit by attaching American flags to their vehicles as they rode into battle in Ukraine.

Should really be wearing MAGA hats…