All Comedy is Conservative

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…

IF I CAN’T SEE IT, IT CAN’T SEE ME:

Stephen Fry: What Jeeves and PG Wodehouse taught me about life: The actor fell in love with stories about ‘silly asses in spats and monocles’ as a teenager. Fifty years after the author’s death, he celebrates his comic genius (Stephen Fry, 5/18/25, Times uk)

It is true that, on the surface, the world of Wodehouse seems trapped in time — a time we might very well think has passed its sell-by date. His cast of imperious aunts, stern and gooseberry-eyed butlers, disapproving uncles, sporty young girls, natty young men who throw bread rolls in club dining rooms yet blush and stammer in the presence of the opposite sex — all may be taken as evidence of a man stuck in a permanent childhood, a view attested by George Orwell primus inter pares. (If that’s the right phrase, Jeeves? “Perfectly correct, sir. Although the common English equivalent ‘first among equals’ would perhaps serve as well.” Thank you, Jeeves.) As many have pointed out, Wodehouse never grew up, making his world and outlook, as Waugh put it, “Eden before the Fall”.

European culture never really recovered from WWI, while he simply ignored it.

AND WE ALL RECOGNIZE SOLIDITY:

A Comedian of Order (Titus Techera, 7/23/24, Law & Liberty)

The moral authority of the decent American is the running theme of Bob’s first big show, in which he plays Robert Hartley, a psychologist. On the one hand, it’s as normal as you could want—he plays a Midwesterner, he works in Chicago. On the other hand, life is crazy and psychology isn’t going to fix it, all it can really do is foster forbearance and even that is difficult. Freedom is hard to deal with, because everyone else is also free. […]

The comedy show as a whole suggests that there is something that endures in America, despite social transformations. Put otherwise, what’s funny about people is the variety of ways in which they fail to be solid. You want to think the best of people, in part because it helps you can go on with a sense of your own dignity; comedy suggests that’s much harder to do once the difficulties of life set in—in fact, you might go mad. In this sense, the show is all about a sound man confronting reality.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

The philosophical genius of P.G. Wodehouse (WILLIAM FEAR, 7/22/24, Englesberg Ideas)

As one would expect, Jeeves has a rather more precise grip on philosophy than Bertie. He is a keen reader of Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century rationalist philosopher. This is noteworthy because Spinoza was known for his ardent determinism and his denial of free will. Jeeves is also familiar with Marcus Aurelius. He offers a quote of his to Bertie in a time of difficulty:

Does aught befall you? It is good. It is part of the destiny of the Universe ordained for you from the beginning. All that befalls you is part of the great web.

Bertie responds by saying: ‘Well, you can tell him from me he’s an ass.’

In Wodehouse’s world, the ‘the great web’ doesn’t equate to the bleak, windswept attitude of a pessimistic fatalist. Instead, it represents a kind of optimistic determinism. In other words: there’s a certain degree of equanimity that comes with resigning oneself to the fact that the future is decided, one being unable to change its course.

Wodehouse’s stoical optimism doesn’t just appear in the Jeeves novels, but in Wodehouse’s earlier work. His 1909 school story Mike makes a similar observation:

When affairs get into a real tangle, it is best to sit still and let them straighten themselves out. Or, if one does not do that, simply to think no more about them. This is Philosophy. The true philosopher is the man who says ‘All right,’ and goes to sleep in his arm-chair.

Wodehouse wasn’t merely a champion of the stiff upper-lip, but a true stoic. He believed in adapting the self to the world, rather than trying to change the world to fit around the self.

LIFE IS COMEDY:

Can jokes in terrible taste ever be funny?: Wisecracks is clearly the work of an academic philosopher adept at teasing out fine distinctions between “offenses” and “harms” (Matthew Reisz, 6/28/24, The Critic)

Whilst mockery can be culpably cruel and often deserves to be condemned, Shoemaker notes, it can also “serve to bond those who engage in it”, work as “a kind of initiation rite” and act as “a genuine expression of affection amongst people who otherwise have trouble expressing affection”. This leads him to some uncomfortable questions about whether declaring a group such as the disabled “beyond mockery” can’t itself act as a form of exclusion. […]

It is crucial to his case that Shoemaker himself should practise what he preaches. When he was “diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer”, he recalls, he found he could cope with “a wee bit of sympathetic concern”, but what he really wanted were “emotionally detached wisecracks” from close friends on the lines of “C’mon out for a drink, you’re not dead yet.”

When he chose to treat his suffering as a joke, the last thing he needed were “empathetic” friends saying “Oh, you poor thing, that’s horrible! How can you laugh at that?” Genuine “emotional empathy in such circumstances requires, ironically, that I emotionally detach from your pain or trauma along with you”.

Indeed, although we rightly condemn people who lack all empathy for the suffering of others, Shoemaker is convinced that there is “significant underappreciated value in our sometimes empathising less with, and being more amused by, pain, suffering and misfortune. It is a powerfully effective way to cope with life’s curveballs, and it’s often the most appropriate way of responding to life’s ultimate absurdity.”

Mocking everyone and everything is liberalism.