Why so serious? Studying humor on the right

Sometime around 2008, a friend invited me to a St. Patrick’s Day barbeque in Southie – the Irish American enclave in Boston, perhaps most infamous for its violent riots against racial integration in the 1970s. My friend’s father, a proud veteran of those street skirmishes, greeted us at the gate in front of his row house. We introduced ourselves, and mid-handshake he asked me point blank, “Are you Puerto Rican?” I’m not. My ancestors were settlers and immigrants from Western Europe, though my dark hair and olive complexion render my body ambiguous and open to myriad ethnic readings. “No,” I answered, taken aback. “Well, you woulda been one of the good ones!” he replied without missing a beat. He laughed. I cringed and spent the rest of the day avoiding him. As a researcher of right-wing media and conservative news, I’ve long pondered this joke and its purpose – the social, cultural, and interpersonal labor of such humor. My friend’s father was just about as self-actualized as a racist can get. He had engaged in racist street fighting and was unabashed in expressing his hatred of and resentment toward African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and various other racial and ethnic “others” whom he viewed as a threat. How, then, to explain his attempt at levity? In this essay, I review two new books that foreground the lighter emotional valences on the right: The Souls of White Jokes, by Pérez (2022), and That’s Not Funny, by Sienkiewicz and Marx (2022). These works mark an important turning point in the study of right-wing political culture in the United States, away from reductionist accounts of the “reactionary mind” and toward a fuller understanding of the complex and contingent motivations of conservatives.

Scholars and journalists have long foregrounded negative emotions like hatred, anger, and resentment to explain the salience of right-wing and white supremacist political ideas and identifications. In the United States, this tendency dates to the very origins of the post-war conservative movement. Highly influential early works by Bell (1963) and Hofstadter (1966) attributed the rise of conservatism in the McCarthy Era to psychological disturbances such as “dispossession” by progress, “status anxiety,” and paranoia. Bell and Hofstadter were influenced by the Theodore Adorno-led Frankfurt School study The Authoritarian Personality, a psychological analysis of proto-fascist personalities published in 1950. That study distinguished between “conservatives” and “pseudoconservatives” – the former concerned with defending “traditional” American values like capitalism and liberal democracy (e.g. opposing the New Deal) while rejecting anti-minority prejudice, with the latter defined as, “a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.” These pseudoconservatives, according to Adorno and his colleagues, were hiding behind the banner of tradition to mask deeper impulses toward “authoritarian aggressiveness and vindictiveness,” as well as “crude repression,” and a “virtual condemnation of anything that is deemed weak” (Adorno et al., 1950: 675–676). Although reductive, these old theories still hold considerable space within the conventional wisdom of U.S. political journalists and political scientists (e.g. Hart, 2020), with some critical scholars even returning to revise and extend them (Weigel, 2022).

Scholars associated with the “affective turn” in political science, a response to the broader tendency in the field to consider political actors as being driven primarily by rational-critical imperatives, have similarly tended to associate right-wing politics with bad vibes. Hoggett and Thompson (2012) for example, offer an extensive typology of political feelings in Politics and the Emotions. They distinguish between “positive feelings (of attraction)” and “negative feelings (of repulsion),” with the latter “now widely understood to be the affective foundation for reactionary and authoritarian forms of populism” (Hoggett and Thompson, 2012: 8, 10). While social and political historians have documented the conservative movement’s complex array of rhetorical appeals and activist strategies, including its occasional dalliances with humor (e.g. Hemmer, 2022; Shepherd, 2023), such studies have also complicated attempts to define conservatism as a discrete political identity or coherent ideology—as it happens, the conservative movement has long been a motley coalition of contradictory and at times conflicting ideas, personalities, and values. Pushing back on the “nominalist” tendency by social and cultural historians to portray conservatism as a sort of empty signifier (i.e. “conservatives are people who call themselves conservative or, more elaborately, conservatives are people who people who call themselves conservative call conservative”), intellectual historian Corey Robin has reduced conservatism to a personal affinity for the “private life of power.” Robin contends that conservatism is defined by “opposition to the liberation of men and women from the fetters of their superiors, particularly in the private sphere” (Robin, 2011: 16). While not a psychological analysis, Robin’s work draws upon the same negative affective register for explaining the “reactionary mind” as did Adorno et al. (1950).

The underlying presumption that conservatism in general – and right-populism in particular – arises from and produces nothing but negative emotions and affects, results in the overwhelming tendency among scholars and critics of right-wing news and conservative media activism to deploy a hermeneutics of suspicion, an interpretive lens which seeks to uncover and expose hidden truths that lay beneath appearances (Sedgwick, 2003). In Manufacturing Consent, Herman and Chomsky (1988) famously argue in favor of considering all corporate news media as reactionary, reducing explicitly right-wing media outlets to “flak” designed to keep those mainstream outlets from straying too far from the pro-business, pro-military interventionist line. David Brock, a conservative-turned-liberal media activist and founder of progressive press watchdog MediaMatters for America, refers to the conservative think tank and media apparatus as a “noise machine” (Brock, 2004). Jamieson and Cappella (2008), in describing the ways in which establishment conservative media reinforce right-wing beliefs and inoculate audiences against ideology-contradicting facts and arguments, contend that conservatives are trapped in “echo chambers.”

That these studies each metaphorically reduce conservative media and activism to inanimate and bewildering devices is indicative of their shared assumptions that conservative audiences are objects, rather than agential subjects, of political communication. All suggest that these audiences are disoriented, embedded in self-contained media environments which other media scholars have characterized as primarily driven by hate, outrage, and fear (Berry and Sobieraj, 2014; Young, 2019). The main problem with these approaches is that they fail to render right-wing media, and the hermeneutics surrounding them, in ways that reflect the lived experiences and interpretive strategies of conservative audiences themselves. This should go without saying, but right-wing populists aren’t mad all the time—not even while watching or listening to their favorite conservative news and commentary. Their hatred does not always, or even often, manifest in violence or assaultive forms of speech. Indeed, as was the case with my friend’s father, feelings of racial and ideological superiority are often experienced as pleasure, joy, or levity.

What is it about conservatism in general, and right-wing populism in particular, that leaves scholars, journalists, and the public at large contented by such one-dimensional explanations?

According to Pérez, Sienkiewicz, and Marx, one answer may lie in an inability among scholars and non-conservatives to recognize right-wing humor as such. Surveying the humor studies literature in The Souls of White Jokes, Pérez finds a tendency to approach humor as a “happy object,” namely that jokes are primarily means toward the end of levity or positive affects (i.e. the exact opposite of the feelings scholars have focused on when explaining the impacts of right-wing media). This tendency is perhaps most stark in the work of the British sociologist Christie Davies, who devised a “universal theory of ethnic jokes” that posits such humor as merely about asserting “distinctive identities” and forming out-group distinctions in an entertaining and amusing manner. Davies rejected the social consequences of racial and ethnic humor, denying the role such jokes play in producing and reinforcing forms of social exclusion and cultural subordination (Pérez, 2022: 33–37). Pérez rightly points out that Davies’ approach dovetails with arguments by conservatives who accuse liberals of “political correctness” or “cancel culture” when they call out racially insensitive jokes for perpetuating racism (Pérez, 2022: 40). According to this strain of humor studies, right-wing jokes are “just jokes” – meaning they have little social, cultural, or political consequence and, as such, are undeserving of robust or concerted inquiry.

In That’s Not Funny, Sienkiewicz and Marx take aim at a similar tendency among media studies scholars – and, they argue, among liberals more broadly – to dismiss or overlook conservative humor as “unfunny.” Liberals’ unwillingness to take conservative humor seriously, they argue, has resulted in repressive tendencies while enabling the flourishing of bad-faith, right-wing comics. “If liberals believe that only they possess the power of comedy, it is tempting to over-police humorists in order to reduce the risk of insensitivity,” they write. This move exacerbates conservatives’ already well documented sense of victimization, adding fuel to the fire. Instead, Sienkiewicz and Marx call upon liberals to “foster the freest possible space for the best comedic talents to work in,” in the hopes that “good faith comedic experimentation” will make space for less toxic forms of conservative humor to flourish (Sienkiewicz and Marx, 2022: 4–5). The dismissive reply of “that’s not funny,” Sienkiewicz and Marx contend, causes progressives to overlook (and fail to counter) the widespread and growing influence of the conservative humor industry.

Sienkiewicz and Marx take particular issue with Young’s (2019) book Irony and Outrage. They contend that Young unduly naturalizes differences between liberals and conservatives, as though ideology and humor or outrage are somehow biologically linked. But Young does well to root the differences she describes in historical processes and in particular movement and media formations. Indeed, Young and Sienkiewicz/Marx both rightly trace the rise of conservative outrage programing and conservative humor, respectively, to macro political economic shifts in media, including deregulatory trends and technological innovations from the 1980s onward. Sienkiewicz and Marx are correct, however, that Young’s comparison of preferred liberal and conservative genres reinforces an inaccurate conventional wisdom – that liberals are funny, or at least motivated by humor, whereas conservatives are not.

Sienkiewicz and Marx describe the prevailing tendency to dismiss conservative humor as a psychological complex, akin to denial. This complex, Sienkiewicz and Marx contend, causes liberals and academics to overlook a different sort of complex: “a networked structure of conservative, comedic TV shows, podcasts, streaming media, and websites that work together, directing viewers to each other and circulating them throughout intertwined ideological spaces” (Sienkiewicz and Marx, 2022: 5). The authors somewhat over-state the former complex for the sake of metaphor – it’s not clear, to me at least, that liberals are actually in denial about conservative humor so much as they, rightly, don’t find it humorous. I’m also not convinced that liberals need to learn to appreciate conservative humor, although academics would surely do well to grapple with it more deeply. That’s Not Funny is at its strongest laying a foundation for the latter, mapping the sprawling and lucrative business of conservative comedy and explaining its growing influence over not only self-identified conservatives, but viewers who may not yet see themselves as ideologically aligned.

Sienkiewicz and Marx take readers on a tour of this “conservative humor complex,” starting with false starts like The ½ Hour News Hour, The Flipside and Headlines Tonight – failed conservative attempts at countering Comedy Central’s The Daily Show that have often been deployed by critics as evidence of conservatives’ lack of humor. The authors then point to more successful efforts, most notably by Fox News comedic commentators Jesse Watters and Greg Gutfeld, suggesting that the “conservatives aren’t funny” common sense is underwritten by a selection bias designed to reinforce liberal comedy prowess. Though thoroughly mocked by liberals on Twitter, Fox’s Gutfeld! is competitive with its late-night peers. The show averaged 1.73 million viewers in 2019, ahead of all other late-night programs except CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and NBC’s Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. By 2021, Gutfeld! had topped 2 million viewers, beating CBS’s Colbert (Sienkiewicz and Marx, 2022: 37). Even beyond late night, so-called “paleo” comedians like Dennis Miller and Tim Allen (I would add Bill Maher to this list) achieve massive audiences with conventional radio and television programs on nominally non-conservative platforms such as HBO and ABC. These comedians pander to audience nostalgia for the “good old days” when white men dominated the public sphere, employing what cultural studies scholar Reece Peck calls a “‘mass’ positionality” by pandering to white working-class taste while claiming to represent “American” culture as a whole (Peck, 2019: 53–54). Liberals, journalists and scholars may not find conservatives funny, Sienkiewicz and Marx contend, but millions of U.S. Americans do.

Sienkiewicz and Marx also consider more unseemly corners of right-wing comedy online, with content analyses of sites ranging from the Christian parody Babylon Bee to the overtly white supremacist and antisemitic Daily Shoah. In spite of the dreadful, at times genocidal, content, the authors tease out the role of humor in cultivating and perpetuating far-right ideology – hatred and laughter, it seems, often go hand-in-hand. The authors also artfully track how far-right actors like Nazi sympathizer Nick Fuentes and Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes circulate between obscure online and podcast spaces and larger outlets like Fox News, using levity and trolling tactics to cross pollinate right-wing extremist ideology between fringe and mainstream.

In The Souls of White Jokes, Raúl Pérez similarly suggests that humor provides a crucial connective tissue between the “far right” and more widely respected conservative quarters. While the rise of the so-called “Alt Right” in 2016 emphasized racist humor in niche online spaces like message boards, Pérez finds similar sensibilities more broadly within U.S. policing culture, among immensely popular conservative media figures like Rush Limbaugh, and among Republican Party leaders. Building on Omi and Winant’s (2014) conception of “racial projects,” social and cultural processes by which historically particular formations of racial discourse convert phenotypic diversity into hierarchies of value, Pérez examines how racist humor shapes and perpetuates white racial consciousness. Key, here, is the notion of “amused racial contempt,” a tendency ranging from overt white supremacists to nominally well-meaning white people, to express their feelings of social and cultural superiority over people of color using humor. Pérez argues that such racist humor is particularly salient amidst a prevailing dominant racial discourse oriented toward “colorblindness.” He argues, “racist joking in a so-called colorblind society allows joke tellers to share and test the waters of racial sentiments in seemingly benign or unserious ways, as ‘just a joke’” (Pérez, 2022: 47).

My friend’s father’s “joke” speculating about my supposed Puerto Rican heritage is a prime example. If I had been Puerto Rican, this “joke” would have given him a sense of the boundaries for his expressions of amused racial contempt while I was present at the barbeque (lest he or I disrupt the party by causing a scene). Assured of my whiteness, my friend’s father felt comfortable expressing where in his personal understanding of racial hierarchy he situates people of Puerto Rican descent (as provisionally “bad,” but potentially “good” with appropriate social connections or deference to whiteness). Despite being a white man, my dark hair and olive complexion rendered my “goodness” similarly contingent. Such are the absurd vicissitudes of racist reading practices – constantly seeking hierarchal order amidst phenotypical difference, even in such low stakes settings as a holiday party. As Pérez writes, “racism is not only about ignorance or hate, but about reproducing pleasurable racial solidarity” (Pérez, 2022: 48). Seemingly benign interactions like my friend’s father’s “joke” occur daily and accrue to form the malignant ether of white supremacy – invisible to most white people, though constitutive of the quotidian pleasurable experiences of whiteness itself.

Humor is also a mechanism, Pérez notes, for people of color seeking the social power and class privileges of whiteness to participate in its pleasures. Racist humor, he writes, “invites participants to share and enjoy in the uncritical amused contempt of racialized targets, regardless of their historic and continued experiences of systematic, structural, and cultural oppression, abuse, and violence” (Pérez, 2022: 166-167). Pérez begins his book with a particularly rich text in this regard: a “white” police officer learns, through a DNA test, that he has some sub-Saharan African ancestry. He announces this finding to his fellow officers by making racist jokes about his affinity for chicken and the size of his penis. Before long, however, the officer became the brunt of racist jokes himself – subjected to racist taunting and mockery by his follow white officers. This example, crucially, proves that race is unrelated to any biological essence. Pérez writes, the officer’s “racialization was created not by a DNA test but by the racist jokes, teasing, and ridicule that he endured from his fellow white officers” (Pérez, 2022: 4). Racist humor isn’t epiphenomenal, it is the very substance of racial difference.

This is not to say that hatred, outrage, and violence play no role in the mutual perpetuation of political conservatism and white supremacy in the United States and elsewhere. We have decades worth of scholarly and journalistic work documenting and analyzing such. What Pérez, Sienkiewicz and Marx demonstrate is that understanding right-wing politics according to only its negative affective valences obfuscates precisely what attracts many white people to right-wing ideology in the first place – pleasure, humor, levity. We cannot understand the continued salience and reproduction of right-wing political projects without recognizing and attending to these positive affective valences. Actually, we can. We have. Meanwhile, right-wing politics have been slowly but persistently ascendant in the United States and around the globe. If we hope to understand these phenomena with the purpose of slowing their progression and mitigating their harms, we must avoid reductionist tendencies. We must understand white supremacist and right-wing political projects on their own terms – even if we don’t personally find them amusing – so we can produce criticism that is legible to white conservative audiences, that considers the full spectrum of emotions through which they experience their ideology.