The Colbert Cancellation and Why Comedy Must Now Be Political

Values determine what we find funny

With the recent firing of Colbert and the coming end of The Late Show, the right has gone with the story that late night comedy has declined because it became too political. They see Colbert as another case of “Go Woke, Go Broke.”

I don’t think such critiques make sense, as they seem to assume some objective measure of humor one can appeal to. Comedic talent is obviously real, but whether something is funny depends on the cultural context, and the value system of the audience. The criticisms of Colbert are similar to what we heard about other comics throughout the Great Awokening. I think conservatives were imagining that, because they didn’t think that there was anything funny about mocking Trump supporters, no one else did either. But, believe it or not, many on the left do genuinely enjoy watching John Oliver and Samantha Bee.

When I was in law school, I had a friend I used to make racist and sexist jokes with. This was of course before I had learned to respect people of color and try to uplift the voices of women. One day on the school’s email listserv he made some kind of joke implying indifference to animal suffering at the expense of vegetarians. I remember getting offended and being somewhat mad at him about that. Then I thought it was strange how I enjoyed racist and sexist jokes, but ones about cruelty to animals made me into a crying lib.

Obviously, political and moral values influenced my sense of humor. Liberals consider racism a major societal issue, and make opposing it central to their identity. Conservatives may be more likely to find racist jokes funny, not necessarily because they are racist themselves (although they often are), but because they believe that society overrates its importance, and they’re the people who say we need to lighten up. Likewise, the idea that there are adults out there who believe that they have an imaginary friend named “Jesus” who they’ll get to hang out with after they die can be a source of great entertainment for atheists, but not Christians.

Steven Pinker’s upcoming When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows… discusses the role of humor from an evolutionary perspective. When social scientists study instances of laughter out in the field, it turns out that only a small minority of them involve an individual making a joke. People instead mostly laugh when they say stuff like “Nice meeting you too!” and “Are you sure?” Or a friend will point to someone or allude to a shared memory and everyone will start giggling.

Comedy to laughter, then, can be understood as the analog of cheesecake to the need to eat. Jokes “are engineered to deliver the pleasure of day-to-day humor in a concentrated jolt.” Saying things that other people outside of a given context will find funny is deeply unnatural, with laughter at its core being a communal experience that bonds us together.

Since laughter is involuntary, like crying and blushing, it serves as a credible signal of what we think and feel. I might say that I believe that discrimination against the LGBT community is a major problem. But if I then turn around and crack up at the sight of a man in a dress for how ridiculous he looks, others will doubt my sincerity. It’s preferable in that case to enjoy more politically correct comedy, say insults aimed at bigoted Republicans instead. This isn’t a matter of pretending to find one kind of content funnier than the other. An individual’s sense of humor ends up being shaped by what their true values are, which are themselves the products of a complex mix of social incentives and intellectual conviction.

Humor also has the role of challenging hierarchy, or reducing the status of our enemies. Pinker writes about Trump’s origin story as a presidential candidate.

Starting in 2011, Barack Obama would roast Donald Trump at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, where the butts of the jokes are expected to be good sports. That year, having just released his birth certificate to refute Trump’s charge that he was born in Africa, Obama announced that he would now release his actual birth video. He proceeded to play the opening scene from The Lion King with the presentation of the newborn cub Simba (adding, “I want to make clear to the Fox News table: that was a joke”). On another occasion he quipped about Trump’s presidential aspirations: “There’s one area where Donald’s experience could be invaluable, and that’s closing Guantanamo [the American prison camp in Cuba]. Because Trump knows a thing or two about running waterfront properties into the ground.” Amid the merriment Trump visibly seethed, and some analysts speculate that the humiliation tipped him into running for president as revenge and redemption.

The barbs drew blood because of a feature of humor pointed out by James Joyce: “In risu veritas. In laughter there is truth.” More accurately, in laughter there is common knowledge. Obama’s playing of the Disney clip was funny because everyone knew that Trump’s “birther” theory was little more than a cartoonish stereotype. His add-on jibe presupposed a common understanding that Fox News was credulous about anything that disparaged liberals. The unkindest cut of all was the wisecrack that called to mind Trump’s bankruptcies, since it undermined Trump’s proudest boast, that he was a successful businessman.

Of course, not everyone knew that Birtherism was a false conspiracy theory and that Fox was a propagandistic news outlet. To many Republicans, there was nothing funny about these jokes. They may have seemed downright offensive if you truly believed that Obama was a usurper who had conned his way to the presidency with the help of a compliant media, and they were all now sitting around having a grand old time at the expense of Americans who dared to tell the truth.

In an era in which Americans are more divided in terms of politics and values, then, we should expect them to be divided in terms of what they find funny. In a sense, it may be true that Colbert’s decline had something to do with how political his show was, but that doesn’t mean that he could have avoided controversial issues altogether and expanded his audience. In contrast, Jay Leno and David Letterman were able to successfully stake out the middle when joking about major news stories. I remember first discovering late night TV around the years that Leno was making fun of the Monica Lewinsky scandal (see this monologue). This could appeal to Republicans, but also many Democrats too, even if they thought that the entire impeachment process was a witch-hunt. They weren’t so enraged about the situation that they couldn’t put their politics to the side and still enjoy the absurdity of the situation.

Since MeToo, Leno has occasionally been pressured to apologize to Lewinsky. He has refused to do so. Aside from the partisanship angle, another reason that the jokes wouldn’t play as well to a broad audience today is that they involved making fun of a situation where a woman was arguably taken advantage of by her superior in the workplace. To many contemporary leftists, that is akin to mocking a rape victim, while conservatives might be more inclined to believe that she was a consenting adult and therefore fair game. So we do not only disagree more strongly on who the good and bad guys are in politics now, but also diverge on fundamental values regarding things like which kinds of relationships are off limits, or in the case of debates over “punching down,” who is even a legitimate target. We differ more on basic facts too. There was much less fundamental disagreement about what actually happened during Watergate, Iran-Contra, or the Clinton impeachment than there is regarding Russiagate and various Trump scandals.

Comedy is therefore bound to be more fractured today than it was in previous generations. This can explain the decline of not only late night TV, but also sitcoms and adult comedy blockbusters. People treat this as a story of technological change, and it certainly is, but divergences in terms of values and political attitudes mean that it is unlikely that comedy could be the unifying force it once was even if we went back to the era of the three major network TV channels. The homogenous underpinnings of a shared culture are gone. It’s ironic that the right often blames immigration for societal divisions, when new arrivals seem to be assimilating just fine, while it is the rise of conservative media that is more responsible for creating an alternative ecosystem with its own taboos, ideological litmus tests, and narratives that have undermined our once common reality.

The type of comedy performed by John Oliver and Stephen Colbert would hardly make sense in a world without Fox News. Their schtick depends on rebelling against the more absurd aspects of American conservatism, and they would be unlikely to have audiences as large without a rival cultural force this offensive and alien to push back against. In an environment without partisan divisions as sharp as the ones we currently have, say like in contemporary Germany or the US of the 1970s, such an act would not work, and mainstream comedy would probably revolve around the norms and challenges that many Americans still share once we get beyond hot button culture war issues. The creation of the “liberal establishment” in the minds of the mainstream public divided the world into two antagonistic camps. This had countless secondary social and psychological effects, down to what causes involuntary expressions of joy.