For good reason
Conservative satire is underrepresented
By Connor Atkinson
Brad Stine has made a fruitful living as a professional comedian. He has bought and sold three homes, put his son through college and owned several nice cars from money earned throughout his career.
Financial success for conservative comedians is rare. Stine’s decades-long career has faced a barrage of hate. He is often prefaced as unfunny, but was once called “God’s comic” in an August 2004 issue of The New Yorker. He is white, straight and a born-again Christian; what he refers to as the “trifecta of everything that could go wrong with being a comedian.”
“I must be the biggest genius in the world to have fooled people into thinking I was funny for 30 years. If progressives were actually tolerant, objective and mature they would say they don’t like my point of view, but that I’m definitely funny,” Stine says. “They’ve become stunted in interpreting comedy. They’re going to have to grow up.”
Evan Sayet, author of The KinderGarden of Eden: How The Modern Liberal Thinks, has seen instances of shortcomings too. He once wrote for Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect and The Arsenio Hall Show, but when Sayet pitched his comedy special Right To Laugh to Showtime, it was rejected. He realized that the majority of gatekeepers in the industry are left-leaning.
“They see it as a political responsibility to now allow alternative points of view,” Sayet says. “What late-night talk show host is going to have me on their program: The leftist Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Myer or Stephen Colbert? Given their detest for alternative points of view, they’re not going to give a conservative comedian an opportunity to present his case to the world.”
Stine fondly remembers times when his comedy was solely gauged on being funny or not. In 2004, with the George Bush administration in power, Stine saw the polarization of his audiences grow. He saw people become enemies of opposing viewpoints, likening it to “anarchy.”
“It’s become a detriment, by no fault of my own, to be white, and through my own political observation and cultural awareness to choose a particular philosophy of conservatism,” Stine says. “We need equal dignity to equal ideas, in hopes that we can have a civil dialogue. That can only be done with equal access to content. That’s where comedy comes from. Its job is to find funny in anything and everything.”
Matt Christman, Felix Biederman and Will Menaker seem to have found a way to make large audiences laugh at the anything’s and everything. In February 2016, the group taped an hour-long conversation using the Google Hangout app and broadcasted it in real-time over YouTube. A joke from the broadcast combining “Chapo”, the name of a Mexican drug lord, and the slang term for a drug lab, “Trap House”, gave them a title for their podcast Chapo Trap House. The program thrives on vulgar discourse about the political climate.
Enter the “dirtbag left”, a term coined by Chapo co-host Amber A’Lee Frost. Their millennial approach to political comedy is notably anti-political correctness while consecutively left-leaning. “Gay”, “retarded” and “pussy” are often slurs used in their transcripts. They use many of the same online mannerisms as the alt-right (namely vulgarity and memes) while maintaining their leftist mindset. Chapo does not pander to the audiences of Trevor Noah and Seth Myers. The friendly “agree to disagree” energy is absent.
When coarse humor is vehemently projected by a group of primarily white men, it sometimes projects as dogmatic. In turn, Chapo’s listeners often overlap in the political compass. A socialist listener might donate to the group’s Patreon account (which currently grosses over $88K on a monthly basis) while a right-wing troll might actively participate in the show’s forums.
“The twenty-first century is basically defined by nonessential human beings, who do not fit into the market as consumers or producers or as laborers. That manifests itself differently in different classes and geographic areas,” Christman told The New Yorker in 2016. “For white, middle-class, male, useless people- who have just enough family context to not be crushed by poverty- they become failsons. Some of them turn into Nazis, others become aware of the consequences of capitalism.”
While Chapo provides some vulgar humor to the underserved rightwing audience, Sayet follows a “four-wall” strategy that ironically parallels the liberal echo chamber that he passionately speaks against.
“I’ve had to create my own environment. I am the only act. I promote it to my fans. That way I know everyone there has knowledge to what the act is going to be about. They tend to have more knowledge than a 24 year-old having their fourth beer and laughing at dirty jokes. They tend to be politically active, so I can delve deeper,” Sayet says. “I can garner a bigger following thanks to YouTube and Facebook. I don't need the left as much as I needed them 10 years ago. I do a lot of conservative events. In a lot of ways, my reputation precedes me. I'm extremely well-known by anyone who knows me. I have a hardcore niche fan base. I’m extremely well-received.”
People often tell Stine that the dwindling presence of rightwing satire could stem from audiences’ views on certain issues changing. “Or maybe they were bullied into shutting up. When you’re told you’re a racist for wanting sovereignty and vetted borders, maybe it’s just better to shut up,” Stine says.
Stine is also often asked why he isn’t the host of a conservative version of The Daily Show;
“I thrive where my fans are. None of the networks are giving us a Daily Show. It’s like being in a concentration camp. They rounded up a certain type of people and made it really hard for us to survive. We had to find a black market. We had to find a guard to bribe, to bring us some schnitzel. We had to find a nurse that would bring us back some bread. We had to find a back door to survive. We went to radio, and blew it up. We weren't given a chance to go to CNN, so we got Fox News. Boom! We dominated every single news channel. The market was underserved and found itself, just how capitalism always does.”