A Modest Proposal for Political Humor

Can you laugh at yourself? Most people seem willing to admit personal foibles and chuckle at their missteps and eccentricities. Can you laugh at your team’s political candidates? Fewer hands are raised for this question, and this has long puzzled me. As the midterm elections fill the airwaves and our mailboxes with polished foolishness, why are some so reluctant to snicker?

Political humor on television has long seemed to me to lean left. The right has plenty of comedians—Greg Gutfeld draws a large audience—but I haven’t found a conservative counterpart to The Daily Show or John Oliver, at least not one with quite the same combination of satire, irony, and political commentary. Why the difference? I read Irony and Outrage by a University of Delaware social psychologist who moonlights as an improv comedian, and the puzzle got a theory.

Dannagal Young studies how personality shapes politics, and she finds a tendency, not a law: people who are relaxed about threats, tolerant of ambiguity, comfortable with nuance, and fond of thinking just for the sake of it lean culturally liberal. They’re the ones who can sit through a movie without a happy ending, nod at abstract art, and chuckle at irony and satire.

On the other side are people whose antennae are tuned to danger, a valuable instinct when danger is real. They prefer certainty, closure, and decisive action, and they gravitate toward messages with clear heroes and villains. Satire may simply be less culturally central among people who prefer a sheriff and an outlaw.

That might explain why satire in the mold of The Daily Show or John Oliver—the kind that winks and ambles toward its point—resonates with the left. The right has plenty of funny people, but its humor tends to be sharper-edged and more direct. Different temperaments, different comic tastes.

But that doesn’t quite answer my opening question. Enjoying political humor isn’t the same as being able to laugh at your own candidates. Both sides are delighted when the other team’s balloon gets punctured. The trouble starts when the pin approaches their own.

The best satire skewers its own side’s pomposity and inanity along with those of its opponents. Liberal comics often drive right past their own team’s foolishness without a swipe, while conservative entertainers rarely turn their sights inward. Outrage isn’t one party’s monopoly. It’s an industry, and both sides have found that it pays.

Before anyone gloats, Young’s point isn’t that one temperament is better; she sees them as complementary. Dreamers imagine a better world, and traditionalists guard the banking system and national borders.

Young’s real concern is what happens when those differences become profitable. Political and media organizations use algorithms to find our divisions, amplify them, and keep us clicking. The result is an endless supply of reasons to distrust the other side, just when we might benefit from noticing what it gets right. With the midterms approaching, the market for outrage remains remarkably healthy.

I admit a strong skepticism about the candor of any politician, but I apply this test to myself nevertheless. Laughing at a foe’s foibles is easy enough; there’s no shortage of volunteers. The harder question is whether I can laugh when a candidate I favor supplies the foolishness. I think I can, though I might be less eager to forward the joke.

I’m also tolerant of ambiguity, a handy trait in a world that specializes in uncertainty, and I’ll explore almost any topic just for the fun of the debate. Forty-odd years of listening to people for a living will do that to you.

Yet the results come back mixed. I welcome closure when it’s on offer, and I greatly prefer stability to chaos. I’m glad some people enjoy Jackson Pollock’s splattered art, but I have trouble distinguishing it from the drop cloth. Apparently, I have Don Quixote’s soul and Sancho Panza’s realism.

I think Young would tell me not to worry because that’s a decent division of labor. But whatever our temperaments, there’s a difference between having convictions and treating our candidates as too precious to ridicule. We can prefer different kinds of jokes without insisting that the joke always be on somebody else.

Next week I’ll have to vote for someone. Before I do, I may try a small experiment. When a candidate I favor supplies the punch line, I’ll notice whether I laugh or immediately begin preparing the defense. If I can’t laugh at my own side’s foolishness, the algorithms have probably already won.