The right laugh

Correctness has crippled the left's sense of humour, writes John Birmingham.

It's a dangerous business, humour writing. Literally, in some places, the ruling brutocrats will have you swinging by your thumbs for the mildest of knock-knock jokes at their expense. Figuratively, in others, where hecklers, critics and hungry defamation lawyers are waiting to pounce. I guess it's not surprising that so many stand-ups are bipolar.

What is surprising is just how successfully the new right, for want of a better tar brush, has been at colonising this outpost of public discourse. If you're looking for a year zero from which to trace this development, you could probably do no better than 1987 when P. J. O'Rourke published Republican Party Reptile and inspired a generation of conservative satirists to begin poking fun at the sacred cows of the left. Reptile was not just genuinely funny, it was dizzyingly, irresistibly, shockingly so.

It seems tame now, compared with, say, the terrifying anti-PC comedy of Sarah Silverman ("Everybody blames the Jews for killing Christ, and then the Jews try to pass it off on the Romans. I'm one of the few people that believe it was the blacks.") But in his day O'Rourke was satire's Marco Polo, or maybe Erik the Red, getting in a little Viking-style rhetorical rape and pillage as he explored the outer reaches of what was then known to be funny.

The former international affairs editor of Rolling Stone magazine, who had been a garden-variety campus leftie in the late 1960s, had two great tricks. He managed to synthesise a right-wing, almost Hobbesian, political philosophy ("Neither conservatives nor humorists believe man is good. But left-wingers do") with a libertarian paradigm of personal freedom taken to excess, which was a core faith of the 1960s counterculture and the comedic engine of his seminal 1979 article in National Lampoon titled How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink.

The first paragraph is a masterwork of irresponsible thought crime: "When it comes to taking chances, some people like to play poker or shoot dice; other people prefer to parachute jump, go rhino hunting or climb ice floes, while still others engage in crime or marriage. But I like to get drunk and drive like a fool. Name me, if you can, a better feeling than the one you get when you're half a bottle of Chivas in the bag with a gram of coke up your nose and a teenage lovely pulling off her tube top in the next seat over, while you're going a hundred miles an hour down a suburban side street. You'd have to watch the entire Mexican air force crash-land in a liquid petroleum gas storage facility to match this kind of thrill."

There's a certain judgemental type who'd recoil in horror from this sort of thing; a gimlet-eyed punisher and straightener, who would suppress such recklessness on the grounds of sexism, racism, cruelty to endangered rhinos and Sending The Wrong Sort Of Message To Our Kids. But whereas these censorious figures were once largely conservative caricatures - think John Lithgow as the preacher in Footloose - since the early to mid-1980s they have increasingly spawned on the left. The prevalence of avowedly right-wing humorists such as O'Rourke, and locally of Tim Blair, Imre Saluszinsky, the evil geniuses behind Vice magazine and, more generally, of witty, but not exclusively humorous commentators such as Mark Steyn, Cathy Seipp, Michael Duffy and the venerable Frank Devine, can be seen in part as the natural reaction of an open system.

Blair, the closest antipodean analog of O'Rourke, is a declared political warrior, with no interest in fairness, unlike traditional satirists such as Patrick Cook or Mike Carlton who are even-handed in their choice of targets. A Blair column is predictable insofar as you know who is going to get whacked: exactly the same people who took a beating in that morning's Miranda Devine op ed piece. But unlike Devine, Blair consistently rewards attention with little hash cookies of humour such as his obsession with AC/DC's bagpipe player. Does he tour? Does he have groupies? Are they called bag ladies?

He revels in the bile directed at him for his relentless assaults on Greenpeace, the ALP, John Kerry, the ABC, arts grants recipients, grieving war mum Cindy Sheehan, human shields in Baghdad, Phillip Adams, global warming doom-mongers and clueless pop stars. "A freakin' smorgasbord!" as he puts it.

Asked what's behind the arrival and success of neo-con comedy, Blair wonders whether the cultural left has become complacent and limp due to the dominance of its views in the press and educational institutions. "Their responses to mockery are telling," he says. "They sometimes seem utterly puzzled that they might be figures of fun, which makes them look all the more out of touch."

A less partisan explanation may lie in the stern and "improving" nature of the post-'60s left, that tendency to socially engineer preferred outcomes which is often tagged as political correctness. While the term PC has proven to be a devastating rhetorical weapon when deployed by conservatives who want to shut down any discussion of uncomfortable realities, that's largely because their opponents handed the weapon to them in the first place.

O'Rourke may have nailed the self-imposed shackles worn by "progressive" comics in the introduction to Reptile. There he wrote that when a conservative sees an old woman slip and fall on her butt, he'll say, "You shouldn't laugh at that." But a liberal, in the American context, will say, "You cannot laugh at that." Implied, of course, is the threat to make such an admonition legally enforceable.

The thing about humour, unfortunately, is that it is often sick and wrong, from dead-baby jokes to Sarah Silverman confessing that "I want to get an abortion but my boyfriend and I are having trouble conceiving", or that their pet name for her vagina is "faggot"; a one-word joke that Slate magazine credits with kinking "sexual identity into such an ingenious pretzel it could fuel a doctoral dissertation".

By establishing an exclusion zone around a whole category of topics that are ripe for exploitation by comics because of the very tensions they create, the left abandons the field to the enemy and often confuses itself over just who are its friends and who are its foes. Silverman, for instance, is often cited as an example of toxic conservatism, and yet her skewering of identity politics is as dangerous to reactionaries as to anyone. Likewise the creators of South Park, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, were excoriated by some critics for their pitiless treatment of Hollywood liberals in Team America: World Police, as well as racking up black marks for the unholy trinity of racism, sexism and homophobia. And yet Team America remains one of the sharpest satires of the war on terrorism so far released, while South Park offends everyone eventually.

The stand-out feature of Parker and Stone's work, indeed of all successful comics, whatever their medium or subject matter, is confidence; confidence that their joke is inherently funny, even if millions of people refuse to agree. And confidence of course is a defining characteristic of the right in its resurgent form. To read Mark Steyn on the Islamisation of France, for instance, is to encounter a man speaking the unspeakable and doing so with an unshakeable self-assurance. But it is also to witness a comic genius at work, sharpening an already finely honed wit to a razor's edge on the rock-hard noggins of his enemies.

The left, on the other hand, has indulged for so long now in the guilty pleasures of relativism, protected by a value system that says discussion of certain topics is off limits, that any sense of confidence they might have had at one time has now entirely disappeared. And with it their sense of humour.

It's like the old joke. How many angry feminists does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: that's not funny!

John Birmingham is a journalist, columnist and author. His latest book is Designated Targets (Pan Macmillan, $30).