Radical Humor

RADICAL HUMOR (1990-2020). Comedy has often been the recourse of a Left with plenty of inventive talent but lacking the organizational strength to change society. Denied access to media dominated by liberal and conservative voices, comedic criticism has appeared at the margins, or arrived disguised, within the mainstream.

Things have been rather different when the Left has major players within realms of popular culture, such films in the high days of Hollywood. Abbott and Costello (the best of their films scripted by two Communists) followed Charlie Chaplin and the Three Stooges, throwing proletarian humor at middle-class propriety. Witty drama by more prestigious Communist writers and left-leaning directors satirized the powerful in their own language. During the Golden Age of television, stage veterans and others on variety shows of the 1950s-1960s carefully but successfully ridiculed McCarthyism, racism and other taboo subjects.

By the end of the 1960s, television needed a seemingly unusual younger audience: the very protest generation of the 1960s facing the 1970s. Escapees from the Hollywood Blacklist joined progressive-leaning writers and producers on the staff of MASH, at once the most antiwar and most popular residual on television for twenty years. Others worked racial and gender themes into contemporary dramas with a comedy edge, like The Mary Tyler Show. There were sharp limits on this work. Leftwing writers quietly complained that what seemed radical or at least challenging in Norman Lear features like All in the Family or Maude, actually toned down controversy to the lackluster by the time the shows aired. On the other hand, Lenny Bruce’s fearless stand-up comedy yielded to Richard Pryor and Dick Gregory (who ran for office as a left-winger), and they in turn yielded to George Carlin, darling of the post-1970 dissidents.

Saturday Night Live, especially in its first decade, was sharp and self-conscious in following Mad Comics genius Harvey Kurtzman and Monty Python’s Flying Circus in a critique of social standards and political events of the day. The feeling of fight-back waned as Reaganism secured itself. On stage, a three day “First Radical Humor Festival” (1982) at New York University, organized by an artists’ coalition against the Right, brought together left-winger stage acts across the generations, and closed without a successor.

During the 1990s, the decline of US left prompted detached irony as the dominant artistic pose of what was branded “Generation X.” Comedy turned its subversive energies to form rather than content. The biggest and most characteristic comedy of the decade, Seinfeld, was famously a show about nothing.

It would take two decades before broad, newer radical currents would flow, and in that long interregnum the brilliant and funny political satires were generally marked by a kind of anti-politics. This is especially evident in the work of Mike Judge, arguably the sharpest mainstream satirist of the era. His TV and movie creations include Beavis and Butthead, Office Space, Idiocracy, and Silicon Valley. The Simpsons, which emerged out of a leftwing comic strip, seemed mild by comparison.

Actor and filmmaker Tim Robbins produced two notable stellar leftwing movies: Bob Roberts, a prescient fake documentary about a rightwing populist folk singer running for office, and Cradle Will Rock about a WPA theater troupe in the 1930s. In another time, Robbins might have become affiliated with a left art movement. Another “what if” is the stand-up comedian Bill Hicks, a comic beloved by other comics for his fearlessness whose life was tragically cut short by cancer at the age of thirty-two when he was still developing his political world views.

Few live or stand-up comics in the 1990s could be identified with anything to the left of liberalism, but exceptions could be found. Barry Crimmins, a Boston area comic who spoke at rallies against the first Iraq invasion, was decades ahead of his time in talking about his childhood sexual abuse to break the silence on pedophilia. Randy Credico, who would later become nationally known when his name was dragged by Roger Stone into Russiagate, divided his time between stand-up comedy and organizing rallies against New York’s draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws. Danny Hoch wrote a series of bracingly political humor infused one-man shows like “Jails, Hospitals, and Hip Hop.” Protests leading up to the 2000 election often featured Billionaires for Bush and Gore, whose members dressed in furs and tuxedos and sneered at protesters that whichever candidate won, so would they.

Then the mood began to chance. Iconic “Battle of Seattle” demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in late 1999 ushered in a revival of large-scale protests in the coming decade, predominantly focused on George W. Bush’s disastrous Iraq War but also taking up immigrant rights and same-sex marriage. If millions participated in marches, the numbers that became part of ongoing left currents and organizations only grew marginally, and the numbers of leftwing comics remained small.

One important exception was Ted Alexandro, a New York based stand-up who was active in the Occupy movement and helped found the New York Comedians Coalition. This project successfully raised fees for performers in the city’s comedy clubs. Another was Eddie Pepitone, whose grouchy old New York accent stood out in Los Angeles comedy clubs almost as much as his angry but somehow merry political bits, including one about a game show where contestants have to guess the true cost of the Iraq War. Rising to the heights of television, Judah Friedlander, widely known as an actor in the sitcom “30 Rock,” spent his evenings in comedy clubs wearing a “World Champion” trucker cap and mocking Trump-style American bombast and bluster years before anyone had ever heard of a MAGA cap.

The emergence of protest comedy amidst the marches against global financial institutions like the World Trade Organization and International Monetary Fund in the early 2000s could be seen as a byproduct of the anarchist spirit animating much of the movement. Jaques Serin and Igor Vamos created the glorious corporate impersonators the Yes Men, whose stunts included impersonating a Dow Chemical spokesman on CNN and vowing to pay reparations to the survivors of the Bhopal Oil Spill.

As the “End of History” triumphalism that followed the end of the Cold War stalled with Bush’s stolen election and horror at the attacks on New York and Washington DC on September 11, the overall culture was, arguably, politicized. Mainstream comedy now played a leading role in that shift. The gap widened between a rightward moving Democratic Party and its voters, furious at the Bush-Cheney regime. Liberal political comedy leaning sometimes leftward, in form of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show and its many imitators, becoming not only extremely popular, but a major source of analysis and even news for young progressives who stopped watching the regular news shows.

Many of the Daily Show’s “correspondents” like Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, and John Oliver went on to start socially critical, even leftish comedy news shows of their own. The most popular, Colbert’s brilliant eleven-year imitation of a Fox News blowhard on his “Colbert Report,” brought leftish comedy to millions.

Colbert’s savage roast of Bush in the President’s face at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner thrilled millions who longed for the opposition party to do the same. But while many on the left watched Stewart and Colbert every night to get them through the Bush years, the comedians themselves shied away from calling themselves even “liberal.,” In 2010, leading figures among them organized a satirical but serious “Rally to Restore Sanity” that called on Americans to find common ground and avoid the vitriol that was a supposed problem on both the right and left.

Air America, a radio attempt to create a liberal counter to right-wing talk radio, proved far less successful than the Daily Show and crashed financially after a few years. But the attempt, founded by comic and Daily Show creator Lizz Winstead, did give a forum for liberal to left comedians like Garofolo, Marc Maron, and Sam Seder. Many viewers enjoyed Dave Chapelle, whose brief but massively influential sketch comedy show turned out to be all over the map politically, alternating wildly original takes on the absurdities of racism with crass sexism and “crackhead” stereotypes.

What had been described as “literary comedy” in past generations of the Left also found new forms. The all-satire tabloid, The Onion, moved, meanwhile, from its campus base in Madison, Wisconsin, to New York City, just in time for the 9/11 attacks. Full of daring humor and famed for its own fake-news headlines, The Onion quickly won a national audience for its madcap satire. The paper, even off campus, could be seen as a scrappy campus cousin to the hypocrisy-skewering liberalism of the Daily Show, which was not surprising since Stewart’s and Colbert’s producer Ben Karlin was himself a former Onion editor.

A range of other tabloids, most of them local alternative papers imitating the vastly larger Village Voice, offered readers a new generation of political cartoonists hitting their stride, including Ted Rall and Tom Tomorrow. Ruben Bolling, whose “Lucky Ducky” series mercilessly parodied a Wall Street Journal editorial that called the poor “lucky ducks” for getting a few crumbs of social programs, appealed to the same audience. David Rees’ “Get Your War On” cartoons expressed the sheer rage many felt in the post-9/11 years, and the clip art style of Rees and Tomorrow’s This Modern World anticipated in some ways the meme comedic structure that would take off in the coming social media era.

In the mainstream daily press, readers could find Aaron McGruder’s brilliant comic strip “The Boondocks” about a two young African American brothers--one who wants to be a revolutionary and other who wants to be a gangster--stranded with their grandfather in a boring suburb. McGruder mercilessly targeted Black elites like Bill Cosby and Condoleeza Rice. McGruder scandalized a 2003 Nation benefit by proudly proclaiming his vote in the past presidential election for Ralph Nader, but he often saw his strip suspended from the funnies page or sent to the op-ed page thanks to its post 9/11 satire of Bush administration officials.

Michael Moore, the prankster son of an autoworker whose 1989 Roger and Me mined the dark comedy of deindustrialization in his hometown of Flint, had already inspired a generation of documentarians. He released a series of thoughtful and funny movies, including Bowling for Columbine about gun violence, Sicko about US health care, and Capitalism a Love Story, all of which were better politically if not nearly as successful as his anti-Bush Fahrenheit 911.

The following decade saw an explosion in the ranks of outright left-wing comics. Increasingly bold performers and writers expressed the anger at inequality that produced movements like Occupy and Black Lives Matter--and by the end of the decade the emergence of socialist elected officials like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and socialist organizations like DSA brought many of these comedians into the first vibrant socialist subculture that the United States had seen for at least half a century.

If one major factor in the revival of left comedy was doubtless ideological, the other key factor was technological. The emergence of decentralized platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, and podcasts, combined with the continued increase in cable TV channels and streaming services, forced entertainment executives to look for niche programming for small but devoted audiences. In turn, this development encouraged radical comedians to find a national and global audience far more easily than they had been able earlier, when the only path to national exposure was five minutes on the Tonight Show. A new, stunning Facebook grassroots comedy emerged from the semi-anonymous creators of internet memes, a major medium of political satire expanding dramatically for the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign.

For the comics and their audiences, these developments offered a mixed blessing. The comics felt forced to churn out endless streams of free “content” and to think like mini-moguls obsessed with promoting their “brand.” For audiences, the new situation created a veritable golden era of humor that may end only if and when the new media monopolies ratchet up subscription fees and thereby degrade the ostensibly free internet.

Left comics who had built on the news/humor fusion popularized in the previous decade by liberals such as Jon Stewart could now do so in a variety of formats. Francesca Fiorentini combined news reporting and stand-up with her segments on Al Jazeera’s online channel. Sara June giving a lighthearted takedown of capitalism for Means TV and Ziwe Fumodoh took to messing with clueless white celebrities on Instagram Live. Dozens of left comic podcasts ranging from the “dirtbag left” (many said “sexist”) shenanigans of Chapo Traphouse to the revisionist history standup of The Dollop found their respective niche audiences.

Left-wing comics have in recent years become increasingly outspoken offstage as well as on. They took the floor not just about events in the world but about their own industry, in particular the treatment of non-male comics. At the beginning of the decade, clubs normally declined to book more than one woman in a show and held to the old prejudice that women cannot possibly be as funny as men. All this changed through the success of sketch shows like Broad City, the stand-up showcase podcast Two Dope Queens, and the increased unwillingness of non-male performers at large to tolerate industry sexism.

Comedy played an outsize role in the cultural earthquake against rape and sexual harassment known as #MeToo. The feminist humorist Lindy West had been one of the first women to go public with the way she was harassed by internet trolls. The wave of public allegations of sexual assault by powerful celebrities and executives began with Hannibal Burress’s routine about the rape allegations against Bill Cosby that finally gave Cosby’s many victims a platform to bring his crimes to the public. A year later, the series of allegations returned to the comedy world when it was revealed that the popular comedian Louis CK had sexually harassed younger female performers, drawing clear lines in the comic community that further radicalized many of the younger left comics.

Comedy also played a prominent role in the increasing public openness to discussions about mental illness. Some of the sharpest comedians of the 2010s merged observations about the troubled state of the world with the troubled state of their own minds. Maria Bamford made brilliant and hilarious hay out of her life with bipolar disorder, while Gary Gulman and Chris Gethard did acclaimed stand-up movies about their debilitating and dangerous struggles with depression and suicidal thoughts.

Looking back over the decade, a key incubator of left-wing comedy can now be understood as the 2012 cable show, Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell. A few years earlier, Bell and fellow Bay Area comic Nato Green, who combined comedy with a career as a union organizer, had teamed up with Janine Brito to form the Laughter Against the Machine comedy troupe. They aimed to go beyond the prevailing comedy that made liberal audiences feel better about themselves by poking fun at George Bush and Republicans. Green and Brito, two of the many left-wing comics who started on Totally Biased, reflected in their work the Biased writing room, an atmosphere far from the straight white boys club that had dominated most shows. Some of the shows of other alumni included the deadpan depressive comic Aparna Nancharla and Guy Brannum, who did a bit on the show that called out the homophobia of other comics. Hari Kondabolu, another of the most accomplished left-wing comics to come out of Totally Biased was a former immigrant rights organizer who managed to get his “List of People Who Will Die in the Revolution” bit aired on Viacom’s Comedy Central. He also made “The Problem with Apu,” a documentary that helped pressure The Simpsons to retire the character that many South Asians found offensive.

Bernie Sanders’s surprisingly popular 2016 presidential run and the subsequent growth of DSA brought a number of left comics into formal membership in DSA. Many more could be found within the organization’s orbit through appearances on members’ podcasts and performances at fundraising shows, particularly in New York and Los Angeles, for socialist candidates and organizing campaigns. Rob Delaney, co-star and co-creator of the sitcom Catastrophe, joined DSA as did Dollop co-host Dave Anthony. Radical comics Sara June and Josh Adrosky created media for DSA as part of the Los Angeles branch’s agit-prop committee, while Amber Schaefer produced a number of online ads for Sanders’s 2020 run that spoofed ads for products and starred comics like Demi Adejuyigbe and Kate Hollowell. Other left comics close to the milieu of DSA included Dallas Goldtooth, organizer of the Indigenous Environmental Network and co-founder of the 1491s indigenous comedy group; and Lee Camp, whose Redacted Tonight was a radical version of the Daily Show style comic/news show that aired on RT.

Within a sometimes dull thirty-year era, the key developments arrived within the last, heady decade and a half.

Rall, Ted. Attitude: The New Subversive Cartoonists. New York: NBM Publishing Company, 2002.

"Laughter Against the Machine": a seven part documentary series on Means TV about the comedy tour of W. Kamau Bell, Nato Green, and Janine Brito.

"Adam McKay is Angry as Hell,” an interview with Jacobin's Connor Kilpatrick. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/11/adam-mckay-is-mad-as-hell/