If you watch an episode of Gutfeld!, it is, we think, impossible to call it anything other than a late-night comedy talk show. NM: Importantly, Gutfeld has been with Fox News for the better part of two decades, and he’s always had a dry, ironic sensibility - totally something that most liberals would’ve missed because you’re not watching Fox News at three in the morning. How does Gutfled! work on and for Fox News? Gutfeld seems to be emblematic of the trend at large your book is talking about, in that Gutfeld! is often dismissed online, but has surpassed The Late Show With Stephen Colbert as the top show in late night. The book is broken down into levels of a “complex.” The first chapter is called “Fox News and Mainstream Right-Wing Comedy” and focuses on the Fox News careers of Jesse Watters and Greg Gutfeld. And it keeps the cycle going of, That doesn’t make me laugh. The algorithms of Facebook and social media feed us things that it knows we want to see, and in the event that something from outside of that bubble breaks through, it’s probably going to be something that we as liberals react to with a visceral, I don’t like that. One of the bigger-picture issues, though, is the extent to which the social-media universe has siloed audiences from one another. There’s a taste-based argument that we’re making when we call the book That’s Not Funny, because we’ve been judging this on its admittedly kind of clunky, bad joke writing. They would call it something else - “outrage programming” or “news infotainment.” This in turn gets picked up by mainstream publications that run headlines like “Why Don’t Conservatives Like to Laugh?” and “Why Is There No Conservative Jon Stewart?” It’s this kind of self-perpetuating thing that’s like sticking your fingers in your ears going, “La, la, la, I’m going to pretend it’s not there.” Matt and I started in the academic realm, and we noticed fellow researchers miscategorizing what was pretty clearly stuff meant to make you laugh.
Nick Marx: The bigger argument of the book is that liberals have been burying our heads in the sand for the last five, ten years. Your book’s called That’s Not Funny, referring to how often this topic, when it comes up in mainstream-media sources, is treated: “This is not funny,” implying “so it doesn’t exist.” It becomes this thing where larger and larger cultural phenomena are dismissed. Tune in to Good One every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
#And then there was light funny full#
You can read an excerpt from the transcript or listen to the full episode below. On Vulture’s Good One podcast, Sienkiewicz and Marx discuss the book and how the figures featured in it - from Tim Allen to Joe Rogan to Holocaust deniers - are all connected. As they explain in the book’s introduction, “The ways in which people discover new comedy today - algorithmic suggestions on YouTube, retweets on Twitter, cross-promotion on podcasts - provide a set of pathways that connects more banal right-wing humor to the truly evil stuff, up to and including actual neo-Nazis comedy spaces.” In their new book That’s Not Funny: How the Right Makes Comedy Work for Them, academics Matt Sienkiewicz and Nick Marx capture exactly how we got here and how the right-wing comedy ecosystem works. From the ratings smash Gutfeld! to Patreons earning $200,000 a month appealing to this new audience, con-com has gotten too big to ignore. But in spite of constant disregard, conservative comedy has thrived. Since it was first tweeted in 2018, “The right is starting to get better at comedy and it’s making lefties nervous” has remained a meme used to mock the idea of conservative comedy. Photo-Illustration: Vulture Photo by Vivian Zink/SYFY/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images
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