In a stunning and brave reversal, Jerry Seinfeld has reneged on his previous claim that the Left is not only bereft of a sense of humor, but that conceding to their delicate appetites actually prevents comedy from taking place:
“It used to be you would go home at the end of the day … You just expected, there’ll be some funny stuff we can watch on TV tonight … Well, guess what —where is it? This is the result of the extreme left and P.C. crap, and people worrying so much about offending other people.”
Despite my utter loathing for invertebrate celebrity culture, I’m not above a swell of optimism when someone, anyone, says something true. The sky is blue; the coffee is black; the money is gone — literally anything. And so I indulged in a reserved “Huzzah!” when even the establishment could admit to what the rest of us have been saying for years. Now, barely half a year later, Jerry looks back with regret on that brief flight of courage:
“I don’t think the … extreme left has done anything to inhibit the art of comedy. I’m taking that back now officially. They have not. Do you like it? Maybe, maybe not — it’s not my business to like or not like where the culture is at.”
But it’s okay, because he came up with a bizarre analogy involving skis and gates and Lindsey Vonn, in which he tries to explain how it’s society’s fault that he’s a lily-livered boot licker and what can anyone do but “play the game according to what’s acceptable.” Now I’m not a comedian, but “playing the game according to what’s acceptable” is, hands down, the most sickly definition of comedy I’ve ever heard. It’s the kind of definition that doesn’t just hurt comedy, but that goes at it’s knuckles with a spiked maul, effectively guaranteeing it will never play the piano again. It’s almost the kind of definition we could expect of someone who’d been threatened with the drying-up of certain revenue streams.
Happily, we don’t need to know Jerry’s motives to be able to rough up his nerdy little take. All we need is Kamala’s recent apology-o-gram, which — while possessing many layers of inscrutability — didn’t even approach the outer troposphere of humor.
So why can’t the Left, still, not meme?
The Left has to take itself very seriously. Mostly because no one else will.
If you’re confident in the integrity of your house, you can fire off some jumping jacks, move the furniture around, or invite some friends over for some Taekwondo. If your house is made out of banana marshmallows and popeye cigarettes, however, you aren’t free to do any of that. In such a house, every movement has to be painfully calculated. One wrong move and the whole thing might come down on your head.
In such a house the Left lives, moves, and has its being. Everything about its world — from the wolf people to the free wages to the vertical learning spaces —is nuts and fluff. Which is why its humor always feel so constipated. They inhabit a world so fragile and artificial that the slightest bump can shatter it.
That’s why Kamala and Friends need poor Mary Gallagher. It isn’t because Mary is funny. Mary is about as funny as cataract surgery. It’s because Mary is a distraction, designed to prevent us from arriving at the real humor of the situation, which is that a democrat is pretending to care about what Catholics think. It’s like listening to 80-year old Cher talk very seriously about the plight of Billy the Elephant in a sequined miniskirt and a beret. The whole context is charged with humor; and yet we’re not allowed to laugh at those parts. We have to laugh at Mary smelling her armpits.
But that’s not how humor works. You can’t plot it out like a military diagram. The best kind is adjacent to serendipity, which is adjacent to reality. It bubbles up where no one expects it — which is why stand-up comedians are rarely funny and why children and Very Serious celebrities often are. When you have to regulate every frame in a scene because you’re afraid of the set falling apart, you just don’t have the luxury of humor.
Blood-Sucking Parasites
The Left is fundamentally parasitic. By that I mean that it exists only to further itself. It doesn’t build anything. It doesn’t want anything built. Its only goal is to destroy that which would prevent it increasing in mass. Everything — including its anemic attempts at humor — is a means to accrue more power.
Notice in Kamala’s skit, we’re not permitted to enjoy even the dried echo of humor that is Mary Gallagher. Instead, we’re immediately hosed in the face with the matriarchy, followed by a rash of TDS symptoms. It’s obvious that no one enjoyed making the skit, and obvious that no one enjoyed watching it. But that’s okay because it was never meant to make you laugh. It was meant to waterboard you into hating Kamala slightly less than Trump. Which is why it’s about as enjoyable as listening to two balloons being rubbed together.
We’ve grown so accustomed to ironic nihlistic humor that we’ve forgotten that humor, especially satire, is meant to be constructive. It pokes at candy floss houses not just because they’re not safe, but so people can find a better place to live. It attacks the false pieties of our age so that true piety can shine out unimpeded. It provokes genuine laughter so we can know that the Lord rejoices in his works (Psalm 104:31) and not the barren works of would-be gods.
As Christians, we have the courage that comes from knowing we live in God’s world, that reality is fixed, and that lies, no matter how sacred our culture holds them to be, will only ever be an object of mockery. We can feel free to adjust the camera angle on the world knowing it will still be there when we get back. Jerry can keep living in the sad little hole he has dug for himself and his humor. As for us, we can gladly affirm, “The earth and its fullness are the Lord’s.”