The Plight of Conservative Comedy: Where's the Right's Daily Show?

[AUChizad]

Interesting read.

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/03/the-plight-of-conservative-comedy-wheres-the-rights-em-daily-show-em/283937/

The Plight of Conservative Comedy: Where's the Right's Daily Show?

Sean McElwee Mar 12 2014, 7:30 AM ET

Fox News has astronomically high ratings. Rush Limbaugh rules talk radio. But liberals dominate political comedy. The few attempts to create a conservative satire show have either not found mainstream success (News Busted, a YouTube series with views typically in the low 30,000s), aired far outside of prime time (Red Eye, filling Fox’s 3 a.m. slot), or been promptly cancelled (Half Hour News Hour, with 13 episodes on Fox). Are right-leaning satires doomed to failure?

The creators of Flipside don’t think so. Their once-a-week program, in the vein of The Daily Show or The Colbert Report but with a generally conservative tilt, hosted by comedian Michael Loftus, will premiere this fall. Can it work?

* * *

Most explanations for why Republican-friendly satire struggles pin blame on conservative philosophy. Comedian Mike Macrae told me in an email,

    Most American comedy traditions stem from the concept of resisting or questioning authority on some level. Our comedy is about rascals and rule-breakers. Mark Twain skewered the notion of Europe's cultural hegemony over the rustic New World and its new nation of upstarts. Most Marx Brothers movies are essentially about them evading some arbitrarily deputized authority figure, be it the hotel detective or the sailor in charge of finding stowaways. Cheech and Chong wouldn't be as funny if marijuana weren't made pointlessly illegal by right-wing cultural pressures. The common thread in these and other American comedy staples has been that the foils are generally motivated by values that we tend to associate with conservatism or, in some cases, the Republican Party platform itself.

Alison Dagnes, an academic who examined politics and comedy in her book A Conservative Walks Into a Bar, came away with the conclusion that:

    The nature of conservatism does not meet the conditions necessary for political satire to flourish: conservatism is harmonized and slow to criticize people in power, and it originates from a place that repudiates humor because it is absolute.

These theories may sound attractive—especially to liberals—but suffer from deep deficiencies. For one: Humor doesn’t rely on the objective nature of the social structure, but rather, one’s subjective understanding of it, which is often fraught with bias. For instance, majority of Republicans think that racial discrimination against whites is as bad as discrimination against minorities. “During the last four decades the Republicans and conservatives in general have conceded a lot of the progressive premises,” Kfif Alfia, one of the executive producers of Flipside, told me. “I would question that premise that conservatives are in a state of, or a position of authority.”

What’s more, skepticism of authority is a conservative tenet itself. It was the great conservative philosopher was Edmund Burke who said, “The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.” In the Obama era, there are plenty of liberal institutions ripe for mockery. South Park has brilliantly lampooned many of the left’s excesses, from PETA, to race, environmentalism, Al Gore, San Francisco smugness, abortion, tolerance, anti-smoking activists and celebrities, lots of celebrities.

So philosophy isn’t the problem. Indeed, history shows that conservative-leaning comedy isn’t inherently unviable. Half Hour News Hour, for example, did well in its time slot despite weak reviews. Financial concerns, not low viewership, killed it. “Essentially, they were trying to run a broadcast show on a cable budget,” Matthew Sheffield, an executive producer at Flipside told me. “It was a lot cheaper to run Oliver North’s ancient war clip show than it was to do that.”

Before Comedy Central settled on the Colbert Report/Daily Show model, it had Tough Crowd With Colin Quinn, a well-liked panel comedy show with many very funny conservative commentators in conversation with liberal ones. (For a representative segment, watch the famous Giraldo/Leary fight over North Korea.) But Tough Crowd struggled with ratings, especially with younger audiences, so it was cancelled to make room for Colbert. Before Tough Crowd, there was Bill Maher’s Emmy-winning Politically Incorrect, which, unlike his current show on HBO, Real Time, had more equally balanced panels and less demagoguery.

* * *

So if philosophy isn’t preventing conservative comedy from flourishing, what is? Structural, demographic, and financial issues.

Successful comics often rise up out of thriving, crowded standup scenes, which tend to mainly exist in urban areas. Jon Stewart, for instance, spent five years in the New York City comedy world before landing a show on TV. Big cities tend to be liberal, and it stands to reason that so would be the people who attend comedy clubs in them. Funny urbanites who are conservative may decide that there just isn’t much of a market for their political material. One comedian who I was referred to declined to be interviewed because, the comedian said, the conservative label, “has never been good to me.”

Similar impediments exist in the entertainment industry, which has a not-undeserved reputation for being run mainly by liberals. “People always ask why there aren’t a lot of really big conservative comedians but I think the deck is stacked against that and I doubt it will ever happen in my lifetime,” Nick Dipaolo told The Daily Caller, mentioning that he suspected that his politics were why HBO wouldn’t air a recent hour-long special he taped. There just aren’t many outlets for conservative comics. The feeling, as Stephen Kruiser writes on Breitbart, is that “most liberals in the entertainment industry expose themselves to conservatives about as readily as they would a leper colony.”

But the problem for right-leaning televised comedy may also have to do with audiences. Historically, it’s young people who have favored news mixed with humor, and polls have shown young people trending liberal for years. Fox News’ viewership is older, of a different generation than any up-and-coming standup comics, and many of its members hold pretty traditional views. That’s not exactly the audience that’ll help nurture boundary-pushing, conversation-making comedy. On Half-Hour News Hour, for instance, one writer complained that “the best material we wrote was rejected because the network considered it too controversial.”

In fact, the closest thing Fox News has to The Daily Show (Red Eye) is broadcast at 3 a.m. In Fox style, the show primarily takes the form of a panel and doesn’t include the more expensive-to-produce field pieces. Its racy humor might be off-putting to much of Fox’s primetime audience, but it’s doing relatively well with young people.

* * *

Loftus already has had a successful career as a comic and a writer. He has an hour-long special to his name (You’ve Changed) and he can woo a city crowd (he often stops by Hollywood Improv in LA for a set). Though I’m a liberal, I’ve enjoyed his bits before (and was excited to see him hosting the show).

If Flipside succeeds, it might be because in this era where high-quality web videos for niche audiences are thriving, it can avoid some of the structural obstacles other attempts at conservative satire have faced. Flipside’s looking for broadcast distribution, but it’ll also try to build an audience online. One of its producers, Kfir Alfia, has worked in TV before and seen “really, really funny things go through a horrible development process and have the funny squeezed out of them,” he says. “We’re not going to have a board of directors with a stick-up-their-ass network to have battles regarding content.”

The pilot episode of Flipside proves there’s plenty of potential material, though the punch lines could use some tuning. One bit mocks Harrison Ford for warning about the effects of global warming and then “flying his plane to get a hamburger.” It’s a promising setup, but the payoff—Mattera spraying aerosol cans in studio—falls flat. Another bit lampooning the possible Hillary Clinton documentaries is funny, but a jab about her attractiveness stuck me as gauche.

Of course, politically infused comedy from both sides of the spectrum is tough to pull off. As Norm Macdonald put it to me, “The problem with coming to comedy with any ideology is the surprise is gone. We know the punchline.” Marc Maron told me that he moved away from his more overtly liberal jokes, because “when you’re doing ideological comedy, from a point of view that pre-exists you, it’s very tricky not to carry water for someone else’s agenda.” The Daily Show, for example, seems aware of this. Jon Stewart happily mocks Democrats, drawing vituperative harangues from lefty viewers. The first great conservative comedy show will put humor before ideology. As Mark Twain noted, “Humor is never artificial.”

The last line of that article carries the most weight. It's why many of these attempts at right-wing humor have failed, in my opinion. It seems that most are putting the cart before the horse. Trying to force a right-wing copy of The Daily Show or some other left-leaning comedy format, ends up tasting like Sam's Choice Cola instead of Coke.

I watched a couple of those clips what is apparently a current attempt at Conservative humor. The laugh-track is ridiculously forced.

https://www.youtube.com/user/newsbusted?feature=watch

It's not like The Daily Show starts out by going "Ok guys, now we're going to be really liberal and we're going to express a liberal viewpoint! Now let's see how we can squeeze some jokes around our greater goal of indoctrinating the masses to our line of thinking!" No, they just think that way, so their humor comes out that way. Guys like Adam Carolla, Jim Norton, Nick DePalo, etc. do that naturally from the right. I think guys like that could pull it off.

I remember Colin Quinn's show tough crowd before it got replaced by Colbert. It was good. It was funny. It was basically a panel show, and there were some comedians that leaned more to the left, but the host and most of the regulars were right-leaning. But they were actual comedians. Jim Norton, Nick DePalo, Patrice O'Neal, Dennis Leary, Lenny Clarke, Rich Vos. Because of that, the show was funny. Like I said, those guys could pull a right-leaning comedy show off, in my opinion, because it will be more about the comedy than shoehorning it in artificially.

This guy's show, who I guess was what prompted this piece, may be as close an attempt as I've seen since Tough Crowd of actually being good.

http://www.telcoproductions.com/Flipside.shtml

I guess we'll see how it goes. Still not sure it's quite there.

[Townhallsavoy]

I think the article missed a big part of why conservatives don't succeed at being funny -

Conservatives are not allowed to step on eggshells.  Liberals are. 

If a conservative comedy show makes a joke about a Freudian slip from a black representative, it will be attacked as being racist.  Same way with most other topics.  Labels such as xenophobic or homophobic or war mongering or whatever else fits. 

Though, lately, it's conservatives - really, just many leaders and spokesmen of the Republican Party - that warrant being made fun of.  An old white haired man in an outdated suit explains why gay people are causing earthquakes.  A fat guy with a mullet says that education is of the devil because everyone knows that we didn't come from monkeys.  How could we come from monkeys when monkeys still exist today?  A poofy-haired pear-shaped woman blames that evil hippity hop music for brainwashing her daughter into having premarital sex. 

But all in all, it's not so much the ideology of the jokes but the ideology of the jokester.  People see liberals as being the young, rebellious, "with it," free spirited, reckless crowd that cares about the common person and neglects the established traditions of rule-mongering elders.

[AUChizad]

This guy kind of said what I was trying to say, but a little better.

http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/209875/check-out-the-new-super-cringey-attempt-at-a-conservative-daily-show/

Now, I don’t deny that there are people out there who want “conservative humor”– of course there are. I won’t even say that there aren’t any good conservative comedians–although most of them veer more on the Nick DiPaulo quasi-libertarian side of things. But I’m not sure that anything that starts out all “It’s not fair that everyone likes ‘The Daily Show!’ Waaaaah! Fine! We’ll make our own ‘Daily Show’ and it will totally be way better than your ‘Daily Show,’ because it will be conservative!” is going to be all that appealing to anyone. That just feels ridiculous and spiteful.

I think the problem with this show, like the other so-called conservative “Daily Shows” before it like Fox’s “The 1/2 Hour News Hour,” is that, while it may appeal to their base audience, it’s not really going to appeal to the people they so desperately want it to appeal to: the hip young college kids. It’s obviously and overtly manipulative, which just seems a little sad. Like when they tried to make a conservative BuzzFeed. It’s basically like your Dad trying to dress up like a beatnik and talking like Meynard G. Krebbs in order to “relate” to you and your friends. Or like some “cool tattooed dude” handing out purity rings. It’s creepy and it rings false.

[AUChizad]

I just googled Flipside and came up with other similarly written articles I find interesting on the topic.

http://www.pajiba.com/think_pieces/nobody-likes-a-preachy-clown-the-perils-of-comedy-for-conservatives.php#.UyCqRrTqjAE

Nobody Likes a Preachy Clown: The Perils of “Comedy for Conservatives”

By Daniel Carlson

Next fall, Telco Productions plans to distribute a show called The Flipside, which “turns political satire on its head, offering a fresh new perspective on what is happening in America.” That’s just according to the bland one-sheet meant to drum up business, though. If you actually watch the preview material, you learn that the show is designed to be a conservative-friendly, right-leaning answer to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. It’s also states that host Michael Loftus “throws political correctness out the window,” as if it were an intruder or wild animal threatening the living room. You can watch a five-minute sizzle reel — and I use that term very loosely, even charitably — or an entire episode at Telco’s website, but I can save you valuable time and tell you right now that the show isn’t funny. For a comedy show, this is a problem.

It’s not like this is a new experiment. Fox News aired The ½ Hour News Hour, from 24 co-creator Joel Surnow, in 2007. Surnow pitched the series as “The Daily Show for conservatives,” but those conservatives didn’t show up to watch. Fox News canceled it after 15 episodes. Like Surnow, The Flipside invokes Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert a lot in its attempt to explain itself. The assumption is that Stewart and Colbert are agents of a specific political entity — or at the very least, dedicated to spreading a certain message — and that a political comedy should be created to give voice to the “other side.”

The problem, for starters, is that this is totally the wrong way to think about comedy in general and Stewart/Colbert in specific. Comedy’s highest goal is to be funny, not to prove a point. It’s not that Stewart’s and Colbert’s jokes don’t fit in and play well with progressives; it’s that they’re trying to do other things first. Colbert’s target isn’t specific politicians or even parties, but the grandiose pomposity of on-air hosts like Bill O’Reilly and the way they manufacture rage and turn it into a reliable consumer product. He’s attacking our own self-indulgence, and our capability for anointing as prophets those who can bloviate the loudest. Stewart, too, isn’t just knocking idiots on the right, but incompetents on the left. Many’s the time when Stewart will lay into Democrats or left-leaning initiatives, only to be greeted by muted claps from the audience as they wrestle with their natural desire to laugh and the feeling that they shouldn’t have to laugh at somebody they support. “Not so funny when it’s your guy, is it?” is usually how Stewart’s refrain goes, as he deflates the light tension and moves right ahead with skewering the system. Because that’s what he does, and what Colbert does, and what all great comics and satirists do: they revel in the absurdity of the system we’ve created for ourselves, alternately laughing and crying at the way we keep ourselves in chains. Here are Stewart and Colbert, talking to Maureen Dowd a few years ago:

    When you came to lunch at the “Times,” Jon, you said the lesson of the Oscars and the White House Correspondents Dinner was that you guys should not be talking to “the Establishment.”

    STEWART: It’s not that we shouldn’t be talking. It’s that we shouldn’t care.

    COLBERT: We can’t care.

    STEWART: What people in Washington don’t understand is that we’re not running for re-election. We don’t have to parse every word for fear that it appears in our opponent’s commercial and suddenly renders us impotent.

    COLBERT: We claim no respectability. There’s no status I would not surrender for a joke. So we don’t have to defend anything.

    STEWART: They believe everything has consequence in real-world terms. And what we as comedians understand is, you bomb one night, you go on the next night and you do a little better.

    I don’t understand why you always say, “I’m just a comedian,” because from Shakespeare to Jonathan Swift, humor is the best way to get through to people.

    COLBERT: Peter Cook was once asked if he thought that satire had a political effect. He said, “Absolutely. The greatest satire of the twentieth century was the Weimar cabaret, and they stopped Hitler in his tracks.” It doesn’t mean that what we do is worthless. It’s hard to do, and people like it, and it’s great. But it doesn’t mean that it has an effect politically.

    STEWART: Or that it has an agenda of social change. We are not warriors in anyone’s army. And that is not trying to be self-deprecating. I’m proud of what we do. I really like these two shows. I like making ‘em. I like watching them. I’m really proud of them. But I understand their place. I don’t view us as people who lead social movements.

Shows like The Flipside don’t get that, though. Their goal is not to be funny, or to skewer a system, but to aim at specific targets as they build content around a political ideology. This is many things — all of which have buzzy and unsettling terms like “branding” and “message-building” — but it’s not comedy. And this should not be news to the crew or intended viewers of The Flipside.

Political shows that drape themselves in comedy are going to be limited at the outset. Only someone who leans strongly to the left could enjoy, let along regularly watch, Real Time With Bill Maher. Maher’s messaging is his comedy, and watching someone smugly accuse those who disagree with him of being intellectually disabled gets old really fast. You don’t watch to laugh, or to be entertained. You watch to listen to somebody punch somebody else. Ditto the recently canceled Totally Biased With Kamau Bell. Bell’s a hilarious guy, and quite a few of his bits have real bite. (The discussion about faith between John Fugelsang and Jamie Kilstein is surprisingly welcoming.) But bits like the man-on-the-street “Anything to Say to a White Guy?” wear thin after a while. You start to realize that Bell’s goal isn’t comedy, but some form of education, like auditing a humanities course while half-asleep. Even Dave Chappelle knew to mix up the racial insight with broader humor. The closest Stewart and Colbert have come to real-world instruction was itself a spoof: the Rally to Restory Sanity and/or Fear in 2010 that mocked the treacly rallies spearheaded by people like Glenn Beck.

The reason shows like The ½ Hour News Hour and The Flipside will always feel small and cheap is because that’s all the want to be. Somebody like Jon Stewart is aiming for everybody. He (and his writing and production staff) want every joke to work for every viewer. You shouldn’t have to pass a voting history test to be able to enjoy a 22-minute show that parodies the news media and American culture. Plus, while politically oriented, so much of Stewart’s and Colbert’s series hinge on playfulness, crowd interaction, and experimentation. Perfect example: the three-way crossover in 2008 that saw Stewart, Colbert, and Conan O’Brien gleefully messing with audience expectations in a running gag about which one of them was to blame for Mike Huckabee’s modest successes. Topical, political, but most of all funny. Comedy is inherently anti-establishment, exploratory, and aggressive in its desire to question everything. It punctures, but never lectures. The folks at The Flipside don’t seem to understand that you’ll never convince anybody of anything by just shouting at them. Entertain them, and you can lead them to new places. But preach to them, and you’ll only ever succeed in winning those who’ve already converted.

[Townhallsavoy]

Saw a good example of this just last night -

On The Soup, the host Joel McHale brought up Obama going on Between the Two Ferns and used it as a lead in to making fun of Bill O'Reilly.  He showed a clip of O'Reilly giving his opinion on the idea of any president using media such as Funny or Die to push an agenda.  I agreed with O'Reilly's points.

Joel however said something about O'Reilly being an idiot and then at the end of O'Reilly's rant, O'Reilly said that Abe Lincoln would never have done something like that.  I'm figuring O'Reilly brought up Abe Lincoln because Obama has been compared to Abraham Lincoln throughout his political career.

Then Joel finished the segment with an insensitive joke - "Yeah, Bill Abe Lincoln wouldn't have just been funny, he would have been funny and died!" 

I laughed. It was funny.

Then the very next segment was about a comment made by an old white haired guy on a Los Angeles news show.  It was concerning the bachelor.  The clip went something (not word for word but the gist) like this -

Young attractive reporter 1 - "So can you believe how The Bachelor ended last night?  What a creep."

Old Guy - "You know it's bad when I know about what happened on The Bachelor.  I've never seen an episode but I know about it."

Young attractive reporter 1 - "There were plenty of signs throughout this season that told ABC they should have maybe aborted the show before it got worse."

Young attractive reporter 2 - "I think it was obvious the show needed to be aborted back when they turned January into Juan-uary.  They should have done us a favor and stopped it back then."

Old Guy - "Maybe his mother could have done us a favor and aborted him."

OOOOHHHHH NO OLD WHITE GUY.  YOU CAIN'T SAY THAT.

[AUChizad]

Saw a good example of this just last night -

On The Soup, the host Joel McHale brought up Obama going on Between the Two Ferns and used it as a lead in to making fun of Bill O'Reilly.  He showed a clip of O'Reilly giving his opinion on the idea of any president using media such as Funny or Die to push an agenda.  I agreed with O'Reilly's points.

Joel however said something about O'Reilly being an idiot and then at the end of O'Reilly's rant, O'Reilly said that Abe Lincoln would never have done something like that.  I'm figuring O'Reilly brought up Abe Lincoln because Obama has been compared to Abraham Lincoln throughout his political career.

Then Joel finished the segment with an insensitive joke - "Yeah, Bill Abe Lincoln wouldn't have just been funny, he would have been funny and died!" 

I laughed. It was funny.

Then the very next segment was about a comment made by an old white haired guy on a Los Angeles news show.  It was concerning the bachelor.  The clip went something (not word for word but the gist) like this -

Young attractive reporter 1 - "So can you believe how The Bachelor ended last night?  What a creep."

Old Guy - "You know it's bad when I know about what happened on The Bachelor.  I've never seen an episode but I know about it."

Young attractive reporter 1 - "There were plenty of signs throughout this season that told ABC they should have maybe aborted the show before it got worse."

Young attractive reporter 2 - "I think it was obvious the show needed to be aborted back when they turned January into Juan-uary.  They should have done us a favor and stopped it back then."

Old Guy - "Maybe his mother could have done us a favor and aborted him."

OOOOHHHHH NO OLD WHITE GUY.  YOU CAIN'T SAY THAT.

McHale leans slightly right. He and Carolla are buddies.

And I think O'Reilley's point was ridiculous.

Lincoln wouldn't have been on Funny Or Die, because it obviously wasn't around then. He was a fan of comedy. He was killed at a comedy.

Was it absurd of Gerald Ford to appear on the early iteration of Saturday Night Live? At the time it was just as edgy, irreverent, and very counter-culture. It was something that only the kids got. How is this different? Or for that matter, how is it different from Sara Palin or Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, or Bush Sr. or any of the multitude of other Republicans to have appeared on the show since?

[AUChizad]

Oh, and this.

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/03/12/lincoln-scholar-tells-oreilly-lincoln-would-hav/198458

Bill O'Reilly is being ridiculed for comments last night suggesting that unlike President Obama, President Lincoln would never have appeared on a web comedy show. In addition to the inherent silliness of the comparison, according to a prominent Lincoln scholar, O'Reilly is also dead wrong.

Yesterday, comedy website Funny or Die released an episode of its Zach Galifianakis-hosted web series "Between Two Ferns" featuring President Obama, during which the president traded insults with the actor before encouraging people to visit the health care reform website.

Predictably, conservatives freaked out about the appearance, culminating in O'Reilly telling viewers that Lincoln would never have appeared on such a show. (O'Reilly co-authored a 2011 book on the Lincoln assassination.)

But historian Harold Holzer, whose Lincoln scholarship has been recognized by presidents of both parties, tells Media Matters that the former president had a great sense of humor and used a wide variety of methods to spread his message.

"I will tell you Abraham Lincoln would go on 'Between Two Ferns' in a second," said Holzer. "He went in the reeds, he played whatever was the most modern, the most cunning, the most unthinkable, unprecedented way to get his message across in a day when there were no press conferences, no culture for press conferences."

Holzer has authored, coauthored, or edited 46 books on Lincoln and the Civil War over 40 years of scholarship and has a new one, Lincoln and the Power of the Press, scheduled to be published by Simon and Schuster in October. He has also written more than 500 articles and chapters of more than 50 books on the topic.

Holzer is chairman of the Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation, after being appointed to the leadership of its predecessor organization by President Clinton in 2000. In 2008, President Bush awarded him the National Humanities Medal for bringing "new understanding of the many facets of Abraham Lincoln and his era."

According to Holzer, Obama's actions are in keeping with Lincoln's press tactics.

"How could you be angry with President Obama for taking his message to the widest audience, this is absolutely in the Lincoln tradition," said Holzer. "He used humor very well and was very tough, very manipulative with the press."

In a piece at Huffington Post responding to O'Reilly's claims, reporter Michael Calderone notes, "Lincoln was also a man who enjoyed telling off-color jokes, and his bawdy sense of humor attracted its share of press criticism."

And this from 2012:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/cartoonists/2012/11/lincolns-smile.html

November 28, 2012
Lincoln’s Smile
Posted by Robert Mankoff

Something that has always intrigued me about Abraham Lincoln is, not surprisingly, his sense of humor. As far as I can tell, he’s the first American President to have one.

That’s because the term “sense of humor” really wasn’t in common usage until the eighteen-sixties and seventies. In the eighteen-forties and fifties, it was called “the sense of the ridiculous,” and didn’t have the positive connotations that “sense of humor” has today. Back then, what was ridiculous was what invited ridicule. Funniness and cruelty went hand in hand. Of course, they still do a lot of arm-in-arm strolling in our day as well.

In the movie “Lincoln,” Tommy Lee Jones, as the sarcastically vilifying Thaddeus Stevens, exemplifies the funny-cruel connection. Many of his vilifications were too nasty for the Congressional Globe (predecessor of the Congressional Record), but this one was recorded: “There was a gentleman from the far West sitting next to me, but he went away and the seat seems just as clean as it was before.”

Lincoln’s humor was very different because, for one thing, it was actually “humor” as the word was defined in his time. We don’t make the distinction between “wit” and “humor” anymore, but in the nineteenth century people did. Wit was sarcastic and antipathetic while humor was congenial and empathetic. It’s the difference we note now when we distinguish between “laughing with” and “laughing at.” Lincoln was much more about “laughing with” than “laughing at.” And when “laughing at,” it was often himself he was mocking.

In the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, when Douglas accused Lincoln of being two-faced, Lincoln replied, referencing his homeliness, “Honestly, if I were two-faced, would I be showing you this one?” And, in a way, Lincoln’s face itself tells us much about his sense of humor.



You can comb through thousands of photographs of politicians, soldiers, and the like from Lincoln’s time and not find a single smile. Here’s his sourpussed cabinet:



True, the extended exposures required for photographs of that era made smiling difficult. Yet Lincoln alone, as far as I can tell, overcame that difficulty. And though there is only a hint of smile in his photographs, it hints at what Lincoln knew too well: that, as Mark Twain pointed out, “the secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow.”

Interestingly, while having a sense of humor, or at least the appearance of one provided by comedy writers, has become a necessary characteristic for an American President in our time, in the nineteenth century, too much humor was considered a liability. And that was the case for Lincoln. A journalist covering the Lincoln-Douglas debates commented that “I could not take a real personal liking to the man, owing to an inborn weakness for which he was even then notorious and so remained during his great public career, he was inordinately fond of jokes, anecdotes, and stories.”

So here’s hoping that he would be inordinately fond of some of these New Yorker cartoons about him. Or at least smile upon them.