CSU's The Audit

Host intro: Comedians have been joking about politics for probably as long as there have been politicians. But in the past few years, there's been a noticeable shift in political comedy.

No longer just a spotlight for the Democrats, more and more conservatives are getting in on the act, too, from the rise of comic and podcaster Joe Rogan to Fox's answer to “The Daily Show,” "Gutfeld," right-wing conservative comedy is on the rise. Colorado State University Associate Professor Nick Marx researches media industries and American politics and culture and is the coauthor of the book "That's Not Funny How the Right Makes Comedy Work for Them."

I recently sat down with Marx to talk about this cultural shift and what it could mean for comedy and for politics.

Host Stacy Nick: Your focus specializes in media studies, media industries, and American politics and culture, particularly political humor. What drew you to this specific area?

Nick Marx: Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's a good question. I became interested initially in my graduate schoolwork on comedy, so I studied and wrote a lot about “Saturday Night Live” and television sketch comedies, mainly because a lot of folks hadn't up until that point. In my career here at CSU, I've become more active and aware politically, especially how comedy is activated in a political sense to either support a liberal or a conservative cause.

The trajectory my research and teaching has taken has been one of a kind of fan-based interest. A lot of the things I like to watch and listen to on my own are funny things. But in my over a decade here at CSU, comedy has really become politically weaponized and used in support of specific political projects for good and for bad. I really wanted to know more about why comedy, specifically, to what political ends is it being used and by whom, and then perhaps most importantly, who's making money from it? Who are the benefactors of this building careers and industries around the creation of political satire and humorous content.

Host: In your book "That's not funny," you discuss conservative comedians in particular like Joe Rogan and Tim Allen and Fox News's Greg Gutfeld. How do their comedic styles and content reflect or influence right wing political ideologies?

Marx: They are all different stripes of a broad coalition of generally right of center political entertainers. It started as a research project. My coauthor, Matt, and I began by attending the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2020, a week before Covid shut everything down. We were in this big conference ballroom where Mike Pence is speaking and Donald Trump is speaking, all these political activists gather to plot out the remaining course of the year before the presidential election.

Matt and I noticed comedy being pervasive in the room, people joking with one another, politicians, activists on stage using humorous modes of address to activate and talk to the audience. That struck us as unusual. We wanted to know more about how and why this strain popped up. We started watching as many and as different types of comedy as we can find and very quickly stumbled upon a pretty robust world of interconnected performers, political activists, podcasters, comedians who all shared the same kind of worldview. Mainstream comedy isn't for us, so we're going to do our thing, which is talk to and activate our political base, not necessarily making a positive case.

These performers aren't necessarily positing a political platform. They don't have policies they're supporting. But what they all have in common is joking about liberals. They identify as something other than the political and comedic mainstream, which has been familiar to most folks for 25 years now on “Saturday Night Live” and “The Daily Show” and the many offshoots of those programs.

Joe Rogan, for instance, claims to be a bit more politically ambivalent. But if you spend a lot of time listening to his podcast, following his career as I have, he over and over again is reaching rightward and further and further rightward, even if he himself claims to be politically neutral. Tim Allen represents the old guard of baby boomer-oriented, paleoconservatism. He harkens back to a time when it was the white patriarch in charge of the family who didn't have to worry about all these diversity efforts, and their daughter wearing the pink hat, and pronouns and things like that that a younger generation might put on his plate.

Greg Gutfeld is very much the Jon Stewart of the right-wing comedy movement. He's the ringleader of Fox News's primetime lineup. He's currently occupying the last hour of that lineup and has a panel talk show and he cracks jokes with these folks. His show looks a lot like “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon,” with prerecorded sketches and a monologue and humorous modes of address to talk about the news of the day. In a lot of ways, at least the three folks I just mentioned are part of the same comedy universe that birthed the more familiar stars of Jon Stewart, Samantha Bee and Stephen Colbert. But they saw a market opening to try something different — to, I'll use the word pander, to a right-leaning audience — precisely because that audience didn't have comedy programing for it for the longest time.

Host: Looking back, I'm wondering when politics and comedy started to intersect, when did that really happen? Maybe around the time of Clinton?

Marx: Yeah, it's a good question, and you'll get a dozen different answers from me depending on when you ask. If we're being really historical, I would go all the way back to the wave of stand-up comedians emerging after World War II, folks like Lenny Bruce, and a little later, Richard Pryor. I would claim they are very politically engaged and especially thinking about class- and race-based differences. But in terms of the electoral politics and comedy that we commonly think of today, because I'm a media industry scholar, I always look to the business of media, who's making money off this type of content. I think you're right, the sort of late 1990s, early 2000s rise of networks like Comedy Central, and especially “Saturday Night Live” really sort of leaning into more political sketches in their cold opens — that's the very first sketch of the show before the official show begins. Right around the time of 9/11 is when “SNL” really makes this turn into making sure politics leads the show. People had just endured this huge national trauma. They wanted to see relief played out in this sketch comedy show. This is when we get to see routine impersonations of George W. Bush and later on, Obama. Not that there weren't any before, but “SNL” really leans into that brand, probably in the sort of late '90s, early 2000 period.

Host: Even getting actual politicians on the show. That was something that was really interesting in the last few years you're seeing actual politicians making cameos.

Marx: It's a great point. Again, it's something with plenty of precedent before the early 2000s. But I think politicians correctly see that there are fewer and fewer places where millions of people gather and watch the same thing nowadays. “SNL” is one of them. Their nightly average on a good night can approach 10 million viewers. It's usually around three or 4 or 5 million. Very few TV shows exist where people are watching in the same numbers.

Politicians, if they wish to reach a broad audience and show that they have a more lighthearted, self-deprecating side to themselves, that's where they go to display it. The 2008 campaign was a somewhat notorious one for having, say, Sarah Palin and John McCain circulate through. Conservative figures that we might not associate with the show's brand have pretty routinely come on the show. Donald Trump, infamously to some controversy, was on the show, I think, in 2015 before his run at the presidency. It's just as much of a savvy self-branding and campaign maneuver on the part of politicians as it is a let's-attract-eyeballs move for “Saturday Night Live.”

Host: In your research, did you find any notable shifts or trends in how right-wing comedians are engaging with their audiences compared to in the past?

Marx: For the most part, our research starts with the beginning of the Trump era 2016 to the present. There again, there are plenty of regressive, conservative, right-leaning comedians. Andrew Dice Clay comes to mind; the kind of misogynist, homophobic comedy routines that he did. There are a handful of others. But what we think happened around the time of President Trump's inauguration is a coalescing of these disparate strands of right-wing humor into something that was robust and profitable and interconnected.

For instance, Joe Rogan routinely has as guests a few of the other folks that we talk about in the book. He communicates with Greg Gutfeld on Twitter or X. He has as guests other libertarian comedians whose podcasts you can go and check out or see on stand-up comedy tours. What's changed since then in the eight or nine years since President Trump's rise, is that these folks have now become even more mainstream. They are no longer confined just to these more niche right-wing comedy spaces. Joe Rogan recently had the most popular stand up special on Netflix. Somebody that he's regularly hosted on his show, Shane Gillis, has one of the highest rated sitcoms on Netflix called “Tires.” So many of these folks are gaining a foothold in the more nominally mainstream and center-left media institutions like Netflix.

Host: How does the appeal of conservative or libertarian comedy differ from that of more traditional political humor?

Marx: As a scholar of humor and politics and humor, there's been a tendency among many like-minded liberal folks — I count myself among that group — to assume that comedy is liberal in its orientation. That something is funny if it “punches up” at folks in power. That's the version of comedy I personally tend to affiliate with.

But what conservative comedy teaches us is that comedy is a neutral ideological mode. It's available to anybody to make jokes at the expense of anybody else. All comedy does is create two groups, a laugh-er and a laugh-ee. I might not like the setup of laugh-er and laugh-ee from conservative comedians, but Matt and I urge folks to be honest about the fact that it is comedy, that it is designed to generate laughter in its desired audience.

At its core, what Joe Rogan and Greg Gutfeld are doing is not fundamentally different from what Stephen Colbert is doing. They simply have different ideological perspectives. They're trying to create different sets of in-groups and out-groups with their comedy. But as I mentioned before, if you sit and watch an episode of Gutfeld's show — or any of the sort of right-leaning sitcoms and standup specials that we talk about in the book — the pattern and the format of those are quite familiar. There's a setup and a punchline and the audience laughs. There are skits, monologues, and there are all these familiar conventions from years of late-night television. It's just that most folks on the left won't find them funny. That's not the sort of ideological project that they support. But it doesn't look all that different from the years and years of liberal comedy that have dominated conventional mainstream Hollywood spaces.

Host: So then what makes it particularly effective for their audience?

Marx: We suggest that scholars, fans and comedians have buried our heads in the sand so long — that if it’s conservative comedy, it’s not funny, it’s not actually comedy but something else, it’s outrage humor. We warn fellow liberals that this tool is something we've been in denial about, and it's a potential rallying tool for folks on the right, just as it has been for those on the left for so many years.

The concern that I think liberals might have is that conservatives are no longer rallying around just purely partisan political issues and grievance and outrage like many folks have claimed in the past. Now comedy is sort of the tip of the spear of a conservative-culture industry. Not only are conservatives creating their own stand-up comedians and late-night comedy shows, but they're also launching competitors to Netflix and other streaming platforms. They've got musicians. They've got movies coming out, such as last summer's "Sound of Freedom." Culture is something we've conventionally thought of as center-left in decades past, but there is a lot of evidence pointing to a growing culture industry from those on the right as well.

Host: How does the economic success and the media platforms that we're seeing of these right-leaning comedians compare to their more liberal counterparts?

Marx: It's all over the place depending on where you check. Rogan is the most popular podcaster in the world by many metrics. Ten, 11 million listeners per episode. If you go to any of the podcast charts, he's always in the top two or three.

The bigger effect of that is not necessarily how they stack up viewer and listener wise, against an “SNL” or a “Colbert Show,” but it's the gateways that folks like Rogan provide to more and different types of right-wing comedy. He might have a performer on from a libertarian podcast where the use of racial slurs and misogyny might be tamped back a little bit on Rogan's show because he's on Spotify. He'll have Dave Smith, the libertarian comedian, on his show and his podcast, who we talk about in the book is much more out there and rivaled with racial slurs. He's had on the comedian Milo Yiannopoulos, the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, some folks who've got some pretty nasty ideas about how the world works, and our warning to folks is that these pathways exist between the more conventional, outward facing performers like Rogan and Allen and others to the much more extreme and further right's trolling-type humor and avowedly racist and misogynist humor that you don't have to go there but these pathways exist. Comedy is often a front door to those universes.

Host: What are some of the key challenges or criticisms faced by right-leaning comedians when it comes to blending comedy with political messaging?

Marx: To play devil's advocate a little bit, American mainstream culture — what little of it there is left — the stuff that we all know about and participate in, like the Super Bowl, is and has been hegemonically liberal. The general orientation of what Hollywood produces and what we tend to see on our social media feed and in movie theaters tends to represent a center-left political perspective.

There is some truth to the claim among Rogan and others that conservative viewpoints are underrepresented in Hollywood. I've got my own personal opinions about that and why that's the case, but the danger of it for right-wing folks wanting to break into that space is that they might be more inclined to grab on to the more outrageous, extreme joke as a way to gain attention and gain viewers.

Even if they don't necessarily believe the nasty, racist or misogynist things they're joking about, it's a way to get a foothold in your social media feed, to get promoted, to get advertisers, to get listeners. Indeed, many of the folks we talk about in the book and that you've since seen pop up as popular comedians, like Gillis, will be pretty reluctant to publicly identify as politically one thing or another. But they'll say that sort of incendiary comedy for their routines and use that as a tool to get clipped out and make the rounds on Tik-Tok and elsewhere. I think there's a financial incentive and there's a sort of self-branding incentive to go for the extreme on the right, even if it's something they personally don't publicly back up in their non-performative lives.

Host: How do comedians decide what is and is not acceptable to joke about when it comes to politics?

Marx: Boy, I could teach a whole graduate seminar on that. My short and direct answer to that is comedians will joke about that which makes them money and gets them the next gig, the next booking, the next appearance on somebody's podcast. I don't say that to be cynical and say that folks are purely money driven, but because the cultural space and especially the comedy space is so competitive, it's so constrained right now with streaming media platforms and social media platforms fighting for their own nickels and dimes, that you have to stand out somehow. You have to make some set of jokes that gets you a listenership.

This is why, again, the comedians especially that follow in Rogan's wake, Rogan and Andrew Schulz and Shane Gillis and Tony Hinchcliffe, a handful of these folks who've since come up might not be these publicly identifiable right-wing people. They may deny that label, but when they get on stage, they know how to play with an audience. They know how to craft a joke so that the racist punch line hits the right way, gets circulated in the right ways, and elicits a reaction in exactly the right way.

The comedian Matt Rife comes to mind, too. He recently released a Netflix special, just him doing crowd work. He's somebody who's been accused of having some regressive views on gender roles and race in the past, too. He very openly embraces in the special his role as a provocateur, as somebody who's poking at and prodding audience members in ways that many liberals might find offensive. Whether or not he believes those ideas, I don't know. But he sure knows how to leverage them in his special to greater economic success beyond it.

Host: I'm thinking about that idea, and I think a lot of comedians will use the, you just take that little extra step, go to the extreme to make your point. Although sometimes it's kind of hard to know where the line is.

Marx: At its best, comedy breaks boundaries and pushes taboos. We're kind of in this weird political, cultural moment where on the one hand, inclusivity and belongingness is extremely important to many folks. We want to create spaces where all are welcome. But on the other hand, we live in a time of intensely identity-driven storytelling and modes of cultural communication. I'm this person, you're this person, and those two things butt heads really hard in the comedy space. Comedy is all about creating in groups and out groups. I get asked this all the time, and there's never a good answer for it where that line is. I guess my cop-out answer is you just kind of know it when you see it.

Host: Or when you’ve stepped over it.

Marx: Yes, when you're an audience member in a comedy show or you're watching something on TV and something in your gut reacts, or you have a visceral reaction to a joke somebody made or somebody you're with doesn't react the way that you want them to. Humor is so contextual that I don't think scholars of it will ever be able to draw some hard dividing line of this is okay to joke about, this isn't.

Host: The impact that both liberal and conservative comedy can have. It's hard for me to believe that a standup act or an SNL skit can really impact the outcome of an election. Do these comedians actually have influence? Can they influence political, public opinion and political discourse?

Marx: No, I don’t think they have any direct impact on electoral outcomes. What entertainers and culture industry workers do is shape the broader conversation. They shape the reaction to the politician and the narrative that emerges out of them. They generate discourse. They talk about memes. They create memes, they circulate them.

My sense of the relationship between culture and politics is always one step removed. There's no direct outcome you can point to as, aha this episode of “SNL” aired; therefore, we got President Trump. Some of that may be debatable. What I think culture and especially comedy does best is provide guidelines on how we talk about politics and what we deem permissible under any given circumstance.

You saw the recent sort of news cycle surrounding Tim Walz's joke about “white guy tacos,” the way that joking mode of address from a politician was activated by both right and left as something disingenuously. Conservatives would say he was making a racist joke, and you can't say that about white folks. Liberals would say he's very clearly joking because he was. That may not have been a conversation we had ten, 15 years ago. Now it's a part of the mainstream news cycle and conversation. What is the ethical stance of this joke? Is it okay to say something like this if you're somebody of Walz's identity position? It'll always be a shaper of the broader discourse, but I'm skeptical of its direct impact on electoral outcomes.

Host: Did you see any kind of influence and are you seeing anything reflected now as we're gearing up to the 2024 election?

Marx: One thing we signal in the book that I think you're seeing currently, especially in the Trump campaign's efforts, is outreach to the young male vote. Men aged 18 to 30 has become a huge area of focus for the Trump campaign. It's this untapped demographic of somewhat politically ambivalent voters, folks who might not have voted at all or be disenchanted with the options. This is the demographic that Hollywood and media industries have traditionally associated with comedy.

For decades, comedy TV show producers, stand-up comedians have always created this assumed natural relationship between, say, “Chappelle's Show” on Comedy Central and young men. This is, of course, a manufactured relationship. There's no natural belongingness between those two things. But it was thought at the time that viewers of “The Daily Show,” if they were younger and male, would have more, say, disposable income and be more open to using their cultural influence to get friends on board.

We're seeing the same kind of playbook run right now from the Trump campaign. He's making the rounds on all sorts of not necessarily comedic, but sort of young male-courting YouTuber and streaming platforms. The Nelk Boys and Adin Ross, these folks wouldn't necessarily be out and out comedians, but they have that trolling, humorous mode of address that we see in a lot of right-wing comedy that Trump himself has adopted, his sort of mean spirited, look at this silly person that I disagree with over there, let's make fun of them and belittle them. All of this is meant to draw out votes that might not have been there in previous election cycles by inspiring what many of our young college age students to say, they like that guy because he's funny and he's on this person's show who they also think is funny. So, they’ll give him a vote.

Host: It's got me thinking about the early years of MTV’s Rock the Vote campaign and that over the years, they really welcomed that younger and undecided voter into the process that maybe they hadn't felt included in before. It sounds like these right-wing comedians are having maybe similar influence.

Marx: Absolutely. It's a play that the liberal coalition has long been running, as you mentioned, since the days of MTV's Rock the Vote. We've seen many iterations of it from the Democratic nominees for president. There's always been a turn-out-the-vote effort on the left for young people. The bond between young progressive voters and liberals has always been strong. Democrats have used Hollywood and the entertainment universe to draw out (voters). That's why we get many more celebrity endorsements from folks that young people like on the left, versus Clint Eastwood, Tim Allen and Dennis Quaid, who are those older, more conservative demographics of folks we typically associate with the right.

What we're signaling in the book and what I think you're seeing borne out now on the Trump campaign, is a real intentional, concerted effort to draw out young men with comedy. It's a playbook that the left has run before. It's something that Hollywood streaming platforms and cable TV channels and movies have tried before. It's certainly something that the Trump campaign is going to try, and we'll see what happens.

Host: How does the integration of comedy into political messaging impact the broader cultural and social attitudes that we have? We're so polarized right now.

Marx: It absolutely plays into the polarization of the United States on virtually every political issue. I'll not wade into the expertise of my colleagues in political science or social psychology, but because I'm a media scholar, I tend to always default to what it is that makes people money. How is this media content something that can be platformed, advertised to a specific type of demographic?

Right now, all the financial incentives for people making comedy and entertainment content are to very narrowly focus your audience, targeting efforts on a small group of people and foster in them a very intense loyalty to your streaming series or to your podcast. As I mentioned earlier, there are fewer spaces where we gather across demographic and political and identity baselines to all watch the same thing. That happens once a year, usually in the Super Bowl and maybe sometimes in a place like “SNL,” where I think many people will probably peer in this fall just to see what politicians cycle through and how will they interpret X, Y, or Z political events this week. But the money is the driver of this division and partisanship, at least in terms of comedy and entertainment content.

Host: For my last question, I wanted to ask you to kind of put on your predicting hat and tell me where you see the future of comedy playing out in political campaigns, and how might political ideologies adapt their approaches in response to these tactics?

Marx: After 2016, I gave up making hard and fast predictions on anything in life, so take this with a great big grain of salt. I think that as you see generational turnover in our national political candidates, that is to say, as you see the sort of boomer generation and others cycling out of political life and you see political candidates who are of Generation X and younger folks who've matured in this age of political satire and political comedy, I think you'll see more and more of it.

You'll see more and more national politicians using joking modes of address to win over at least their base and garner support that way. You'll also see more stand-up comedians and content creators, folks who want to be paid and make a living to create entertainment media trying that political comedy angle more and more.

I'm loath to even bring this up as an example, but I recently saw the "hawk tuah" girl, Hailey Welch, is launching a podcast under one of the Paul brothers' podcast umbrellas. I have to think that even something as silly and fleeting as her and the viral moment she had will gain some kind of political comedy currency at some point, like she'll have on Rogan or somebody else. She was on Bill Maher's podcast not that long ago. Even the folks who might start out in a politically neutral space, I think the money and the algorithmic nature of how we access media pushes you into a politically engaged space, whether you think that way or not.

Host: Well, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate your time.

Marx: Thank you, Stacy. I really enjoy talking to you.

Host: That was CSU Associate Professor Nick Marx speaking about the cultural shift to more conservative leaning comedy. I'm your host, Stacy Nick, and you're listening to CSU's The Audit.