Conservative publisher Adam Bellow thinks conservatives need to produce more popular art: beach fiction, TV shows, comedy routines, etc. Paul Waldman thinks he’s got an uphill battle:
As I’ve noted before, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report work as well as they do because they’re not shows written and performed by professional liberals who happen to be comedians, attempting to use humor to score political points; rather, they’re shows written and performed by professional comedians who happen to be liberals, using politics to produce comedy. It’s a really important distinction.
The same distinction applies to other mediums. If you set out to write an explicitly conservative novel, it’s likely to suck. If you set out to write a novel, and it has a conservative worldview because you happen to be a conservative, it will probably do a lot better. Unfortunately for conservatives, if you take this approach you’re likely to end up writing little more than an establishment-friendly novel, not an overtly pointed takedown of liberalism.
That said, conservatives could produce perfectly good books and TV shows if they took Waldman’s advice. But comedy is a special problem. Conservative comedy just doesn’t seem to work very well, and I’d guess there are two big reasons why:
The material: Liberals are, generally speaking, opposed to the establishment. Poking fun at the establishment is easy to do, so liberals have lots of ready-made material. Conversely, poking fun at the little guys just seems mean. It’s not impossible to get good comedy out of, say, the more ridiculous aspects of the Occupy Wall Street folks at Zuccotti Park, but it’s a lot harder and the material is a lot thinner.
The audience: I’ve never quite understood this, but liberals just seem to like political comedy more than conservatives. Conservatives simply don’t consider this stuff a laughing matter. Especially recently, they’re convinced, deep in their marrow, that liberals are literally out to destroy America, and how do you find the yuks in that? By contrast, mocking conservatives is a popular liberal pastime. Is this because liberals accept conservatives as an inevitable part of the scenery, to be fought but not really hated? That doesn’t seem quite right. Still, it’s true that the establishment, by definition, is always with us, and always working in its usual way to preserve itself. You might think it’s a malign force, but you don’t think of it as something new that’s suddenly emerged to wreck the country.
I dunno. I’m just guessing here. Age probably has something to do with this too. In any case, conservatives are great at outrage, while liberals who try to emulate them almost always fail. Liberals are great at comedy, and conservatives who try to emulate that fail as well. In the middle ground of books and movies, I imagine both sides could do well, but since most artists are liberals, there’s just more to choose from along the liberal spectrum.
