When did Republican writers stop being funny? Look around at the landscape of contemporary American literature – and, for that matter, TV and film – and you’d be hard pressed to find a genuinely funny literary voice who doesn’t lean liberal, or at least purport to. This isn’t to say that individual right-wing writers aren’t amusing. Often found in these pages, Rod Liddle, for one, is very funny, though I suggest he’d balk at being called a conservative. And Donald Trump is hilarious on Truth Social – his posts may have the subtlety of a bullhorn, but they usually land with a satisfying thunk.
During his 2016 campaign and well into his first term, Trump succeeded in part because he understood that politics and entertainment run in parallel. In the primaries, he skipped around lumbering, straight-down-the-line rivals such as Jeb Bush; set against Hillary Clinton in debates, he played the winking, roguish uncle to her hectoring Home Economics teacher. His approach was crude, brutish and occasionally misogynistic, but he still recognized the value of comedy in getting voters onside, with a knack for damning nicknames – “Sleepy Joe,” “Pocahontas” – that had their recipients seething with impotent indignation. Likewise in his first administration, his zingers were hardly more than playground jabs – Kim Jong-un’s “Rocketman” moniker, for instance – but they did prove that on the world stage, as in elementary school, mudslinging gets you noticed.
The Land and Its People is far from self-serious. In fact, it is giddily good fun
But these days there appears to be a worrying self-seriousness in Republican letters. Where are the young tyros ready to follow the President’s example? Where are today’s Tom Wolfes and P.J. O’Rourkes? Both writers helped shape the idea of what we might term “Republican humor”: it was wry, poised, dry and often devastating. It looked the world straight in the eye and found it wanting, but tolerable, provided it kept you in bespoke linen suits and a decent table at the Monocle.
Take a typical gag by O’Rourke, the founding editor of the National Lampoon:
The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then get elected and prove it.
There’s classical structure: a build up, a pay-off; the boom-tish of delivery that any aspiring standup learns by rote. O’Rourke subsequently refined his message – that almost everyone in government is a lazy, cack-handed slob – to a fine point in later work, publishing an entire book called Don’t Vote! – It Just Encourages the Bastards.
Wolfe, likewise, believed that putting anyone in charge of anything was a rum idea. Still, his satires do carry moral weight. This is especially the case with his great, teeming 1987 novel of New York excess, The Bonfire of the Vanities. In that book – soon to be reimagined by David E. Kelley for Apple TV – the comedy carries serious purpose. Like Dickens, on whose work Wolfe modeled the monthly serialization format in which the novel originally appeared, he wants readers to laugh – then think.
Despite their waspishness, both O’Rourke and Wolfe had an avuncular inclusiveness to their humor, too: you felt they would be decent guys to have a drink with, no matter your politics. Cursing out the government and rolling your eyes at the excesses of liberal pieties were equal opportunities games. They knew how to live – hard, fast, in style – and have fun doing so. O’Rourke, after all, once published an essay entitled “How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink.” Now that’s a bipartisan message.
The question of Republican humor was brought sharply to mind recently by David Sedaris’s latest essay collection, The Land and Its People. Now, Sedaris is almost a caricature liberal. He’s gay, resides part of the year in New York (the rest in the Sussex countryside) and lived for decades in Paris and Normandy. He writes for the New Yorker and broadcasts on the BBC. Growing up in North Carolina, he was baffled by his classmates who were into hunting and football, preferring instead to debate which was the best tune from The Sound of Music. Trump he thinks, is “a stupid, stupid man” and he describes a run-in with Barack Obama at the White House thus: “I feared I might spontaneously combust – with respect, with pride and awe.”
But The Land and Its People is far from self-serious. In fact, it is giddily good fun. One of my favorite essays concerns a surreal visit to the Vatican City which Sedaris made during the papacy of the last Pope Francis. Sedaris had been invited to a papal audience alongside an apparently random grab-bag of international comedians and entertainers, including Stephen Colbert, Whoopi Goldberg and Jimmy Fallon. Sitting at a dinner with them the night before the event, and feeling deeply out of place, Sedaris tries to impress the group with a joke:
A cop stops a car that two priests are riding in. “I’m looking for a couple of child molesters,” he tells them. The priests look at each other. “We’ll do it!” they say.
It goes down fine, but then it occurs to Sedaris: perhaps this is why they’ve all been invited. Maybe the Pope has summoned them all to plead that these assembled Avengers of international comedy give the child-abuse gags a rest: “How can we get back to the sex-starved nun jokes we all so enjoyed in the past?”
The Pope, naturally, says no such thing – and seems equally baffled by this strange meeting, delivering a two-minute welcome in untranslated Italian, before dismissing the audience. But the encounter gives Sedaris a chance to perform a maneuver that’s typical of his work: freewheeling from ribald humor to profundity, and back again. His audience comes shortly after the Pope has been caught using the Italian word for “faggotry” for the second time in as many weeks; Sedaris, who often uses his 35-year relationship with his husband Hugh for material, feels he ought to be offended.
He anticipates the pearl-clutching which will surely ensue when it comes out that he has quite literally kissed the ring of someone caught using homophobic language. Yet he can’t quite bring himself to care. In fact, wonderfully, he chooses to riff on the word “faggotry,” which, he writes, isn’t really a slur at all, but rather connotes behavior. As in: “Take your faggotry outside, please.” At the end of the episode, he concludes of Pope Francis: “I don’t think he’s a homophobe so much as an 87-year-old.”
Few writers have the lightness of touch that allows them to range across incest, child rape and murdering strangers on trains in a way which not only draws sympathy, but feels like an inevitable conclusion. The best comedians say terrible things to shock – and end up having us agree with them. In this, Sedaris triumphs. But there are corresponding shadows in the writing as well. Sedaris, who is approaching his seventies, finds his address book more populated by the dead than the living; he notices the age spots on his husband’s hands for the first time.
One school of joke-telling holds that comedians should always punch up, never down: caper at the king, but never make fun of his disabled kid brother. This advice is total balls, as Sedaris notes. “The only rule of anything in comedy,” he writes, “is that you should always be as tasteless as possible.”
The Land and Its People contains many such examples of gratuitous tastelessness. Recalling a friend who tries to persuade Sedaris to ask ChatGPT to write in his voice, Sedaris responds: “I saw no reason to get any more depressed than I already was, so I said, ‘Oh, do I have to?’ before closing the app and googling ‘Adults with Down syndrome available for adoption in my area.’”
The true conservative should be unafraid to poke fun and throw his weight around a bit
Many of the targets in Sedaris’s writing will be familiar to right-leaning readers: truculent youths playing loud music in public; the salutatory effects of delivering some light corporal punishment to your kids; ickiness about using the word “husband” to describe his other half, Hugh, despite the fact that they have been married since 2016. Sedaris comes across as what he is: a man staring down the narrowing end of life, baffled by the preciousness of modern society and appalled by the rudeness of younger, grabbier generations. He wants to hold back time, to return to an era when the world was smaller, more secure, and other people got out of your goddamn way so you could get on with your business. In short, he writes – and thinks – like a conservative. So is he one? I’m sure he’d be appalled by the description. But call me naive: if it walks like a conservative – and talks like one – then maybe, just maybe, it is one, albeit with a small c. As Wolfe wrote: “If I have been judged to be right wing, I think this is because of the things I have mocked.”
There’s a lesson here for today’s Republican writers. Half the population already thinks you’re cruel, selfish dickheads. So lean into it, loosen up. And if you want to wrestle your party away from the crankier end of the national paddling pool, then try pointing out how liberal their messaging is. The likes of Nick Fuentes are shrill, conspiracist and almost Nordic in their strident humorlessness. The true conservative, as Sedaris shows in this magnificently wicked collection, should be unafraid to poke fun and throw his weight around a bit.
If in doubt, look to the example of President Trump. He is, among many other things, clearly a man who knows how to have a laugh: he seems to intuitively understand that public affairs is a shallow, mucky game and, if you feel you must take part, then you’re bound to get dirty hands.
That’s a message which I sense O’Rourke – and Sedaris, in fact – would sympathize with: an idea which defines the right-wing sense of humor. “Politics is a vulgar fucking subject,” as O’Rourke once put it. So why not have some fun with it?
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