The New York Times: Boy, the Alleged Entertainment Media Sure Pumped Out a Lot of Orange Man Bad “Comedy” Shows, and Almost All of Them Failed….This Must Be Trump’s Fault!

 
by Ace

Maybe it’s the fault of untalented hacks who keep repeating the same jokes — “small hands Cheeto Jesus Literally Hitler” — and maybe it’s the fault of executives who would rather pursue political agendas than audience share.

And maybe it’s the fault of the leftwing Twitter Nazis who will attack anyone for any insufficiently “Woke” joke, thereby reducing the number of Sayable Things to about a dozen.

And maybe it’s the fault of leftwing audiences, for accepting and extolling Viewpoint Validation “humor” for so long.

The New York Times could have examined what fault any of those played in the failure of Leftwing Political “Comedy.”

But as if following the same blueprint for failure followed by the “comedies” they’re writing obituaries for, the New York Times decides it would be too dangerous to admit the truth and upset the Twitter Junkies.

So they instead just claim exactly what their dogmatic leftwing Twitter Kommissars demand they claim: That the failure of leftwing “comedy” is the fault of the Bad Orange Man Who Is Bad and Orange.

Thinking about the difficulty of making political comedy that jibed with a broad audience, I asked if there was a type of joke they had learned not to do.
I was surprised when Flanz whispered “sarcasm,” but Amira readily agreed: “People are so emotionally invested…” he said, trailing off for a second. ‘You almost have to not couch things in sarcasm, because people will momentarily wonder if you’re not on their side.”

This is the “Hugbox” — a place where no one is permitted to say anything but the 12 things that the Hugbox dwellers have agreed are Good To Say.

The Twitter Weirdoes and Mentally Ill Leftwing Neurotics are too emotionally brittle to process sarcasm. They need you to literally tell them that you agree with their politics (and that the audience is therefore On the Right Side of History) with every single line.

Nodding, Flanz added, “We have to signal to the audience, ‘Hey, we know how you’re feeling,’ so it doesn’t seem like you’re making light of a serious thing.” Yet making light of serious things is the definition of political comedy. Here lies the problem facing “The Daily Show” and its offspring: Consumers of this brand of comedy are so horrified by Trump that irreverence can feel like betrayal.

Yes, you’re all psychologically-well, stable individuals.

From 1996 until the second term of the George W. Bush administration, “The Daily Show” was effectively the only program of its kind. In 2005, “The Colbert Report” gave the most popular “Daily Show” correspondent a half-hour of his own. The boom began almost a decade later, when HBO aired the first episode of “Last Week Tonight.” Since January 2015, another seven liberal clip shows have premiered: “Full Frontal,” “The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore,” “The Opposition With Jordan Klepper,” “Patriot Act With Hasan Minhaj,” “Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas,” “The Jim Jefferies Show” and “The Break With Michelle Wolf.” As of today, all of those seven but “Full Frontal” have been canceled.

This boom and bust overlaps conspicuously with the political career of one Donald J. Trump. In theory, Trump should be the best thing that ever happened to liberal comedy. Five years ago, when he announced his candidacy after descending an escalator in a mall/apartment complex bearing his name, it briefly appeared as if he might be. Like so many others, this hope has not panned out. Maybe it’s the glut; in any form of humor, from sitcoms to barroom remarks, overproduction causes trouble. But there is also a sense, as the president talks openly about defying the results of the election, that satire has not accomplished what its champions believed it could. Even the professionals seem disillusioned.

In other words: They’re angry that four years of media tantrums have not made the Bad Orange Man disappear, and they’ve begun to resent the media that strongly implied that 24/7/365 nonstop hatred could win them political victories.

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