From the Washington Monthly: Why Aren’t Conservatives Funny?

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2012/on_political_books/why_arent_conservatives_funny039432.php?page=1

September/October 2012Why Aren’t Conservatives Funny?

An academic’s doomed attempt to explain why there are no good right-wing comedians.

By Joshua Green

"Whole shelves groan with academic treatises on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report — stuffed with typologies, program analyses, monologue exegeses — but they don’t seem to have proven much or illuminated anything particularly interesting about the audience.

In fact, much of the scholarship feels like it was primarily motivated by the authors’ desire to study something cool, and then retrofitted with exaggerated significance to justify the endeavor. Take the conclusion of two academics who studied Will Ferrell’s Saturday Night Live presidential debate skits in 2000: “Voters seeking to understand the substance of ideas in the debate may have found the parodies of the debate to be a useful organizing tool for their inherent complexities.” Only a Will Ferrell character would rely on a Will Ferrell debate skit to parse the complexities of modern presidential politics. "