"Many a truth is spoken in jest"
Humour has always been one of humanity’s most subversive tools. It pierces pretence, exposes hypocrisy, and reveals uncomfortable realities in ways that solemn argument cannot. A joke can slip past defences, planting truth in the mind before ideology has time to react. Yet in our age, the Left seems uniquely incapable of laughing—especially when the joke is at their expense. They live within ideology, and ideology cannot abide ridicule. To laugh at it is to admit its fragility, and fragility is what they fear most.
The Disappearance of Comedy
Film critics have noted the near extinction of comedies from the silver screen. For more than a decade, Hollywood has produced few genuine comedies, preferring “dramedies” or politically correct satire. A recent attempt at revival, the Naked Gun soft reboot with Liam Neeson, was more curiosity than cultural event. The golden age of comedy, when audiences flocked to laugh at irreverence, seems gone.
The reason is not simply market forces. It is cultural censorship. Comedy requires risk, irreverence, and the freedom to offend. But in an era where offence is treated as violence, comedy is strangled before it can breathe. The joke dies in the cradle, smothered by sensitivity readers and ideological gatekeepers.
Leftist Comedians: The Joke That Isn’t Funny
Comedians who identify strongly with the Left rarely provoke laughter. Hannah Gadsby’s routines, for example, are celebrated by critics but leave audiences more solemn than amused. The humour is replaced with lectures, the punchline with ideology.
Bob Monkhouse once quipped:
Film critics have noted the near extinction of comedies from the silver screen. For more than a decade, Hollywood has produced few genuine comedies, preferring “dramedies” or politically correct satire. A recent attempt at revival, the Naked Gun soft reboot with Liam Neeson, was more curiosity than cultural event. The golden age of comedy, when audiences flocked to laugh at irreverence, seems gone.
The reason is not simply market forces. It is cultural censorship. Comedy requires risk, irreverence, and the freedom to offend. But in an era where offence is treated as violence, comedy is strangled before it can breathe. The joke dies in the cradle, smothered by sensitivity readers and ideological gatekeepers.
Leftist Comedians: The Joke That Isn’t Funny
Comedians who identify strongly with the Left rarely provoke laughter. Hannah Gadsby’s routines, for example, are celebrated by critics but leave audiences more solemn than amused. The humour is replaced with lectures, the punchline with ideology.
Bob Monkhouse once quipped:
“People used to laugh at me when I said I wanted to be a comedian. Well, they’re not laughing now.”
Applied to modern Leftist comedians, the joke becomes literal: Amy Schumer once dreamed of being a comedian, and now that she is one, nobody is laughing. The irony is that the Left has turned comedy into propaganda, stripping it of the spontaneity and irreverence that make humour thrive. The audience is expected to clap for the message rather than laugh at the joke.
The Left Cannot Meme
This stereotype has become a cultural shorthand. When the Left tries to meme, the results are long-winded, preachy, and miss the target. In the meme wars of the internet age, the Left has proven time and again that their attempts at humour are themselves the joke. Memes thrive on brevity, irreverence, and irony—qualities that ideology cannot tolerate. Thus, their memes collapse into slogans, stripped of wit and drained of laughter.
Ideological Fragility
The inability to laugh is not accidental. It is structural. Modern Leftists cannot handle truth, even when delivered in jest. Jokes puncture ideology, and ideology demands total seriousness. To laugh at the absurdities of political correctness, gender dogma, or racial grievance is to expose their contradictions. Thus, humour becomes forbidden territory. The joke is treated as heresy, the comedian as blasphemer.
Historical Parallels: Killing Comedy
This fragility has precedent. Totalitarian regimes—communist, fascist, national socialist—were united in their hostility to unapproved comedy. Jokes about the Party, the Führer, or the State were criminal acts. Only “safe” comedians, who reinforced the regime’s narrative, were permitted. The laughter of the people was replaced with applause for propaganda.
The modern Left, through its “Long March through the Institutions,” has replicated this pattern. Universities, media, and entertainment industries now enforce ideological conformity. Comedy that challenges the narrative is cancelled; comedians who risk offence are ostracised. The result is a culture where only the unfunny are permitted to perform, and laughter itself becomes suspect.
The Death of Laughter
The inability to laugh is not trivial. It signals the death of freedom. A society that cannot laugh at itself is a society that has surrendered to fear. Jokes are small acts of rebellion, reminders that truth can be spoken sideways. When those jokes are forbidden, truth itself is forbidden.
The Left’s promise of liberation has produced only solemnity, censorship, and humourless conformity. Their institutions echo with ideology, not laughter. And history teaches us that when laughter dies, liberty soon follows.
Comedy Under Freedom vs Comedy Under Ideology
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Comedy under freedom is a weapon of truth and resilience. Comedy under ideology is a tool of control, stripped of laughter and reduced to propaganda. When humour dies, liberty is not far behind.
Source: https://nominister.wordpress.com/2025/12/27/the-lefts-inability-to-laugh/
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