Thursday, June 14, 2007
(11:55 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Asymmetry of Parody
Recent events have brought Jesus' General to my attention once again. I thought that blog was funny when I first discovered it, although its schtick quickly becomes redundant: yes, yes, all conservatives are repressed homosexuals, "ha ha." But the General is hardly the only liberal who assumes the voice of a conservative in order to make fun of them -- Stephen Colbert is the most famous current practicioner, but there are many others.My question is: Are there any conservatives out there who run similar parody sites written in the voice of a liberal? I am hardly a scholar of conservative blogs, but if there are any, they do not seem to be very popular. This seems to me to be not a mere empirical fact, but an inner necessity. Though a liberal can assume the voice of a conservative to produce comedic effects, this process cannot simply be reversed. Where the liberal parody consists of an exaggeration of what conservatives actually do say, the conservative parody of liberals consists in "exposing" what the liberals don't say.
I think immediately of Rush Limbaugh's anti-liberal gags. In one memorable case in the early 1990s, he had Clinton sing a song about how he had pulled the wool over the nation's eyes, but now that he was elected, he was free to implement his radical agenda of raising taxes through the roof. Comedy gold, to be sure -- but there is an inner necessity to this procedure. It's not simply that there are no generic features of liberals to mock: the instinctive fake "balance" between two sides, for instance. The problem is that none of this would register as funny, nor would it undermine liberalism; instead, the conservative parodist would simply end up associating liberals with qualities that the public at large values (moderation, fairness, etc.). The only possible route is to reveal the "hidden truth" of liberalism, normally by completely omitting any reference to the liberals' surface-level moderation -- indeed, their continual attempts to distance themselves from any part of the supposed "hidden truth."
The liberal parodist, by contrast, has no need to project content onto the conservative. Whatever "hidden" content there may be is "hidden" in plain sight. Only a minor twist is needed to make a statement ridiculous, and sometimes not even that. This is because within the liberal frame, the conservative is already a parody of himself -- so strictly speaking, Stephen Colbert is not "parodying" Bill O'Reilly; he is simply imitating O'Reilly's parody of himself.
What is this content, though? At the end of the day, it's a (usually hallucinated) set of "traditional" or "substantial" ties -- family, race, country. Such things appear ridiculous to the liberal. On the other side, from the perspective of the conservative, the very "cosmopolitanism" of the liberals -- their lack of substantial content -- already is an active assualt on that traditional substance.
The hyperbolic claims of liberals "hating America" and wanting to "destroy the family" thus are not, strictly speaking, conscious lies -- from the conservative standpoint, liberal moderation and open-mindedness already takes up a side in the struggle to defend "traditional values." The center is the radical left, the element introducing a conflict into a previously homogeneous social substance. Thus on the formal level, the very fact that there are "culture wars" indicates that the liberals have won -- the idea of gay marriage as a live possibility that must be fought already disrupts the fantasy of an immutable "traditional" meaning of marriage. Even if the end result is to outlaw gay marriage, the very act of treating it as a potentially open question already cedes the crucial ground.
This dynamic is what produces the asymmetrical possibilities for parody. On the one hand, the liberal is able directly to imitate the conservative and count on its comedic effect because the liberal is smug and self-assured, ultimately viewing the conservative as a pathetic fool caught up in a rearguard effort. On the other hand, the conservative parody attempts to generate humor indirectly, through the disconnect between the paranoid "hidden message" and the liberal's actual behavior, viewing the liberal as a villain who, no matter what concerete position he takes, already formally poses a danger to the social substance by virtue of his very stance of moderation.
[UPDATE: Slightly edited for clarity. I'm only talking about parody, not "making fun" in general -- obviously conservatives make fun of liberals in a variety of ways that don't fit this description.]
