Comedy has shifted right—but the left is looking to reclaim the laughs

For decades, both culture and comedy alike in America seemed to favor the left.?And if you ask comedian Trae Crowder, conservatives, or the “ Marsha Blackburn -style Church of Christ, judgy ...

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For decades, both culture and comedy alike in America seemed to favor the left. And if you ask comedian Trae Crowder, conservatives, or the “Marsha Blackburn-style Church of Christ, judgy bitches who won't let you do or say anything,” were the brunt of the joke.

Crowder, or the “Liberal Redneck” as he calls himself, has built a fandom through his quippy commentary and progressive ideology delivered with a Southern twang, often going after those judgy types in his own jokes. 

In his stand-up, he takes cracks at things like “thoughts and prayers” as well as the idea that rednecks love “backing the blue” despite having TV shows centered around running from the law.

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However, the comic has really taken off in the social media realm with his driver seat political commentary on the latest White House happenings. 

“You know how these people are,” Crowder begins. “Your Uncle Randy will act like the woke mob is trying to cancel him from his roofing job because you asked him politely to stop telling n-word jokes at T-ball games. Right? But as soon as you make one little crack about Trump having a wrinkly cooter on his neck Randy storms off hollerin’ about the persecution of white Christian men. But, yeah, we’re the snowflakes.” 

However, ahead of Crowder’s sold-out show in San Francisco, he told Daily Kos that he has noticed a change in his fan demographic. While every seat was filled at Cobb’s Comedy Club that night, a sea of silver hair shone across the room. 

“I definitely haven’t been reaching younger people,” he said.

Crowder, and many others have noticed that for younger men in particular the left has become “super uncool.”

Jon Stewart

“When I was their age, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert were the coolest motherfuckers around,” he recalled, telling of his fraternity days of “smoking weed and watching ‘The Daily Show’ every week.”

“And that was a left-leaning voice, obviously. And now today, it's the exact opposite," he explained, adding, "I cannot believe that young people think it's cooler to be a conservative."

But as sociologist Raúl Pérez, author of “The Soul of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy,” tells us, America’s comedic history only began to lean left during the rise of the Civil Rights Movement.

“Comedy was certainly left-leaning for several decades, even into the ’90s and early 2000s, but I think there's also this other sort of aspect of history and comedy in the U.S., going back even earlier than that, where comedy was certainly much more aligned with the politics of white nationalism,” Pérez said. 

Pérez referred to the type of comedy that sought to oppress certain races, sometimes using means such as blackface, as a way to uplift the moods of other (typically white) people.

“You've got over a century of the ridicule of Black people being the most dominant form of entertainment,” he said. 

Comedians have long served as a reprieve from the rat race and simultaneously as a means of pointing out the absurdity of what was happening at the White House. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, comedian Sarah Cooper provided laughs to millions through her lip-syncing impersonations of Trump and his outrageous statements during press conferences.

“If we didn’t do any testing we would have very few cases,” Cooper lip-synced as she wrote out the failed logic on a dry erase board. 

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The comedian’s humor reached so far that Trump himself eventually blocked her on what was then Twitter. 

Backing up to Donald Trump's entrance onto the political playing field in 2016, comedy and culture felt a small but historical shift. The reality star, who had built a reputation as a womanizing bully, was laying claim to the presidential race while throwing insults and nicknames around like Monopoly money. At the time, late night sought to delegitimize the contender and comedians like Randy Rainbow released multiple satirical hits that went viral on platforms like Facebook and YouTube.

"You got trouble right here in America. Sure, I'm a liberal and a gay, I'm mighty proud to say. Well, I'm kind of scared to say it," the comic spouts in full dandy style to his 2016 hit “Ya Got Trouble.”

"I admit that when Trump threw his name in the race, I assumed he was joking,” he sings. “You know how he jokes about stuff with his cool swag and his orange face. And then he started showing up and winning in the polls, like, a lot. And I was like, oh shit."

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But as comedy’s left-leaning stars poked hole after hole in Trump’s problematic sails, the fraudulent real estate mogul still rose to power. While many were shocked, Pérez chalks this up as the white man’s revenge for gender and racial equality. As the cultural pendulum moved toward equality and inclusion following the civil rights era, Trump arose to push back. 

“For white Americans, it's like they're losing out here to racial and gender equality,” Pérez speculated. 

Where pre-Civil Rights Movement jokes would serve to soothe white men by providing racist, misogynistic quips that implied they were at the “top of the food chain,” Pérez said, this all came toppling down when people began demanding their fair share.

Today, Pérez speculates, we are seeing a similar pushback. Early into Trump’s second term, the president has already slashed diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and other civil rights era laws that sought to level the playing field.

Racist and misogynistic jokes have undoubtedly made a full comeback in mainstream comedy, and, in an unexpected plot twist, the left is now branded as the “judgy bitches.” 

At a Trump rally, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe went viral after calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage,” calling Republicans the party with the “good sense of humor.”

To Pérez, he describes this as a cultural pushback on the strides made over the last few decades since the Civil Rights Movement. 

Media and political satire expert Nick Marx also points to conservative giants like Rupert Murdoch, who saw a market opportunity. 

Joe Rogan

“They saw that all of this political comedy was serving liberals and that nobody had really tried, with any resources, to make a conservative ‘Daily Show,’” he said.

Both Marx and Pérez seem to be singing a similar tune, to different degrees. The right, and the white, picked up their pitch forks and marched back into the comedic, or cultural, stratosphere. And with the rise of Joe Rogan’s and Hinchcliffe’s “Kill Tony” podcasts, as well as Greg Gutfeld’s conservative version of a late night talkshow on Fox News, right-leaning comedy has its own home in the market today.

Even Ben Shapiro has built his own conservative streaming platform for conservatives to watch anti-woke films and movies without “woke” bias. “Fight the left, build the future,” the subscription landing page reads.

But what does this shift—in comedy, and culture—mean for those on the left?

Late night shows like “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” and “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon” are all undeniably liberal, but that may not be enough. For Crowder, and for those of us at his sold-out show, we might be gearing up for the inevitable—another counterculture, another resistance. 

“I'd like to see the pendulum swing back in the other direction,” Crowder said. “I'm gonna do whatever little things that I can to help that.”

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