The Youth Vote: Show Me the Funny!

The White House Correspondents' Dinner (which, I think, had more liberal celebrities than correspondents, but such is the life of a rockstar President, I suppose) was witness to the single greatest string of jokes ever told by a President. Obama gently mocked everyone from the newly minted Arlen Specter (you wanna talk about a duct tape economy? This guy was recycled) to Joe Biden (likened to the same untrained intellectual puppy to which people compared Sarah Palin). And, of course, he piled on the self-deprication, saying that Car & Driver had just named him auto executive of the year. "In the second hundred days," he said, "we will design, build, and open a library dedicated to my first hundred days.... I believe that my first hundred days will be so successful that I will be able to complete them in 72 days. And on the 73rd day, I will rest." Good stuff, Mr. President. Real late-night material there.

Then Wanda Sykes stepped up and said she hoped Rush Limbaugh's kidneys failed. And I almost wet myself.

I don't know why the President chose Sykes to speak at this dinner -- maybe because it's the only time in American history when Sykes would ever have the opportunity to follow the President with a routine like hers. Total 100% celiberal hackery, the kind of stuff that gets a candidate in trouble on the campaign trail. But in a room full of liberals, and with a liberal House and Senate, Sykes brought the roof down.

Do Republicans have a comedian? Did George W. Bush have a resident funny-guy? Is it even possible to make small government funny? It doesn't seem so. It seems like a Republican comic would have to be an angry comic -- Lenny Bruce without the drugs, or Richard Pryor without the pyrotechnics. Is Bill Hicks still alive? I guess the closest thing to an angry comic we have left is Lewis Black, and he's a card-carrying member of the formidable Comedy Central Party.

A local comic once told me that he thought it was impossible for a person to be both Republican and funny at the same time. Sarah Palin came close at the RNC, I suppose, but let's face it: we were all just laughing because Tina Fey did Palin so much better than Palin did. I think McCain tried to be funny during the campaign, but I was too busy trying to decide whether he was a geezer or a hermit that I didn't notice.

Point is this: Republicans seem to be very good at being the butt-end of jokes, but we're pretty bad at actually making jokes. Why is this? Well, I suppose it has to do with the people we're making fun of. After all, your average liberal Democrat purports to do good work for the people of this country. They are the Union endorsers, the expanded healthcare providers, the some-for-all distributors of benefits. Who could rail against these people, who are advocates of the lifeblood of the American middle class? Might as well make fun of nuns or nurses.

But why not do as Obama has done and make fun of ourselves? Why can't a Republican step up to a microphone and say, "Can someone tell Rush Limbaugh to shut the hell up already?" I know that Rush has become the rallying point among conservatives, but the man is so despised among his peers that even if he makes a good point -- and he does do that, from time to time -- his villainous image makes him look like a snake oil salesman. Why not just make him irrelevant in anything but substance and (gently) mock him the way that Obama mocks Tim Geitner? Hell, why not? It's all in good fun.

Maybe that gentle mocking is just what the Republican party needs. After all, Comedy Central was a powerful force in the 2008 elections, with both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report drawing the attention of a significant youth demographic, and both liberal-leaning. If comedy rallies youth support, and if the only way Republicans can be funny is to be self-depricating (which I believe is the case), then one method of gaining youth support may be to stop being so damned stuffy and air our laundry a bit.

I mean, hell... We just lost Specter, who has been a Republican since age 4! (Note: Specter says he'd been a Republican since '66, not '34, which means he'd only been a Republican for a paltry 43 years before switching.) If we can't make fun of ourselves for that, then there is officially no hope for any of us ever being funny by any measure, ever.

This plays into a rhetorical method that is somewhat Socratic in approach. If we are to open a discussion about political philosophy with young voters, who are strongly liberal, we must first find a common ground. Why can't the common ground be, "Man, some of these Republicans are just plain dumb"? Why can't we make fun of George W. Bush together? If a voter says something like, "Well, Bush screwed things up so badly, that I just had to vote for the other party," we can say, "Yes, Bush certainly did do some things that were morally and ethically irresponsible. But let's not condemn a whole party based on one bad member."

The conversation continues like this:

Youth Voter: "Yeah, but Republicans believe in Christian ideals... no gay marriage, no abortions, no stem cell research, all that stuff. I disagree with all of that."
Conservative: "Lots of Republicans do have those ideals. But did you know that those aren't conservative ideals? In fact a true conservative would decry government interference in any of these areas. Gay marriage, for example, is a contract between two people, and true conservatives believe that the government should have no place interceding, banning, or preventing the ability of two parties to enter into a legally binding contract?"
Voter: "So true conservatives are pro-gay marriage?"
Cons.: "Absolutely. Same with stem cell research: a true conservative believes that the government has no business regulating industries who do no produce negative externalities -- things like excessive noise or pollution which citizens don't pay for, and which they don't want."
Voter: "Next you'll tell me that conservatives are pro-abortion."
Cons.: "Exactly. What right does the government have to tell a person what modifications she can or cannot make to her own body?"
Voter: "Well then what does the government have a right to do?"
Cons.: "According to conservative thought, the only time a government has the right to intercede into the lives of its citizens is to keep it safe. This means that a citizen has the right to do anything he wishes -- within the scope of the law, of course -- without fear of reprisal from or suppression by his government."
Voter: "Well, I seem to agree with you on all these things. Does that make me a conservative?"
Cons.: "No, not exactly. Conservatives and liberals still disagree on several ideas, most of which have to do with money. But we both have quite a bit in common."
Voter: "I'll say. A lot more than I thought."

And then the intelligent conversation begins. We can discuss things like foreign policy and tax structures and the free market and capitalism, and we can do all this from the basis that the true conservative viewpoint is necessarily socially liberal, and so are many young voters. Making fun of Republicans is easy. It's a simple process of educating those people who only hear the villainizing comments made on television, emphasizing the villainy, and then contrasting it to what the true conservative position is: small government, low taxes, and increased personal liberty for all Americans. And if we have to crack a joke or two along the way, well, good. It's about time we loosened our ties around here.