That's Not Funny - How the Right Makes Comedy Work for Them

A 2022-Best Comedy Book,-VultureA rousing call for liberals and progressives to pay attention to the emergence of right-wing comedy and the political power of humor. "Why do conservatives hate comedy? Why is there no right-wing Jon Stewart?" These sorts of questions launch a million tweets, a thousand op-eds, and more than a few scholarly analyses. That's Not Funny argues that it is both an intellectual and politically strategic mistake to assume that comedy has a liberal bias. Matt Sienkiewicz and Nick Marx take readers--particularly self-described liberals--on a tour of contemporary conservative comedy and the "right-wing comedy complex." -In That's Not Funny, "complex" takes on an important double meaning. On the one hand, liberals have developed a social-psychological complex-it feels difficult, even dangerous, to acknowledge that their political opposition can produce comedy. At the same time, the right has been slowly building up a comedy-industrial complex, utilizing the humorou