Where does a joke end? The last decision an artist makes is deciding when a piece is finished, when one more brushstroke might ruin the painting. When it comes to the freedom of expression, the right wing in America has dropped the curtain. The right’s podcasters, TV stars, agency heads, and presidents have decided that the joke is over.
Jimmy Kimmel was ripped off the air this week because a few sensitive people can’t take a joke [ed. note: or are pretending they can’t] and a series of companies are trying to make a profit. The hypocrisy and shortsightedness of this shouldn’t be a shock. Those profiting from art have rarely been willing to compromise cash for values. Now though, there’s little safe haven in independent art either, where podcasting and comedy have welcomed truly noxious voices that are eager to remake themselves as Wormtongues in the halls of power.
To those who have been aghast at the the genocide in Palestine and have watched for years as protesters are snatched off the streets and deported, the hope that the powerful might find moral courage has long fallen away. But for many, Jimmy Kimmel’s cancellation is ringing fascism alarm bells for the first time, and bringing into focus just how eagerly pliable many Americans are.
Kimmel was canceled at the end of a Rube Goldberg machine that started with a podcast appearance. Free speech hypocrite and Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr appeared on a right wing podcast on Wednesday, and was mad at one of Kimmel’s late night jokes that mentioned dead podcaster Charlie Kirk. Carr called the joke “the sickest conduct possible” and suggested that the FCC could revoke ABC’s affiliate licenses in retaliation, forcing Disney to punish Kimmel. Nexstar, an affiliate group that owns 197 TV stations across the US, heard the call and threatened to stop airing Kimmel, which tipped the hand of ABC’s leadership at Disney.
Nexstar is trying to merge with Tegna, another large media company, a deal which will need federal approval. And if you’re surprised Disney isn’t doing the right thing, I have a magic castle to sell you.
No matter what you’re fleeing, a right wing heel turn will welcome you in and give you access to a lot of money.
It doesn’t matter to any of these people that the joke wasn’t made at the expense of Kirk, but was instead about how the Trump administration is using his death as an excuse to shut down criticism. The content of the joke wouldn’t stop the state reprisals that were already in the works. Days earlier, the Vice President had taken over Kirk’s podcast to announce their planned crackdown on the left, a holy war in the name of a recent martyr, taking advantage of our collective lack of reading comprehension.
So many podcasts. And suddenly they’re powerful, influential enough to take down a late night network show and to announce a major national program of retaliation. Comedy podcasts, especially those typified by the Austin stand-up scene, have become a haven for canceled creeps and the fascist-curious, and a big part of the culture of anti-woke, reactionary guys. These edgy podcasts claim that it doesn’t matter what you say, as long as it’s funny, and built a parallel meritocracy of the aggrieved around this worldview, where you’re judged on your ability to cross certain lines and toe others. It’s a stable ecosystem with a lot of money, which is exceedingly rare in creative fields.
In practice this approach only cheapens the form. You don’t have to believe what you’re saying, as long as it gets the right reaction. It sets up a perverse loop where the content of jokes or takes no longer matters, not really. People who don’t care about saying horrible things, things they don’t believe in, can get laughs and get paid. But people who do care about horrible things and want to see them happen in the world, can voice their beliefs out loud, and be rewarded with laughter and applause. A world where nothing and everything is a joke.
Naturally cancellation doesn’t penetrate this bubble as you might expect, but insofar as the cries of cancel culture were only ever the privileged fearing their own downward mobility, it’s not that surprising. No matter what you’re fleeing, a right wing heel turn will welcome you in and give you access to a lot of money and the most powerful people in the world.
This world has become so powerful that it’s escaped containment, riding alongside Trump’s blitzkrieg and lashing out at the rest of us. Carefully avoiding stepping on their toes doesn’t seem to help. Look at Jimmy Fallon, who steered clear of the wrong jokes and tousled the right hair, and is still catching all-caps strays on Truth Social. I wonder if this is the moment when the comedian, who went on yet another podcast to blame an online “gang-mentality’” for his choice to be “never too hard on anyone,” will finally see that there’s no middle way out of this bind.
If all of your fantasies are imagined confrontations, whether in roast battles, or campus debates, or first-person shooters, you are not so secretly rehearsing for the chance to fight and punish your enemies.
We’re the only ones who can save ourselves. I’m inspired by the music world’s antifascism, where the only option was mutual aid and direct action. Did the cops care that white power bands were playing a bar show for a couple dozen people? Of course not, so it was up to the punks to chase them off. Protect your friends and your spaces, or lose them.
Large parts of the comedy world didn’t learn this lesson—I’ve written before about how comedy failed us. There are some who have been ringing the alarm. Seth Simons has been relentlessly documenting comedy’s right wing for years. And Kliph Nesteroff’s 2024 book Outrageous on the culture wars is excellent too. I returned this morning to the section on the German cabaret artist Werner Finck and his Nazi foe Joseph Goebbels, who sneered that “we do not permit ourselves to be ridiculed” and “Comedians have no right to be jocular about such things as the Nazi four-year economic plan or Adolf Hitler’s demand for colonies because they are too important and require too much careful thinking on the part of big minds.”
Marc Maron has been great these days too, calling out fash-adjacent comics and even taking some of the blame for the rise of Rogan and his ilk. This is the sort of solidarity we need right now, when our neighbors are being dragged out of the country, our trans friends are being vilified for everything, and our Kimmels are getting booted off the air. I’m glad to see unions stepping up today: The American Federation of Musicians, SAG-AFTRA, and the WGA spoke out, calling this “state censorship” and decrying the “abuse of governmental power” and “acts of corporate cowardice.”
How does the joke go on? How do you satirize a moment like this? I was reminded today of a short Connor O’Malley made seven years ago called “Outlet Mall Special Ops,” about a guy defending a strip mall from ISIS because he saw the Benghazi movie too many times. This character is on our feeds every day now, appearing as ICE goons cosplaying as tactical bad boys, or people standing outside screaming with 8.5”x11” printouts, or anyone else breathless with flailing rage and holes bored in their psyches from Facebook posts.
There’s a line in O’Malley’s “Outlet Mall Special Ops” where his character says, “I do hope there is an attack though, if I’m being honest. I mean I don’t want to fucking come down here for nothing.” If all of your fantasies are imagined confrontations, whether in roast battles, or campus debates, or first-person shooters, you are not so secretly rehearsing for the chance to fight and punish your enemies. Trump and his hogmen have built a permission structure of anger that’s allowed our worst podcasters to be at the center of the action, where they’ve always imagined themselves to be.
The world is being ravaged by these cosplayers. Podcasters on the right (and the reactionary center) normalize fascism by cosplaying at concerned free speech warriors. Israel pummels Gaza by cosplaying at self defense. ICE kicks in doors and disappears our neighbors by cosplaying at Marvel cartoons. But for the rest of us, it’s no longer a LARP, and the joke is getting less and less funny every day.
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