Ann Coulter is not funny. And I say this only with the deepest respect for comedy.
The question is Why? Why is Coulter, despite all her insistence and protestations to the contrary, not funny?
Perhaps the biggest problem is that Coulter’s sense humor, like much of her politics, is anachronistic. A lot of what she thinks is funny, and why, is just out of date.
Comedy is a part of culture, which is why jokes are often lost in translation. And since culture is always changing, comedy changes with it. Humor is of the here and now.
But too many of Coulter’s jokes are mired in the past. Not their topicality of course. It’s not like she’s making jokes about what a thick-headed Liberal Woodrow Wilson is. Rather, her ideas about how to be funny are often out of date by a generation or two. Take this example from 2007:
I was going to have a few comments about John Edwards but you have to go into rehab if you use the word faggot.
Maybe you’re offended by that joke, maybe you’re not. But that isn’t the issue. From a purely comedic point of view, the problem is not that she made a fag joke, much less a John Edwards joke. And it’s not unfunny because she specifically said the word “faggot.” Comedically speaking, the problem is that it’s been thirty years since anyone with a decent sense of humor would have laughed at the cultural logic of that joke.
From a technical standpoint, it’s got the twist. The punch line is hidden well enough to work. But the premise is something out of the early 1980s. John Edwards is a fag because . . . he pays too much attention to his hair?
I guess.
Seriously. It’d be funnier if he slipped on a banana peel. This joke is so dated in its cultural interpretation that it reminds me of another joke I heard thirty years ago when I was in junior high school.
A white guy and a Puerto Rican guy jump off the Empire State Building. Who lands first? The white guy, because the Puerto Rican guy stopped on the way down to do some graffiti.
Get it? Puerto Ricans can’t pass up the chance to do graffiti, even as a horrible death is fast approaching. And men with expensive haircuts suck cock.
Too often, listening to Coulter be “funny” is like watching an old episode of Welcome Back Kotter. Man, that’s not funny. Like, painfully bad. And not because of the topic; like politics, generational friction and stymied authority are timeless sources of comedy. Rather, Kotter sucks now because of the way the show joked about those topics. It’s so 1976.
American culture has changed in substantial ways since the days when Welcome Back Kotter was the number one TV show in America. Everything from music, fashion, and food to gender and race relations are different, and comedy is part of that culture. That’s why in 2013 few people still think Kotter is funny. So its stars have moved on. John Travolta belongs to a cult and Gabe Kaplan’s a degenerate poker player, god bless him.
Yet here’s Coulter making jokes about John Edwards’ supposedly gay hair. It’s on a par with Kaplan’s Mr. Kotter saying “Up your nose with a rubber hose,” or the novelty of his student Juan Epstien, a character who’s half-Jewish and half-Puerto Rican. Can you imagine that? It’s so crazy!
So the first problem with Coulter’s sense of humor is that she’s not funny in very fundamental and even technical ways. Her idea of comedy is dated and predictable. Her punch lines often hit their target from the wrong angle and in ways that no longer make comedic sense in modern America, while her typical setup is usually nothing more than an unironic political diatribe.
That’s why she’s often better with one-liners, like telling a four year old girl “Democrats want to take away your Christmas presents.” That’s chuckle-worthy.
But for the most part, her jokes sound like they spilled out of a time capsule that was buried by an elementary school in the 1970s and recently dug up Andrew Dice Clay and Rush Limbaugh.
Of course, some people do think Ann Coulter’s funny. Thousands of them. But I’ve never met a single one who doesn’t also lionize her politics. And that’s not a good sign.
There are plenty of Conservatives who think John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and other overtly liberal comedians are funny. But I’ve never met anyone who thinks Coulter is genuinely, consistently funny, who wasn’t also in lockstep with her politics.
And that brings us to the second major problem with Ann Coulter’s sense of humor.
Her comedic efforts are usually not grounded in comedy. They’re grounded in ideology. And as with any artistic endeavor, that’s potentially very problematic.
Great art is great, first and foremost, because it’s brilliant artistry. Whatever message it conveys might be shallow or profound. But even if it’s the latter, that merely adds to artistic greatness, it doesn’t define it.
Comedy is the same way. Great humor is great, first and foremost, because it’s funny. If it’s also smart, insightful, or brilliant satire, all the better. But funny first, message second.
However, with Coulter it seems that every joke has to be in tune with her political dogma. And this is particularly ironic in light of her vociferous anti-communism. It turns out that Coulter’s approach to comedy is reminiscent of the heavy-handed Soviet artistic movement of Socialist Realism.
The Bolsheviks declared that art for art’s sake was decadent, and so the totalitarian Soviet regime mandated that all art reflect the glory of the Revolution. Ergo all those paintings of exalted leaders and happy, healthy, productive workers. Art had to double as political propaganda.
This of course was a great detriment to Russian arts, which became an easy target for mockery during the Cold War. That’s why, for example, the CIA actually funded the exportation of American art and jazz around the world. It was a way to highlight how much cooler and better Americans were than those squares over in Russia.
That’s right. America’s staunchest cold warriors underwrote Louis Armstrong and Jackson Pollock.
But Coulter’s not Satchmo or Pollock in this analogy. Rather, she’s sketching a radiant portrait of Lenin. She’s blowing a piccolo in the marching band while all those tanks and goose-stepping soldiers parade by a pavilion full of Soviet dignitaries. Coulter cracks wise like the right wing version of a Stalinist comic desperately trying to make her rigid political dogma seem funny, instead of saying funny things about politics. Kind of like Yakov Smirnoff if he’d never left the Soviet Union.
Once you understand Coulter’s backwards approach to humor, you also begin to understand why her racier material, pun intended, typically fails so miserably as comedy. Instead of doing provocative comedy about politics, she’s a political provocateur who’s trying to be funny along the way, and frequently missing the mark with her dated and dogmatic approach.
Instead of saying and writing funny things that play with or mock bigotry, Coulter tries to frame her bigotry as humor. Instead of exposing hypocrisy, she’s just didactic and ideological. And instead of putting us off-balance with a good setup, she typically just plows ahead with dogma.
She’s putting the cart before the horse and so we usually see her punch lines coming from a mile away. Take this example from a couple of weeks ago:
Maybe if they had to work, immigrants wouldn’t have as much time to build bombs.
Putting aside politics, the problem with this joke can be best summed up as, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it.” It’s just a lazy, lazy fuckin’ joke. It smells like something a third grader would tell, and you pretend to laugh so as not to hurt an eight year old’s feelings. Then you think to yourself: Wow, third graders are still telling that joke.
And again, from a purely comedic point of view, the problem with that joke is not the awful bigotry it displays. I love me some fucked up, nasty ass comedy IF it’s funny. Bring on the racial and sexual humor from Richard Pryor, Chris Rock, and Dave Chapelle to Joan Rivers, Doug Stanhope, Lisa Lampanelli, and Louis CK to name just a few. They’re all smart, funny people who can run a faggotniggerjewcunt blue streak with the best of them. Maybe it’s brilliant social commentary. Maybe it’s a form of gallows humor. Maybe there’s not much of a message at all, and it’s just a funny person being really goddamn funny.
But Ann Coulter’s not that funny, and her comedic efforts usually involve shoe-horning the jokes into her rigid political dogma. So when she takes a stab at racial humor, it typically comes off as angry instead of funny, didactic instead of clever, and racist instead of smart. Despite her best efforts, she seems incapable of using humor to make us question and think about our own ideas on race and gender; instead, she just reminds us that hers are so goddamn awful. Which is why, for the most part, only people with similar political views find her funny.
So if Ann Coulter is not funny then what is she?
Mostly she’s just a provocateur. That’s why if you search the phrase “Ann Coulter funny quotes,” you won’t actually come across much comedy. Instead, you’re more apt to find a list of her political statements, which range from the banal to the outrageous, and which won’t be confused with actual comedy any time soon.
Ann Coulter is the grasping class clown who doesn’t know how to make most of the other kids laugh. So instead, she panders to her small crowd of loyal friends, getting the attention she craves by eating her boogers and laughing milk out of her nose. But the truth is plain.
Ann Coulter is not funny.
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A longer, but not funnier version of this article originally appeared at 3 Quarks Daily.