[Potentially declining into incoherence…?]

keyholez:

fiatluxemburg:

Jason Linkins at HuffPo quotes this study in an post titled “Colbert Study: Conservatives Don’t Know He’s Joking”. That’s not what the article says. It says that (some) conservatives don’t think he’s joking—that they think he is pretending to be joking.

Which is really a much more interesting and confusing thing. Why would anyone pretend to be joking?

Is this really that crazy an opinion? When Colbert says, like, Europeans are sissy homos, or poor people are stupid, or whatever it is that he actually says, isn’t part of the fun for the audience secretly but obviously supposed to be that they both get to laugh at the ugly crudeness of the opinion but also to enjoy hearing it said out loud, because of course deep down everyone really knows that Europeans are sissy homos and poor people are stupid?

[…]Colbert pretends to be against aggressive, reptilian “conservatism” but is actually sort of about how it’s awesome to be aggressive and reptilian. (emphasis added)

Potentially. But what about Wonkette!? A few headlines of late:

• Is Obama’s Hair Is GRAYING Like A QUEER COMMUNIST?
• Is Earth Day An Ancient Egyptian Pagan Plot To Destroy Economy For Worship Of Earth Overlord ‘Gaia’?
• Communist Musical Band Wins Epic Oklahoma Battle Over ‘Official State Rock Song’
• Oh Just FYI: Your American Recession Dollars Are Going Towards Enabling Obama’s Fascist Agricultural Hobbies
• Politico’s SCOOP Reveals Journalists Talk To Each Other, With Covert Digital Marxist iGroupthink Thing

There’s a lot that’s similar. Is Wonkette also about secretly enjoying calling Obama a gay terrorist and/or space monster? Here’s something I said about that a while ago:

Again, Wonkette puts it well: “It’ll take a pair of moral reformer Mavericks to clean up the otherwise healthy rich person’s money street.” I think part of the reason they’ve become good lately is that reality started to conform to their absurdist style of description. Or more exactly, they established a voice that is well suited to take outlandish situations and articulate them with an inappropriate amount of clarity. The above is an example. A lot of times they just say facts very lucidly and it functions effectively as political black humor.

I don’t think I expressed myself very well there. The ability to articulate situations clearly and efficiently comes from adopting exaggerated caricatures of what some people seem to think as a sort of shorthand. Needlessly capitalizing certain phrases is a sort of flag for this tactic (see here for an endogenous example). Capitalizing entire words is too, but particularly evokes the sort of shrill wingnut attitude they’re often aping.

But they’re not just doing it to the right. The last headline makes fun both of Politico and of the conspiracy theorist reaction to the story. This is a rather interesting point of affinity between Colbert and Wonkette. Groupuscule once caught Newell stepping out from behind the curtain or whatever:

A major problem with current “political analysis” is that there’s no need to analyze something that’s obvious to everyone. American national politics is a vulgar, transparent, and stupid drama. You can read a few news wires regularly and understand every major politician’s short- and long-term intentions. This is why most of our Wonkette posts are composed of bad/filthy jokes, because it’s the only way to write about this shit secondhand without coming off as utterly patronizing to you, the reader. It would be insulting to you for us to legitimize the horror that is American politics under the guise of “expert analysis” with such backwash as, “From experience, we can deduce that Obama picked someone with popular evangelical views so as to appeal to evangelicals, which would be symbolic of unity.”

You really don’t have to be smart, at all, to understand this within five seconds of hearing the original news. It is obvious. Most of this day-to-day maneuvering is obvious. Sometimes you can even write the “analysis” before hearing the political news, because the political news will be primitive, because national politicians assume you are extremely fucking stupid. Calling the selection of Rick Warren an example of “Obama’s deft manipulation of the politics of symbolism” is a catastrophe of American journalism.

Everyone hates the media! But Wonkette makes some exceptions. They’ve traditionally referred to such as Rachel Maddow and Nate Silver as “your secret (girl)(boy)friend.” What they seem to react negatively to is the Politico/HuffPo/cable news universe of manufactured political analysis. They’re not huge fans of Drudge or Fox either of course, but it’s hard to imagine Sara K. fitting in as a DailyKos diarist or something.

And Newell sort of admits that they are pretending to be joking: “our Wonkette posts are composed of bad/filthy jokes, because it’s the only way to write about this shit secondhand without coming off as utterly patronizing.” There’s something similar going on with Colbert contra, say, The Daily Show. Jon Stewart’s wide-eyed faux-fluster at the terribleness of it all seems sort of childish. Colbert’s radical appropriation of the Bill O’Reilly mode is (or probably was) a bit more interesting. Not least because, as Keyholez points out, it’s sort of fun (transgressive) to say or hear or laugh at all those naughty conservative things he says.

I think in both cases it has something to do with not quite lining up with what the “netroots” or whatever have planned. Wonkette and Colbert are both “against” the entire weird political media terrain on which the utterly unsubtle forces of Good and Evil do battle. It’s impossible to make fun of O’Reilly without also making fun of Olbermann in a certain way; it’s impossible to call Obama a communist (the way Wonkette does at least) without making fun both of the crazies that think he is one as well as his earstwhile defenders that are so stuck in the existing discussion that they can’t really respond.

The fact that The Huffington Post article on the Colbert study reported it unequivocally as “the conservatives don’t realize we are laughing at them” is sort of (the extent of) my point. The narrow party line attitude it reflects is the subject of ridicule by both Wonkette and Colbert. That attitude, which is manifest in basically every political camp, is the consistent target of critique. I think this is why Wonkette has such an interest in the Paultards. Their conspiracy theorist style political attitudes are the purest reflection of typical contemporary politics: the left and the right might be dyadically persecuting each other but the Paultards are contending against everyone! I’ll let the fact that they are the only political faction with a zepplin speak for itself.

[SHOCKING SIDE NOTE: The title of that post I randomly Googled for the above link is “Paultard Blimp To Fly, Teabag Boston” but it’s from December 2007!]

The “pretend to be joking” idea about Colbert probably is mostly about the tendency to attribute sympathetic beliefs to people you like (“he is funny, we must agree about taxes!”), which raises a question about whether the humor from satire comes before or after any imlicit substantive argument. But Colbert and Wonkette both do in fact feign speaking bits and pieces of the political language. If you introduced either to someone totally unfamiliar with them and they asked “is this a joke? are they being serious?”, there wouldn’t really be a clear answer.

Unless you are The Huffington Post, where there is always a clear answer about political orientation.