Column and voice-over by Lee Camp, a human
The liberal anti-Trump comedy that fills our airwaves and attacks our brainwaves actually serves to further, not fight, the imperial fascist agenda.
That’s essentially Chris Hedges’ thesis in his recent column, and I agree. As one of the few anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, anti-corporate, pro-peace comedians in America, I feel like I have something unique to add to the conversation. Of course, it’s exactly these characteristics of my comedy that have forced me to the corners of the internet as arguably the most censored comedian in America.
There are two forms of satire. That of the educated elites, which dominates the commercial media, ridicules the foibles and pretensions of Trump and his hapless followers. This satire does not attack corporations or the war industry. It ignores the decay and rot within our political institutions, including the Democratic Party, which created Trump. It pretends we live in a democracy.
This brand of satire — the kind we see on every late-night show, the Daily Show, etc. — rarely, if ever, gets to the heart of the issues. As Hedges makes clear, it mainly focuses on the foibles, the surface-level flaws, of the leaders, rather than the system that puts those sociopaths in power. Underneath almost every joke (funny or not) is the same message: The leaders suck, but the system is sound, stable, sacrosanct. For example, one will almost never even hear the word “capitalism” on the mainstream comedy shows, much less a solid criticism of capitalism.
The brand of comedy I’ve traded in for 25 years stands in stark contrast. Underneath most of my humor is the message: The leaders suck because the system rewards sociopathy, greed, and corruption. A comedian who practices the mainstream form of political comedy can make millions and appear on every TV show and major podcast. A comedian who does the latter will see their platforms banned and suppressed.
Hedges points to Gramsci’s alternative to our modern corporate-supported satire:
Antonio Gramsci warned that elitist satire is counterproductive. He called for a “passionate sarcasm,” which targets the machinery of power. Satire, he wrote, must excoriate the dominant myths and ideologies which buttress capitalism and fascism. It must expose not only the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of fascism, but acknowledge the legitimate grievances of those under its spell.
Colbert, Kimmel, Fallon, Meyers, Maher, SNL, the Daily Show, and the few stand-up comics with million-dollar comedy specials who occasionally address America’s socioeconomic or geopolitical realities — none of them tear apart the core “myths and ideologies” that allow our sociopathic system to operate. The comedians I looked up to as a young comic and continue to learn from today (even though they’re gone) did just that. George Carlin, Bill Hicks, Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory, etc.
You’ll notice something about the career trajectory of each of those comics. When they were doing more “polite,” “corporate-friendly” comedy, they achieved their greatest success and fame. When they shifted (or, I would say, evolved) to angle their satirical scalpel at America’s hallowed institutions, they were either censored, attacked or blacklisted. After his evolution, Carlin was far less welcome on late-night shows and in fact was fired from many contracts. Hicks’ final Letterman appearance was censored, and he likely would’ve been banned from the show except he died before that could become clear. Gregory was blacklisted and investigated by the FBI at the request of J. Edgar Hoover. (He also believed his friend and driver was killed in a hit that was actually aimed at him.) Lenny Bruce was arrested and harassed many times by law enforcement and essentially driven to his death (by drug overdose) due to the stress of having no way to pay his legal bills and maintain a comedy career.
I clearly should consider myself lucky to have only had my TV show canceled by US sanctions, my YouTube channel banned, my TikTok banned, and my Spotify podcast banned.
Honestly, most censorship against anti-corporate comedy takes the form of a quiet, backroom shadow-banning. For example, the only reason we know about Bill Hicks’ Letterman appearance censorship is that Hicks had already filmed the segment before it was blacked out. In most cases, late-night show bookers tell the comics to cut out the offending material long before it’s ever filmed. As an anti-capitalist anti-imperialist comedian, I’ve never been welcome on the prime late-night shows to begin with. They didn’t need to ban me because they would never allow my type near their stage.
As Hedges points out:
Elitist satire — whether on “Saturday Night Live” or other late-night shows — punches down. It seduces liberals into believing that the thugs and grifters who have taken power are too stupid and too inept to last.
I would only add that in this way, those TV shows lead liberal Americans to believe all will be right with the United States once the offending characters are removed or term-limited. Of course, this is laughable. Of the roughly 6 million innocent people killed by America’s Global War on Terror, as many were murdered during the Obama presidency as the Bush presidency. The fascist dumpster fire of America’s police state was nearly as strong and unhinged under Biden as under Trump. Famously, Biden helped craft and push through the 1994 crime bill that destroyed the lives of millions of Americans and made the US the world’s largest prison state. We still proudly hold that title.
[Elitist satire] reduces the catastrophe to the clown show around Trump: the sycophantic cabinet secretaries, ICE Barbie or Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s bizarre war on medical science. It does not address our failed democratic institutions — the academy, elections, courts, Congress, or the media. It deflects attention from the billionaires and corporations… It does not address the murderous war industry or the domestic security apparatus that makes us the most watched, monitored, spied upon, tracked and photographed population in human history.
Luckily, we now live in a time when many of the gatekeepers can’t keep the gates closed. (Or perhaps they’ve lost the gates? Whatever, point is—no more gates.) We can all post comedy that does indeed attack the dominant myths and ideologies that defend our dystopian death spiral. We can mock the war machine. We can blast the cruelty of capitalism. We can laugh at the belief that the US is a democracy and is not an oligarchy or kleptocracy.
It is precisely fear of this freedom that has forced the ruling elite to buy, degrade, and censor social media so much in the past few years. Their anxiety about what Gramsci termed “passionate sarcasm” has driven them to try to cover it up and shut it down.
Ironically, such a response shows the power of comedy that is of, by and for the people.
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