EdgeBored

I look at media, culture, politics and tech. I like to compare today’s media landscape with that of the past because time is cyclical and the past is prologue.

The Dark Knight was regarded as the greatest comic book film ever upon release. Warner Brothers, like any other film studio, couldn’t resist running a good thing into the ground. Besides squeezing out one more Christopher Nolan Batman film, they transformed all the DC superheroes into brooding, gritty versions of themselves, most infamously Superman. There was a zealous cult that worshiped at the new grimdark altar, but audiences preferred the quippy Marvel films. When the DC cinematic universe got rebooted last year with the new James Gunn Superman film, there was more humor, but also an earnestness and warmth that the Marvel films did not have. The dark age was over.

Meanwhile, it seems like everyone on the Internet this past decade was given notes by a hack director to emulate the Joker.

A facile understanding for the popularity of what Bob Odenkirk calls “manosphere comedy” (primarily comics from the Joe Rogan podcast universe including Theo Von, Bert Kreischer, Shane Gillis and Tony Hinchcliffe) is that it was a reaction to wokeness. Why wasn’t all of it more popular in 2019 then? Was America less woke then? The #resistance dominated Hollywood from 2017 to 2020, but Trump was also president, so any trolling the jokers did was diminished. Trump had the monopoly on crude, crass, cruel comedy. All other comedians of all genres were forced to focus at least some of their act on him. To ignore him was akin to ignoring a drunk heckler who won’t shut up; it could be done, but doing so made you an amateur comedian.

The Biden years had the reverse effect. Just like the Joker needs Batman, the podcast bros needed a powerful enemy and they got one in President Joe Biden (as Audrey Horne says here, Biden even made a great foil for the Dimes Square crowd). Neither Trump nor Biden directly involved themselves with these comics before 2024. The opposing force was the media bubble around Biden that attempted to shield any criticism of him before his disastrous debate performance in June 2024. I go more in depth here about how the media deflected all criticisms, but this excerpt should help elucidate this point:

Then the President fell off his bike. What would have been late night fodder for years if Trump or Bush did it was hardly a blip on the mainstream media’s radar. Conservatives latched on as expected, but so did the growing number of online leftists, upset not only with how Bernie Sanders got railroaded again in 2020, but with the unfair labor conditions of COVID (essential workers potentially risking their health to work onsite, with no boost in health benefits or wages), as well as with the President’s hawkish support of Ukraine. When the press gave more favorable coverage than expected to Dimes Square, you can’t help but wonder if it was their indirect, perhaps unconscious way of platforming voices that were critical of Biden.