Right Funny?

For various reasons too tedious to go into here, I recently had the misfortune to find myself looking at a self-styled 'satire' site which boasted of being a flag-bearer for 'conservative satire.' Now, leaving aside the fact that the words 'conservative' and 'satire' are surely mutually exclusive, this woe begotten site just served to underline the fact that right-wingers just don't 'get' satire. Instead of satirising their liberal targets, they just spew out a stream of bile and invective about them. There's no wit about it, no cleverness, no subtlety, no carefully constructed comic conceits. Just bile. They also don't seem to be able to discern between abuse and satire, or to be able to understand that offensiveness is not, in itself, satirical. Most depressingly, there were no 'ideas' whatsoever in this particular site's content, just rehashing of the same tired old right-wing conspiracy theories and scare stories, all served up quite uncritically.

Like many of these supposed 'conservative satire' sites, rather than producing satire from a conservative perspective, (which is actually what most of the 'establishment satire' in the UK does), it simply trots out party political propaganda. Their unwillingness to subject their own 'side' to any kind of satirical scrutiny makes them so relentlessly one-sided that they're virtually unreadable. Besides, if you are describing yourself as a 'conservative' then the odds are that you favour the status quo, which is surely antithesis to a true satirist, who are usually iconoclasts, always suspicious of vested interests and the established order. But that's the the funny thing: the right always likes to portray itself as the underdog on the rare occasions it finds itself out of power. Which, of course, is a fundamentally dishonest position. As I've noted before, satire should be in the service of the powerless and take the empowered as its primary target. Which is something the right can never do. Which, in turn, is why their attempts at satire are so bloody awful.