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I would have recognized the opportunity for a world-class joke, but would never allow myself to be funny at the cost of making somebody else feel like something the cat drug in.
-- Kurt Vonnegut. Timequake p.141 (1997)
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Ever wonder why conservative comedy is so unfunny? The point of satire is to comfort the afflicted by afflicting the comfortable... whereas the point of conservatism is the exact opposite. Truth is, ridiculing the non-privileged isn't particularly funny -- it's just mean. The result? There's virtually no good conservative comedy.
-- Garry Trudeau. Doonesbury (Aug 3, 2014)
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Is the very notion of a conservative comedian an oxymoron, given that comedy by definition is often the revenge of underdogs against the privileged? If the powerful pick on the less powerful, or worse, the powerless, are the jokes doomed to come off as bratty, if not just plain mean?
-- Frank Rich. "Can Conservatives Be Funny?" New York Magazine. (May 20, 2014) http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/conservative-comedians-2014-5/
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Satire, to do its moral work, must itself be more or less moral. And the law is this: Broadly speaking, if it strikes upward, outward or inward, it's satire, if it strikes downward, it's bullying.

Power cannot satirize: It has too much to lose. When it comes to satire, power is mute.

-- James Parker. "Is Legitimate Satire Necessarily Directed at the Powerful?" New York Times Book Review (Nov 3, 2015)
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Irony and satire are favoured devices of this alt-right discourse which has animated a toxic online counterculture and increasingly infiltrated more mainstream media and political communications. Meme culture has been central to this....

Their anonymity and potential to go viral has allowed them to become engines of racism, xenophobia and misogyny.

Key to this deployment is that memes blur the boundaries between whether something is intended as satire or not. They offer an ironic veil for abuse - if challenged, the creator can just say "lol" or "it's just a joke".
-- Liam Kennedy, Professor of American Studies, University College Dublin. How Trump's America changed political satire--for both liberals and conservatives. The Conversation (September 4, 2020).
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