I woke up Saturday morning and, before making breakfast (everyone was still sleeping), flipped on the TV to have something on in the background I could ignore while cooking. I settled on old episodes of "Love Boat" for the kitsch factor. Was it funny? Yes, but not in the way it was meant to be in whatever year the episode I watched was made, because humor has evolved, it has changed. Now, thanks to the Woke Olympics that Democrats have been playing, it’s dead. But it doesn’t have to be.
I chose "Love Boat" for a couple of reasons. First, it’s the closest we’ve come to time travel. Every once in a while, I like to flip on something very dated – old episodes of "Three’s Company" would be considered a hate crime today, with all the gay jokes. It’s still funny, just for different reasons than I imagine it was when it first aired.
Second, when we were first dating, my wife got a job in radio working with Fred Grandy, Burl “Gopher” Smith on the show. He’s a nice man, a former member of Congress, and she’d never seen the show when she started, so I bought a DVD set to show her. Good times.
Surprisingly, there is a lot of humor, even if it’s not the way it was intended at the time. I don’t know when the last time you saw an episode of "Love Boat," but a lot of the humor would be considered sexual harassment or assault now. Doc Bricker, Gopher and Isaac are kinda just this side of Harvey Weinstein, honestly. They grab, grope, proposition, swap, compete and are generally “sex fiends,” as declared in the episode I watched Saturday. Today, that would get you run out of Hollywood if you wrote a script with these characters that portrayed them as anything short of Hitler. But they were comic relief at the time and funny to watch now because the times have changed.
Comedy evolved, as it always has, and thank God for that. Without that evolution, we would never have had shows like "Seinfeld," which do hold up—at least for now.
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We need comedy—Lord knows we need to laugh. But Stephen Colbert, along with the other late-night interview show hosts (I can’t call them comedy shows; they aren’t funny), aborted funny as soon as they were anointed the fathers of it.
I have to confess that I’ve never really watched Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, or Jimmy Fallon. I never made a point of watching Jay Leno or David Letterman either, though I would sort of by default sometimes.
I never really watched "The Daily Show" or Colbert’s Comedy Central show, though I turned down being interviewed for one of them twice since they edited the hell out of conservatives, and I never really wanted to be a part of anything that holds my beliefs in contempt.
I do know people who thought the “character” Colbert played was funny, but the bits I saw of his show then never struck me as a character; it just seemed like a typical leftist. Since Comedy Central has a low bar – The Daily Show, even when it was all over magazine covers and treated like it was “important,” routinely lost in the ratings to reruns of "Family Guy" on the Cartoon Network, and Colbert was worse – Colbert failed up, landing the big network show.
It's hard to not be funny about current event, but liberals can’t be funny. You can’t be funny when you’re angry all the time or when you live in fear of offending people. Comedy is the great equalizer – making fun of everyone is the only way to make fun of anyone or anything. If you place limits on who you can make jokes about or what subjects are allowed to be joked about, you lose the plot. You will not be funny.
That’s how Colbert lived his show, and why he lost it.
If you only make jokes in one direction, you aren’t making jokes, you’re being an ass. Colbert moved away from the setup, punchline model of monologuing and replaced it with angry grip/attack and applause line. Aside from the hate-filled tone, Colbert’s show could easily have been a years-long Democratic National Convention. Considering how unpopular those are, you can see why he didn’t have an audience.
He, of course, didn’t care. Liberal politics became his life, and it consumed him. I don’t care; miserable people like him deserve what they put out in the world. But the audience deserves to laugh; we deserve comedy.
It never really went away; it was just bullied and shoved into the dark. I suspect it will be back as “normal” makes a triumphant and much-needed return.
Stephen Colbert tried to kill comedy but only ended up being a suicide bomber who accidentally detonated himself while putting the vest on. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer, more deserving guy.
Derek Hunter is the host of the Derek Hunter Show on WMAL in Washington, DC, and has a free daily podcast (subscribe!) and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses, and host of the weekly “Week in F*cking Review” podcast where the news is spoken about the way it deserves to be. Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter.
