Laughter on the Left?

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Sun May 24 11:02:12 PDT 1998


Dennis R Redmond wrote:


>But I would argue that Leftist, subversive, genuinely progressive humor
>really is qualitatively different from Rightwing humor.

Lots of lefties have problems with humor, I think, because of the large helping of aggression it often disguises. The right, obviously, has no such problems - like this fellow....


>Buchanan's stupidity is the stupidity of our entire mass-culture

Buchanan isn't stupid, not at all. He's a brilliant polemicist, who can turn a phrase and knows how to make propaganda. If he were so of a piece with our mass culture he might have won a few more primaries.

And is our mass culture "stupid" exactly? Sure it's stupefying, and stupidifying too, but Letterman's writers are mostly Ivy grads, as are the folks at MTV. It takes a certain kind of intelligence to make that stuff.

Doug



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list