{"id":3296,"date":"2016-10-18T08:44:01","date_gmt":"2016-10-18T06:44:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=3296"},"modified":"2016-10-18T08:48:49","modified_gmt":"2016-10-18T06:48:49","slug":"not-funny","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/3296\/","title":{"rendered":"Not Funny"},"content":{"rendered":"

This<\/a> is a never ending problem, isn’t it?<\/p>\n

\n

Around 200 people walked out of Amy Schumer\u2018s show in Tampa, Florida, on Sunday when she called Donald Trump a \u201corange, sexual-assaulting, fake-college-starting monster,\u201d according to the Tampa Bay Times.<\/p>\n

The paper claimed Schumer was met with loud booing about halfway through the show when her jokes\u00a0switched from raunchy topics to more topical matters, including gun control and the upcoming presidential election.<\/p>\n

\n<\/blockquote>\n

Artists, actors, writers, comedians – and I use those terms charitably – of a left-wing bent cannot resist the temptation to use their popularity as a platform to sound off on politics. \u00a0The result is usually tedious in the extreme. \u00a0Take this by way of example:<\/p>\n

\n

During her show, she asked a Trump supporter to join her up on stage so he could explain why he was voting for the GOP candidate. The audience member responded that he was voting for Trump mainly because he didn\u2019t trust his opponent, Hillary Clinton.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

People\u00a0paid money to go to a comedy show and found\u00a0themselves\u00a0in a political Q&A session. \u00a0No wonder there was booing.<\/p>\n

This comes from living in a bubble. \u00a0I am sure Schumer’s hilarious jokes about Trump go down a storm among some audiences, i.e. those who share her politics to the letter. \u00a0They then take their show to the wider world and find nobody is laughing. \u00a0I remember when Chris Rock first burst onto the scene with Bring the Pain<\/em>, which was fresh, pithy, and hilariously funny mainly because he was providing an insight into black American culture that had never been described in such terms before. \u00a0Fast forward a few years and he’s on stage saying “Barack Obama! \u00a0Barack Obama!” and his audience is going wild. \u00a0This isn’t comedy it’s politics, and it only works if your audience shares your political view.<\/p>\n

Not that you can’t make money out of it. \u00a0John Oliver seems to do extremely well out of telling sophisticated, educated Europeans and Democrat-voting Americans how thick Americans are. \u00a0But he’s preaching to the converted: they’re not laughing because he’s funny, they’re laughing because he is telling them what they want to hear and allows them to feel smugly superior. \u00a0A decent joke shouldn’t depend on who you want to win an election.<\/p>\n

I don’t know if right-wing comedians do the same. \u00a0I expect they do, but they don’t get allotted the same airtime on the likes of the BBC and regular columns in newspapers. \u00a0I also expect right-wing comedians would be hounded out of the studio by a baying mob of the Permanently Outraged if they broached any subject which was even remotely controversial, i.e. immigration. \u00a0I suspect a lot of this has to do with state funding, with\u00a0any budding artist or comedian needing to pass a strict political test before being commissioned.<\/p>\n

If this keeps up, the arts in the west is going to look like that of Enver Hoxha’s Albania after a decade or two.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a never ending problem, isn’t it? Around 200 people walked out of Amy Schumer\u2018s show in Tampa, Florida, on Sunday when she called Donald Trump a \u201corange, sexual-assaulting, fake-college-starting monster,\u201d according to the Tampa Bay Times. The paper … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[60,20,74],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3296"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3296"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3296\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3299,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3296\/revisions\/3299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}