The Rise of the Earnest Comedian

 

 

The Earnest Comedian is not funny.  The Era of the Earnest Comedian began with 9/11, when John Stewart had a very serious group of episodes of the Daily Show.  The Earnest Comedian is achingly earnest and uniquely equipped to deliver for us our true principles of our era, or rather a principled stand without a principle - a return to "sanity" and consensus in a age of incredulity towards metanarratives.  The Earnest Comedian demonstrates to us what is undeconstructible - that which we must pass over in earnest silence.  Even their very irreverence is itself a kind of reverence, a commitment, even a sense of the holy.  Other examples include Hannah Gadsby, Vladimir Zelinsky, and Bassem Youssef.  

The Earnest Comedian has taken the place of the public intellectual.  The Earnest Comedian has a power which a public intellectual (say, Jacques Derrida, in an earlier age) lacked: whereas the public intellectual was expected to have an answer to our questions, or at least some better questions, the Earnest Comedian can always duck behind the fact that he is only a comedian.  Good faith takes the form of bad faith.  The spirit of the Earnest Comedian rules the world.  

The Earnest Comedian arose at a time when the public intellectual had become so encumbered by abstract jargon that no one knew what they were talking about.  By contrast with the public intellectual, the Earnest Comedian can tell us what to think.  In this sense, the Earnest Comedian is also the replacement of the priest.

We react to the Earnest Comedian not with laughter, but with applause.

The Earnest Comedian is what happens when the spirit of mockery has become evacuated of all of its content, has no spirit, and is therefore no longer mocking.  The Earnest Comedian reveals the inner sanctimony that was always at the center of the spirit of mockery.

The Earnest Comedian has an opposite, as well, or rather a complement: you might call this figure the goofy serious person, the ridiculous professional, the absurd bureaucrat, the hilarious dark omen.... I call him the Doom Buffoon.  A perfect example would be Donald Trump.  Before him, and perhaps even more perfectly filling this role, would be Silvio Berlusconi.  There's also Benjamin Netanyahu, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Muammar Gaddafi.... the list goes on and on.  Rob Ford was a perfect Doom Buffoon.  So was Marion Barry.  In some ways perhaps Joe Biden has some aspects of a Doom Buffoon but not really completely.  Sarah Palin, maybe?  The primary qualities of a Doom Buffoon are that, on the one hand, a Doom Buffoon must be a person with a significant amount of power and influence, someone in a job or role with an enormous amount of responsibility, something that by all accounts should be taken very seriously, and that they are very serious, in the sense of being a serious threat, a serious danger, something seriously alarming and usually frightening.  They inspire genuine terror.  But at the same time the Doom Buffoon is just completely outrageous in everything they do, toppling all norms of civility and reasonability like a bull in a china shop, and, even for their enemies, who hate and fear them, there is something truly, undeniably funny about them.  It's not funny but... it is funny.  We shouldn't laugh but we can't help laughing.  They're hilarious.  There is no way to satirize a Doom Buffoon because they already exceed every possible caricature.  And even though we are definitely laughing at them and not with them, there's always the sneaking suspicion that, somehow, they are in on the joke.  They get how absurd they are, and they don't care. 

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