Michael Wolff of Vanity Fair has a recent column titled "No Jokes Please, We're Liberal". Not surprisingly, these are trends we've been looking at since this blog started. Wolff writes:

Not to put too fine a point on it, but liberals, in their desperate quest to be taken seriously, are the new conservatives.

I know--Radley Balko had that meme a year and a half ago. And Jonah Goldberg was riffing on it long before that.

Wolff continues:

Conservative opinionists in the burgeoning right-wing media—from Fox to talk radio to Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard to the Wall Street Journal editorial page—are, on the other hand, often facile, funny, irreverent, eccentric, jaunty, pithy, as well as aggressive and wrongheaded (that improbable creature Ann Coulter is all those things), as well as operatic (Terri Schiavo was an opera). As well as, on occasion, inebriated. (The character note of a liberal these days is sobriety—no drinks, no carbs, no jokes. The conservatives run amok while the liberals are corporatized.)

Heck, you might even say that the left are the New Puritans. Back to Wolff:

Obviously, conservatives have reason to enjoy themselves, while liberals do not. But then, too, it may reasonably be the conservatives' sense of verbal sport, of going too far, of showing off, that's helped get them into their catbird seat.

Going too far? Thank God the head of the DNC never has to worry about that.

And, conversely, the liberals' dullness and depressiveness—"little constipated souls," in the recent description by Ben Bradlee, who is from the liberal media's jaunty age—that's contributed to their fate.

So why no oomph? No joy? No jokes?

Because political correctness kills comedy.

So much of the left has become a religion of their own. Years ago, Tom Wolfe (and this isn't an exact quote) described what made Radical Chic and The Painted Word get so far under the skin of New York intellectuals. "It was like talking out of turn in church".

At a conference on global warming, the late economist Julian Simon once began a speech like this:

“How many people here believe that the earth is increasingly polluted and that our natural resources are being exhausted?” Naturally, every hand shot up. He said, “Is there any evidence that could dissuade you?” Nothing. Again: “Is there any evidence I could give you — anything at all — that would lead you to reconsider these assumptions?” Not a stir. Simon then said, “Well, excuse me, I’m not dressed for church.”

Apparently, neither is Michael Wolff. In an article in the New Partisan, Russ Smith writes that Wolff's apostasy has turned him into a Manhattan pariah--which also isn't all that surprising. As Glenn Reynolds wrote three years ago:

As the old saying has it, the left looks for heretics and the right looks for converts, and both find what they're looking for. The effect is no doubt subliminal, but people who treat you like crap are, over time, less persuasive than people who don't. If people on the Left are so unhappy about how many former allies are changing their views, perhaps they should examine how those allies are treated.

So what's the alternative for those looking for humor? Joe Katzman of Winds of Change, linking to our Tech Central Station piece on Brian Anderson's South Park Conservatives, writes that the new generation of conservatives are "people who looked and sounded nothing like Bill Buckley--and nothing like the New York Times either":

A generation raised on South Park's wicked skewering of political correctness and idiocy isn't going to. A generation with more media choices than ever doesn't have to. And the market will correct the problem, given time. Hence the trends described in Anderson's book.

Vive le media libre.

It's like a reformation or something!

Update: Orrin Judd writes, "You used to at least get an argument when you made the point that all comedy is conservative."

Another Update: Welcome Winds of Change readers!