(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Greg Gutfeld hides behind comedy to advance extremism. Comedy is art, and Gutfeld is fingerpainting [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-10-08 Jokes don’t tend to try to persuade. They try to hoodwink, to get one over; then they reveal the hoodwink. There is some sequential indication that what had come before had been a put-on. The revelation is part of the joke. Even practical jokes, physical jocularities that tend to extend through the medium of time (much in the spirit of April Fools jokes), still have this element of being revealed, so as to inform the victim of the innocuous nature of the whole affair. Greg Gutfeld’s insistence that “elections don’t work” and that by implication we should turn to civilian conflict—war—is not a joke. It is not structured like a joke; it had no comedic under- or overtones. Indeed, Gutfeld was sincerely trying to convince his audience to consider his proposal. There was no reveal, because nothing had been hidden. GUTFELD: But only certain people get criminal mulligans, and Jan. 6 protestors, they don’t get criminal mulligans, and here’s why. They’re the oppressor. Right? So the oppressed get criminal mulligans. The people who are complaining, like us, we’re actually oppressors and we’re losing power, so that’s why we are upset. I just got a job at MSNBC. So let’s compare the rights between criminals and victims, okay? The criminals, they get a mulligan. They can steal up to $900 worth of stuff; they can loiter, sleep, and shoot up in public areas, including playgrounds; they can loot and burn and call it social justice. They can pile up dozens of arrests and never do time. Meanwhile, what about us? Well, we have to change our lives to accommodate risk wherever we go. We have to move out of cities for the sake of the safety of our families and our own safety. That’s what’s happening. We are being driven out of cities by the oppressed, so I return to my imperfect analogy from yesterday. We had a war over slavery. We knew slavery was inhumane and immoral, but somehow we couldn’t solve slavery peacefully. It was an evil, but one side refused to acknowledge that it was evil because it was too big of an admission for them to make. Doesn’t that feel that way now? That this defiant refusal to reverse this decline argues against the survival of a country. What does that leave you with? It leaves you with, you need to make war to bring peace because you have a side that cannot change. Because then that means an admission that their beliefs have been corrupt all the time. So, in a way, you have to force them to surrender. JESSE WATTERS: Or we could make love, not war. GUTFELD: Uh, I tried that once … HAROLD FORD JR.: Or we can have an election. GUTFELD: … I had to go to a doctor. MARTHA MACCALLUM: Yeah, elections. GUTFELD: No, elections don’t work. We know that. We know they don’t work! FORD: They do work. GUTFELD: "Look what we have! Look what we have! We had a moderate president and we have crime exploding everywhere. We had a Democrat president promise that he was going to be moderate, promise that he was gonna unite the country, and now we have a terrible education system. We have no border. We have crime everywhere. Every facet of society is in peril and in chaos because our elections don’t matter. There was no hoodwink; Gutfeld was communicating out in the open. Simply because he is employed as a comedian does not mean that all that escapes his mouth are jokes. It is clear that, in various contexts, what any comedian communicates is to be taken in straight form: if a comedian sits down in a cafe and orders a coffee, he is delivering a sincere request, and the server would be obliged to take him at his word, not to assume that the request was an elaborate fiction. If a comic stepped onto the street and flagged his arm, catching the attention of a cab driver, that driver would be obliged to attend to that signal and treat the comedian as a potential customer for transport, not as someone playing a practical joke. Context is everything. Gutfeld espouses political positions on his regular panel appearance on Fox’s The Five. He takes quite conservative / right-wing positions as a rule; he has a known bias. He regularly communicates this bias by virtue of his situatedness on that panel: he has eked out a stance and carries that position through. No amount of “I was joking!” can change the fact that, at the time, Gutfeld was not joking. He was communicating an actually held belief, in the hopes of influencing his audience to take up the same opinion. If this were an attempt at a joke, the scene would demonstrate the man’s clear lack of understanding of comedy at its root. He has no idea either of the basic elements of a joke nor of timing, crucial for the reveal. If Gutfeld truly believes he was delivering a joke, he should be fired as a comedian, as he shows no aptitude for his chosen medium. His intent was to be inflammatory. And while some comics use inflammatory or indelicate remarks in a routine in order to pull off a joke or lower defenses, the reverse does not hold true, that all inflammatory remarks are signs of comedy. Gutfeld very plainly called for civil war and hopes that his retroactive claim of comedic immunity will shield him. At the very least, he should be placed on suspension, if not lose his job outright. This is the equivalent of telling a hijacking “joke” while on a plane mid-flight. (h/t to AldousJPennyfarthing for transcribing the Fox exchange.) [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/8/2198097/-Greg-Gutfeld-hides-behind-comedy-to-advance-extremism-Comedy-is-art-and-Gutfeld-is-fingerpainting?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/