Here I sit in a coffee shop in middle America. Around me are various groups of college kids, people clacking away on keyboards, people reading various books (not a copy of Infinite Jest anywhere to be seen), people engaged in conversation. It’s a chill scene. If it wasn’t for the sleep deprivation hangover I’m suffering through at the moment, this would be perfect. Almost.

Parked on the side street, among the compact cars and SUVs sporting bumper stickers proclaiming the virtues of Salt Life (which I 99% of the time still confusingly read as “Slut Life” – it’s a bad font), clever decals relating the owner’s love of various dog breed, university parking stickers, and other bits of flare, is an unimpressive and completely missable white hybrid SUV that is only out of place for one reason. On the back window, in the only space that seems like it’s been cleaned within the last year, sits a sticker with the words “Let’s Go Brandon” on it.

Identity Comedy Is Inherently Unfunny On A Mass Scale

“Let’s Go Brandon,” is that insipid piece of doggerel that passes for comedy based in conservatives, and only serves a further evidence in the ongoing case being made that conservative comedy just can’t be funny. Time and time again, these red leaning hacks try to prove that they’ve mastered wit, sarcasm, nuance, and shock, and can deliver it in a way the left can only dream of. And time and time again, this time, again, being no exception, they fall on their face, succeeding only at impressing people far dumber than them, or people who have a vested interest in selling the myth of the conservative comic*.

Back On Topic

“Lets Go Brandon” represents absolutely nothing but an attempt to own the libs. It’s not particularly clever, and it’s devoid of any real message. It’s just a glib reply of “Fuck Joe Biden” by people too afraid to say “Fuck Joe Biden.” It’s tagged onto conversations where the person saying it can’t form a single independent thought.

I get it. It’s fun to say fuck authority. It’s fun to be bombastic. It’s fun to be against something so many people are for. Disco, thin crust pizza, ketchup on a hot dog…Almost everyone has a thing they enjoy more because everyone else is annoyed by it. So, the person parked in front of this cafe, sitting quietly at one of these tables sipping coffee while surrounded by people who probably feel the exact opposite of them on every issue, gets a kick out of anyone who does a double take at the sticker. The person is probably one of the four people sitting in the window. Because it’s way more fun to see people react than it is to just know they react.

In 2016, the number of people who said they were voting for DJT as a joke, or a “fuck you” to political correctness and woke leftism, was remarkable. There’s probably a statistical analysis a Google search ca but anecdotally, the incidence of this was almost uncountable. Fifteen year old Chris Cyr would have cheered them on.

“Yeah!” he’d scream. “That’ll piss someone off. Do it twice!”

15 Year Old Me Also Thought Huffing Duster Was a Fun Idea

But look where that’s gotten us. Four long years of the systematic undoing of our civil institutions by people using the incoherent mutterings of their clown puppet as cover for their own actions. And they were good at it too. While there are definitely some who drank Trump’s Kool-Aid and saw him as the prophesied god-king sent here to save the white race from fading into obsolescence, the smart ones knew that Donald wasn’t going to win re-election. They knew they couldn’t count on the votes of a lot of people who’d outgrown the oppositional defiance disorder that led them to vote for Trump in the first place. So they made sure we’ll feel the effects of his election for years to come.

The Supreme Court is the biggest weapon they’ve secured. The majority opinions in the last week reinstate school led prayer and further push the claim that the United States is a Christian nation. They overturn Roe v. Wade, and let us know that states are well within their authority to regulate a woman’s reproductive choices, and hint that states should think about non-heterosexual marriage, gun control, and other issues. They let us know corporations have the right to destroy the land, air, and water in the name of shareholder value. And we’re going to be stuck with this court for decades.

Win your presidential elections. Win your congressional seats. Conservative nation now has the ultimate roadblock to any liberal, much less progressive, gains.

And we did it because a good chunk of the country “just like how mad he makes the people on MSNBC.”

Okay, those assholes, and the other side who just didn’t vote because “OMG IS HILARY THE BEST WE CAN DO???”

I was going to finish this essay, but I have to get to church before the deacon reports me to The Authority and they pluck out my right eye for reading this.

Post Script

*Some reading this will stop right there, and instead of finishing, they’ll tell me to go fuck myself and start rattling off the names of comics who are conservatives and know how to write a joke. And they’re doing that because they don’t know the difference between conservative comedy and comedians who are conservative. This could be the subject of an entirely different essay, but the short of it is that one of these is a style of comedy based on the political identity of the audience and the comic. The other is a comic who has a specific political view, that while evident in their work isn’t the sole focus and stands a chance of being funny to people who think differently than them.

And to be fair, liberal comedy isn’t that funny either. Identity comedy in general doesn’t appeal beyond the built in “fanbase” it was made for. Like its conservative uncle, it mostly succeeds in being mean and getting preachy. It serves a purpose, sure. I’ve said before that I don’t do it though, and this is only the opinion of a middle aged middle comic in middle America, I don’t find it challenging, because preaching to the choir is as easy as it gets. And that, like I said, is a different essay.

If you’re still offended, I don’t know, stop being so sensitive.