I have a certain affection for all fellow comedians, having done some stand-up comedy myself. So I had sympathy for Evan Sayet, a conservative comedian, who spoke at the Heritage Foundation earlier today. His shtick is not what we might call nuanced. Sayet’s talk was entitled, “Hating What’s Right: How the Modern Liberal ‘Thinks’ ” (He has a book by the same title, he tells me, coming out later this year.) Sayet seems like a nice enough fellow–we have some friends in common– and it’s hard enough to do comedy even with a two-drink minimum let alone at the Lehrman Auditorium of the nation’s preeminent conservative think tank.
A one time writer for the Arsenio Hall Show, Sayet describes himself as a “brain-dead liberal” before 9/11. The attacks led to an epiphany, he says. And now he’s a full-throated conservative who charges that “modern liberalism” believes in “evil over good, wrong over right.” His comedy conflates Jeremiah Wright, the dyspeptic professor Ward Churchill, who characterized 9/11 victims as “little Eichmans” along with mainstream liberals like the Illinois Senator Dick Durbin who gets ribbed, deservedly so I think, for comparing American detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay with the Nazis. Durbin, himself, apologized for the remarks–a point which Sayet didn’t note. At other times, he took shots at Brian Williams, Katie Couric, Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd while I was there but only to sneer at them.
Humor is most funny when it’s deeply truthful so bastardizing liberalism into a grotesque parody of itself is neither truthful or funny, to me anyway, although the conservative crowd at Heritage loved it. To be fair, Sayet allowed a few asides about liberals “who don’t hate America” and are merely misguided about social programs. But in general his comedy lumps everyone on the left together into an absurdist portrait.
Here’s Sayet on liberalism and anti-semitism:
Here he is on being a conservative comedian in Hollywood.
