The Washington Post Literally Can’t Take a Joke

T his week, the Washington Post took the extraordinary step of suspending longtime political journalist David Weigel without pay. The offense that cost him one month’s salary was his decision to retweet a distasteful joke, one that caught the attention of his colleagues and inspired a full weekend of outraged extrapolation about the reporter’s motives, the biases of the institution that employs him, and the society that allows events like these to occur. But while this very public spectacle is revealing of the professional jealousies roiling the Post, it is also indicative of a principle with increasing purchase on the left that regards dark humor as a sin.

“Every girl is bi,” the crude joke authored by YouTuber Cam Harless began. “You just have to figure out if it’s polar or sexual.” Weigel shared the joke with his followers. He was likely admonished for the offense, as he quickly withdrew the retweet and apologized for the “harm” he had caused. But his colleague, Post national political reporter Felicia Sonmez, rejected his appeal. “Fantastic to work at a news outlet where retweets like this are allowed,” Sonmez wrote, in an indictment of both Weigel and her employer.

A fracas ensued in which fellow Post reporter Jose A. Del Real went to bat for his institution. While he conceded the inappropriateness of the joke and the poor judgment displayed by those who boosted its signal, he also reprimanded Sonmez for engaging in the “repeated and targeted public harassment” of her professional associates. Sonmez then focused her ire on Del Real and her bosses at the Post, whom the reporter spent the next 72 hours criticizing for limiting her reportorial remit in 2018, which “would isolate me from my colleagues and force me to relive my trauma every day at work for nearly two years.”

What we’ve been forced to witness is, on its face, an internal dispute that was only catalyzed by the joke in question. But the event would not have produced the organic outpouring of outrage that contributed to Weigel’s sidelining if it did not tap into a potent ideological strain on the “woke” left that regards humor and flippancy with suspicion.

This particular joke leveraged pain for laughs. It dismissed the social and material disadvantages endured by both those who identify as LGBT and those who struggle to maintain their mental health. It painted with a broad brush, diminishing, caricaturing, and stigmatizing women. These are serious matters. If you perceive yourself to be a serious person, they are nothing to laugh at. Indeed, to find humor in the circumstances endured by the marginalized and mocked marks you as part of the problem.

Pain, however, is the essential ingredient in what we consider to be dark humor, a clinical description of which would lead almost every well-socialized person to turn from it in horror. Transgressive jokes mine racial antagonism, sexism, criminal misconduct, and unspeakably tragic events for levity. That is the essence of so much comedy: to satirize the terrible, to plumb the depths of despair in search of irony, and to laugh your way up the gallows steps.

This kind of dark humor has been singled out by the self-serious sort and attacked for theoretically giving license to those who would behave in antisocial ways. It is also being replaced by those who prefer to marinate in pain with a style of comedy that doesn’t allow you the release of a punchline.

The mentality I’m describing is, in fact, puritanical insofar as it cannot countenance idle frivolities, pastimes, and diversions that do not contribute to the promotion of a central political project and the development of the ideal society. In my forthcoming book, The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back Against Progressives’ War on Fun, I describe this tendency and the many forms it takes. When it comes to comedy, however, the two forms this philosophical inclination take would seem to be incompatible.

The first of these forms is the effort to police dark humor. We see that in the controversy engulfing the Post, but also in the work of cultural critics like the New Republic contributor Seth Simons. In a February 2021 essay, Simons laid the blame for the rise of the alt-right and the events that culminated in the January 6 siege of the Capitol Building to the “inequality and extremism” that stand-up’s “right-wing politics” have incubated. “Cringe” humorists, in particular, leverage human frailty and the many horrors of daily life for laughs, thereby belittling the experiences of the traumatized and making sociopaths out of their audiences. “They offered permission to revel in racism and sexism, in homophobia and transphobia, and they earned devoted followings in return,” Simons wrote of the offending comics.

The second form also exploits trauma. It builds the same tensions as conventional joke-telling, but while ostentatiously denying you a laugh at the end. This is what the fans of Australian anti-comic Hannah Gadsby loved so much about her 2018 Netflix special Nanette. It wasn’t the humor in it, of which there was quite a bit, that her most vocal fans on the puritanical left enjoyed. It was the moments in which the comedian was consciously and explicitly not funny.

“I’ve made my story into a joke,” Gadsby says at one difficult point in her act in which she describes the abuse she endured in childhood. “And there’s only so long I can pretend not to be serious.” This, not the jokes, is what enlivened those who subscribe to a puritanical outlook on humor. “Gadsby wields her craft like a weapon, lancing out the trauma and forcing us to look at it,” the Guardian’s Jane Howard marveled. Gadsby assaults her audience with the “revelation that pain has to be mined, manipulated, and stripped of context to make a good joke,” the New Yorker’s Cassie da Costa remarked. As Vox.com’s Aja Romano observed, her performance “confronts” us, “challenges” us, and forces her audience to “interrogate its discomfort.”

There is a moral philosophy on display here; one that believes you shirk your duty to the promotion of a just world by taking even a moment’s break from your duty to dwell on the world’s injustices. Those on the puritanical left have dedicated themselves to the promotion of a comedic monoculture, in part, out of fear. It’s a fear their 17th-century forebears shared. They regard as suspect the involuntary reactions that humor elicits because the joke is a surprise. It is “two planes of meaning at an unexpected angle,” the late humorist P. J. O’Rourke told me. “All jokes offend the mind to one degree or another, just on the basis of rationality.” The reaction a joke produces in you is a work of the unconscious mind. It is ungoverned by discipline and intellect. It is, therefore, ungovernable, and that which cannot be controlled cannot be trusted.

A virtuous society organized around inviolable moral precepts cannot abide such a wild and seditious thing. The old Puritans certainly couldn’t. Nor, it seems, can the New Puritans.