A woman tells the cop who stopped her in a carpool lane that she’s allowed to drive there because her pronouns are “they” and “them.”
This is taken from a video from a conservative Christian satirical site called the bee of Babylon. Their humor gets millions of views.
“Christian conservatives used to…. . be very austere and serious,” Bee editor Kyle Mann says in my new video. Today, he says, it is the left that is serious. “They are the ones who find it hard to laugh at themselves.”
For example, late-night hosts like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert are passionate advocates for COVID-19 vaccines. “It’s a conference,” complains Mann.
“The left was anti-establishment,” adds Bee Chandler actress Juliet. Now, she said, ‘They’ve become the blob. . . . We’re super happy to lead the comedic conversation on the right.
A Babylon Bee video, “The Woke Zone,” pokes fun at how the media ignored the violence and arson during the George Floyd protests.
“Have you ever felt grateful to the left for giving you so much material?” I ask.
“We have to write stuff that’s funnier than what they actually do,” Mann replies. “It makes our job very difficult.”
One Bee sketch depicts its writers struggling to find new material. “John Kerry warns war in Ukraine could divert attention from climate change! suggest one. Impossible, says another. “It really happened.” “Cosmo magazine features morbidly obese woman on cover as image of health” and “Math teacher says ‘two plus two equals four’ is racist!” are among other ideas that cannot be used as jokes.
“A math teacher really said that two plus two equals four is racist?” I ask. It’s “a colonialist, white supremacist idea,” Mann says.
Today, the bee affects more people than the onion. The establishment doesn’t like it, so some people do so-called bee fact checkers. An article verified by Snopes was headlined “Bernie Sanders promises to round up remaining members of ISIS, allow them to vote.”
“Does Snopes not understand that you are making jokes?” I ask. “I think they know what our intention is,” replies Juliette. “They just don’t like us.”
Recently, Twitter banned the bee. His offense was to tweet an article that named Assistant Health Secretary Rachel Levine “Babylon Bee’s Man of the Year.”
Levine is a transgender woman. Calling him man of the year is a joke I wouldn’t do. But it doesn’t need to be censored.
Twitter says it will only allow the bee to return to the platform if it removes the tweet. Mann says he won’t. “Twitter has the ability to just delete the tweet itself. They want us to bend the knee and click, ‘Yes, we recognize hateful behavior.’ We’re not going to do that.
Today, many comedians attract large audiences by poking fun at the left. Some I found amusing are JP Sears, Ryan Long, and FreedomToons.
The culture changes. The top rated late night comedian these days is often not Colbert, Kimmel or Jimmy Fallon but Fox’s Greg Gutfeld.
Even some left-wing comedians like Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappelle poke fun at the intolerant left. “I am talking about AIDS, famine, cancer, the Holocaust, rape, pedophilia. . . the only thing not to joke about is identity politics,” Gervais says in his recent Netflix special.
Professional media critics criticized him for this. But the special was extremely popular with the public.
The Rotten Tomatoes ratings are telling. Critics gave Gervais’ special a 29% rating, calling it “woefully unfunny” and “a hateful combination of smug and obtuse”.
Viewers gave it a 92% rating.
The same goes for Chappelle’s latest special, “The Closer.” Critics give it only 40%. The public gives him 95%.
Obviously, a lot of people are tired of smug, condescending humor. I’m glad The Babylon Bee and others are giving us an alternative.
John Stossel is the creator of Stossel TV and the author of “Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media”.
