Justice Warriors Is Funny, But in a Way That Hurts

Donald Trump may not have entirely killed satire, but he’s helped sunder it into two countervailing forces, neither of which are very funny.

The liberals used to be the class clowns. But while the counterculture of the 1960s spawned Saturday Night Live, Monty Python, and the stand-up-comedy-industrial complex, its political heirs are now the pious, self-serious ones. Modern-day liberal satirists like Stephen Colbert get uncomfortable when audiences laugh at his straight-faced assertion that CNN is an objective news source. Their role is ever more a therapeutic one, intended to flatter and reassure Democrats that they are sane and upstanding.

Meanwhile, the pro-Trump “Barstool conservatives” are now playing at the role of provocateur. Much of today’s very online right seemingly wants to Make America the Aughts again, crawling back into the gutter to retrieve the anti-intellectual and sexist “bro culture” of that era, where the slurs of yore and tired jokes about pronouns stand in for true wit.

In this climate, our comedy options feel constrained by two extremes: the limply virtuous feel-good comedy of Ted Lasso or crass blowjob jokes in the key of Hawk Tuah. “We’ve lost the third way,” once observed Armando Iannucci, the legendary showrunner whose Veep was arguably America’s last great political comedy. The closest thing we’ve had since then is Amazon’s The Boys, which lost its verve in recent seasons and has settled for being an anti-Trump superhero satire for the hashtag Resistance.

But it’s not all bad news. The indie comic Justice Warriors: Vote Harder by Ben Clarkson and Matt Bors is a heartening sign that genuinely subversive satire remains possible on the margins of culture. Clarkson is a filmmaker and illustrator, while Bors was the editor of The Nib, a now-defunct leftist comic magazine that deftly toed the line between political satire and nonfiction storytelling. Bors is perhaps most renowned for a very