The Atlantic wants people to believe today’s comedy scene is lying in bed with the American right, fully embraced, staring at the ceiling and regretting nothing. Stand-up, we’re told, has become a MAGA sock puppet, its laughs goose-stepping behind red hats and grievance politics. It’s nonsense.
The error is simple and seductive. The Atlantic mistakes friction for ideology. A joke that punctures DEI jargon becomes a campaign speech. A riff about Covid sanctimony is treated like a rally chant. Mocking the pronoun protocol is instantly interpreted as allegiance to Donald Trump. This is less analysis than astrology for people with media degrees. Comedy thrives on contradiction, contempt for consensus, and a compulsion to poke whatever altar’s currently crowded with worshippers. When cultural power tilts left—as it has for a decade—comedy naturally leans against it. That doesn’t make comedians right-wing. It makes them functional.
Try naming one big-name right-wing comedian. Not a podcaster who once nodded at Trump. Not someone who mocked a progressive talking point. A disciplined conservative comic whose worldview aligns with church-and-state Republicanism. You’ll struggle. Because there isn’t one.
Joe Rogan endorsed Trump in 2024, but Rogan isn’t a conservative standard-bearer. He’s pro-choice, pro-legalization, allergic to moralism, and culturally closer to libertarianism than to any Sunday sermon. His politics are a grab-bag of gym talk, government distrust, and curiosity about everything from psychedelics to primates. This is a man far more likely to share a mic with Bernie Sanders or Ron Paul than a room with Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio.
Bill Burr has spent years scolding conservatives with the same ferocity he reserves for coastal liberals. He loathes corporate hypocrisy, police sanctimony, and moral posturing wherever it appears. Louis C.K. didn’t crawl toward the GOP after his exile. He returned doing what he’s always done—taking aim at anything that claims immunity. His last special spent a long, deliberate stretch roasting the Bible. That’s not a pivot to the pews.
Dave Chappelle, meanwhile, is often held up as Exhibit A in the case for “right-wing comedy.” This is where the argument falls apart. Chappelle isn’t a conservative. He’s identity politics in human form—obsessed with it, orbiting it, unable to escape its gravity. His recent specials revolve almost entirely around grievance hierarchies, racial grievance, and a near-permanent fixation on how racist America supposedly remains. The punchlines increasingly bend back toward the same refrain: the country’s cruel, the system’s stacked, and Trump’s an abomination. Even when he mocks the excesses of progressive language, the worldview underneath remains progressive.
Ricky Gervais is an even stranger inclusion in this imaginary right-wing pantheon. A loud climate activist. An atheist. A man who regularly mocks religion, nationalism, and traditional morality. He laughs at the left’s rituals while sharing many of its conclusions. That doesn’t make him conservative.
Then there’s the younger cohort. Theo Von, endlessly described as a MAGA disciple, has gone out of his way to distance himself from Trumpism. His persona is eccentric, Southern, and self-deprecating, not ideological. Andrew Schulz, once happy to flirt with anti-woke audiences, has spent the last few months carefully clarifying that he’s not a MAGA bro, not a movement man, not a political mascot. He recognized how toxic the current administration had become and wanted nothing to do with it. That retreat alone should puncture the myth.
Even Kill Tony—now the most popular stand-up podcast in the world—is lazily branded “right-wing.” Anyone who actually watches it knows how absurd that is. The show’s offensive by design. Racist jokes, sexist jokes, sacrilegious jokes, suicidal jokes. Everyone gets scorched. Liberal comics, gay comics, trans comics all step on stage and face the same merciless treatment. The ideology isn’t conservatism, but cruelty with a stopwatch. Equal-opportunity mockery is not a party platform.
What’s really happening is simpler and more embarrassing. Cultural institutions that once monopolized humor no longer control the room. The jokes now flow around them, not through them. And because many of those jokes target progressive pieties—HR theology, activist narcissism, therapeutic politics—the media assumes allegiance. Laughter is misfiled as loyalty.
Comedy isn’t marching right. It swings both ways, vacuuming up whatever holds power and turning it into ammunition. Comedy has never been right-wing. And it doesn’t look like changing anytime soon—if ever.