By Jon BrownChristian Post Reporter Saturday, March 23, 2024

Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon claimed during an interview Wednesday that much of the comedy emerging from the political left has stopped being effective because comedians care more about enforcing ideology and pandering to power than being funny.

“I think one of the ways they lost their sting was because they purposefully adopted this hands-off position where the politicians they like, the people who are in power, and the institutions that control our public speech – everything from media and entertainment, education, the big corporations, all of this – everything is dominated by people with whom they are in ideological lock,” Dillon said in the “Your Welcome” a podcast with Michael Malice.

“They don't see these things as funny; they see them as good and true and [that] we need these things,” he continued.

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Dillon offered gender ideology as an example of a topic that is apparently off-limits to many left-wing comedians despite its self-evident absurdity, which he provided as evidence of the fact that many contemporary comedians “want to protect the narrative from criticism.”

“These are really radical and crazy ideas, and before it was just universally mocked and laughed at, and now you find very few examples of people on the left who want to mock it at all,” he said. .

“So you end up hearing from a lot of comedians who are basically preaching from the stage, they're preaching to the audience, and they're going for a 'claud,' as someone called it, where it's like this applause of affirmation instead of laughter from the audience .”

“I've always thought the first rule of comedy is to be funny, it has to be subversive, it's to poke holes in the popular narrative, not try to support the popular narrative and promote it,” he added. “So that's really where it all kind of went off the rails with comedy, I think.”

Dillon said a lot of comedians aren't funny anymore “because the things that deserve to be made fun of the most are the things that they're least likely to touch.”

Dillon praised HBO host Bill Maher for mocking the idea of ​​transgender surgeries for children by joking about how glad he was that no one ever scheduled him “for eye removal and peg leg surgery” when he wanted to be a pirate as a boy.

“He's making fun of something that should never have been taken seriously in the first place, and he's doing it at a time when you shouldn't, when it's considered hate speech to even go there,” Dillon said of Maher. “Was it, like, crazy hysterical? No, it was kind of funny, but deeply important.”

Dillon's interview aired on the two-year anniversary of Babylon Bee being locked out of X for a satirical tweet announcing US Assistant Secretary of Health Rachel (Richard) Levine as their “man of the year”, which he claimed was an example of the ideological. restraints on comedy and the “privilege” many on the left exhibit despite their claims of oppression.

“The idea is that this hateful behavior, this kind of joke that needs to be banned, punches someone who is marginalized,” Dillon said. “We have power and privilege; this person doesn't. They lack power and privilege, and so when we make fun of them, we're punching them, and that's wrong, it's like bullying, it's bad.”

“And I'm sitting there thinking to myself, 'You know, this is a white male senior government official, and they're on the cover right now of USA Today receiving an award.'” If this person is marginalized, then the word marginalized has no meaning. . There is nothing about this situation that indicates being oppressed or marginalized.”

Dillon noted that if the biggest problem in one's life is someone possibly joking about their gender, then they are “pretty d— privileged.”

“I think that's a profound privilege, and beyond that, if you can have someone censored for even joking about you like that, you're one of the most powerful people who ever lived,” he added. “Kings have that power.”

Malico noted that Levine's privilege is such that others ran interference for him “before the ink was dry” in the Babylon Bee tweet.

The Christian satire website had its account reinstated in November 2022 after the company was purchased by CEO Elon Musk. However, Dillon recalled that when Musk first contacted them privately on the platform, they were unable to respond because their account was locked.

Later in the hour-long interview, Dillon also talked about how he was raised as “a pastor's kid” and detailed the history of his family's Christian faith, noting how his mother was raised Jewish and his father was agnostic until they converted. .

“I've been a Christian basically for as long as I can remember, but I'll admit that, as a teenager, I [was] repeating the sinner's prayer over and over, trying to make sure I was saved,” he said. “I did that for a while before I began to actually rest in the promise of Christ without feeling my own inadequacy, making it seem ; as if it were invalid.”