For many comedy lovers—particularly liberal ones—the concept of “MAGA humor” is an oxymoron. Ever since Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce graced comedy club stages in the 1950s, political comedy has been assumed to be the preserve of liberal culture, always supportive of the subjugated and satirical of the oppressive.
This century, comedy in America has become more political and more disseminated, penetrating into the homes of millions every day and night via various screen outlets. The Daily Show alone is responsible for spawning a generation of TV late-night talk show hosts; Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Samantha Bee, and Trevor Noah are just some of its alumni keeping political comedy left of center.
Failed efforts to emulate The Daily Show model on the right have only hardened liberals’ presumption that conservatives are comedically challenged. For evidence, they might cite Headlines Tonight with Drew Berquist, The Flipside with Michael Loftus, or The ½ Hour News Hour, shows that tried and failed to apply Stewart’s news-oriented satire from a right-wing perspective. Critics conclude that right-wing politics—reliant as it is upon scapegoating minorities, valorizing authority, and fostering anger—is incompatible with comedy. Great comedy always punches up, they argue, while the right is more inclined to punch down.
MAGA Humor’s Takeover
Comfortable in their belief that comedy is left-leaning by nature and unsuited for the conservative mindset, liberals have been dismissive of the right’s periodic efforts to join the mainstream comedy club. This, coupled with a techno-communications revolution that has exacerbated our polarized society, has created a social world where—for liberals—right-wing comedy does not exist.
However, right-wing comedy does exist, and it is on the rise. Residing as I do in my own partisan pod, I was not even aware until recently that the right has its own late-night talk show, Gutfeld!, and that this show has regularly beaten Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, and Jimmy Fallon in viewership ratings over the last six years (Sienkiewicz and Marx).
The show’s host, Greg Gutfeld, sits at the center of what humor scholars Matt Sienkiewicz and Nick Marx call a “right-wing comedy complex” (ibid). This network interconnects all parts of the MAGA coalition, with Gutfeld helping to promote old-school “paleocomedians” like Dennis Miller and Tim Allen, as well as more recent far-right firebrands. Wanna-be humorist, Gavin McInnes, best known as the founding father of the white supremacist Proud Boys street gang, was once a regular panelist on Gutfeld’s Red Eye talk show. Traditional conservatives and the alt-right may differ in their political views, but they are united by many traits that characterize the MAGA humor universe.
Conservative humor used to be associated with self-deprecation, the likes of Minnie Pearl, Jeff Foxworthy, and Larry the Cable Guy parodying the stereotypical rural working-class rube. This caricature was fun-loving and playful, part self-mockery and part commentary on the assumptions urbane middle-class people routinely make about heartland culture. Their “redneck” jokes functioned as pre-emptive strikes, indicating that if anyone was going to make fun of “us”, it would be us, not them.
In contrast, MAGA humor projects outwards at “them” by applying a comedic veneer to its pre-existing combative political style. This humor is all about “owning the libs” – throwing insults and scorn at the perceived enemy. After decades of feeling put down by liberals and liberal comedians, MAGA humor seeks to settle scores by digging at the sore spots and political vulnerabilities of the other side. MAGA comedians attack political correctness and cancel culture by testing the limits of both; they use shock tactics that trample on conventions, punching down on minorities and insulting them in ways more cruel than clever.
“The cruelty is the point,” Adam Serwer once wrote about MAGA politics in an essay for The Atlantic in 2018, and the same purpose applies to its political humor. This is also humor as counterculture rebellion, a desperate attempt to reinvent the right as cool, subversive, and edgy – adjectives rarely, if ever, applied to conservatives in the past. However, in the minds of MAGA humorists, they, not their risk-averse and PC-hobbled liberal counterparts, are continuing the tradition of bold, truth-telling comedy.
From Hitler to Stalin to Trump, history has shown us that authoritarians demand a cultural wing for their political brand. Proto-MAGA guru Andrew Breitbart once argued that politics runs downstream from culture, and one can see a “make art great again” priority in Trump’s second term. Whether it be protesting the choice of Bad Bunny for the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show, Trump’s commandeering of the Kennedy Arts Center, or his shakedowns of TV stations (and their corporate owners) in an effort to force comedians critical of him off the air, all amount to a systematic effort to transform American culture in the image of the MAGA movement.
Right-leaning comedians now see the roads to access and success opening for them, while MAGA believers see those humorists as providing the cachet they crave. Like the Trump coalition itself, today’s booming right-wing comedy complex is becoming a cultural force to be reckoned with.
MAGA Humor Has Roots in America’s Basements
To trace the rise of MAGA humor, one has to go back to its influential antecedents. Many critics were surprised when right-wing radio personality Rush Limbaugh was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom during Trump’s first term. They wondered how this shock jock who made a living from calling strong women “feminazis” and mocking the variously afflicted could be so honored. However, within the conservative world, Limbaugh was both the king of talk radio and of political humor.
Indeed, Limbaugh’s style of partisan commentary gained prominence by virtue of two significant pieces of legislation: in 1987, the FCC repealed the Fairness Doctrine, and in 1996, the Telecommunications Act deregulated media, both enabling corporations like Clear Channel to buy up local media and standardize it in their financial and/or ideological interests. So was born the era of right-wing talk radio, its successors now evident in the age of specialized podcasts and streaming sites.
By the 2010s, on chat sites like 4Chan, 8Chan, and Reddit, young alt-right participants were upping the ante on Rush-style put-downs, each trying to amuse and outdo the other in how obscene and offensive their posts could be. Most pertained to issues of race, gender, and sexuality, but nothing was off-limits or deemed too extreme. Their “sophomoric, racist jokes became defiant acts of free speech”, say Sienkiewicz and Marx.
Far-right provocateurs like Gavin McInnes and Milo Yiannopoulos emerged from this manosphere as cult heroes; its coming out party was the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally, at which young male attendees—previously content with furiously flaming from their parents’ basements—physically united around their common sense of humor by carrying tiki torches and chanting “the Jews will not replace us.” The man who inspired them to come out in public, Donald Trump, was equally adept at the art of trolling; he was also then president of the United States.
Donald Trump: America’s Troller-in-Chief
In the many decades the American public has known Donald Trump, few considered him for his comedic capabilities. That changed in 2015 when, during the Republican presidential primaries, he fell upon a campaign strategy that drew both laughter and support.
Raised on Rush Limbaugh radio and the manosphere internet, right-wing males (and some females) delighted in seeing and hearing the candidate trample on the PC rules that had come to dominate social life. During the first debate, Trump doubled down on sexist insults he had hurled at Rosie O’Donnell, then introduced new ones when criticizing host Megyn Kelly afterwards, telling CNN’s Don Lemon that she had “blood coming out of her whatever” when asking her questions.
Trump’s outrageous comments sucked up all the attention, distinguishing him from the pack of conventional Republican contestants. Democrats and future RINOs [Republicans in Name Only] were horrified by his unseemly behavior, but a considerable portion of the party’s base laughed gleefully, vicariously experiencing each potshot at each perceived enemy. In Trump’s audacity, they sensed a kindred spirit, someone seemingly as frustrated as they were by the speech codes, safe spaces, microaggressions, and cancel culture they felt were increasingly suppressing them.
Here was someone unwilling to play by their rules, someone eager to exercise free speech without restraint. Here was the MAGA id set free and on display.
Baked into Trump’s unapologetic insult humor is the political populism that propelled him to the presidency. People loved that he spoke like them, or rather, how they would like to speak. Like many populist leaders, Trump is a bully and a narcissist, traits essential to cultivating and perpetuating his brand of humor. As with the schoolyard bully, some onlookers admire his show of strength, such that they will ingratiate themselves by laughing at his cruel antics. How else can we interpret Trump’s patented list of childish nicknames—Sleepy Joe, Crooked Hillary, Nervous Nancy—but as the comic vernacular of the school bully?
Moreover, as a malignant narcissist, Trump is incapable of taking incoming mockery; his impulse is always to lash back with insults and abuse that his base digests as though they were bits from an Andrew “Dice” Clay routine. When challenged on their mean-spirited nature, his tribal supporters will invariably use the defense, “They are just jokes; can’t you take a joke?” thus negating any need for a moral or mental reckoning.
This process of rationalizing insults as jokes continues today, transforming our understanding of what constitutes humor itself. When the president recently responded to a question from journalist Catherine Lucey with the retort, “Quiet, quiet, piggy,” I was curious to see the general public’s reaction. Although not the majority sentiment, I was not surprised to see one of the first posts about it on X from someone stating “Dude i love this guy” (followed by a laughing emoji).
Trump elicited similar in-crowd responses when he used the occasion of the Thanksgiving holiday to “joke” that he would never call the Democrat Illinois governor “a fat slob”—after just doing so. Seeing such wit as an effective method of communication, Trump trolling has become standard practice within his administration, such as when White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt recently responded to a journalist’s question about who chose the location for an upcoming meeting with Putin with the clapback, “Your mom did.” This is what passes for humor in MAGA America; this is MAGA humor.
The MAGA Comedy Network
As noted, Donald Trump did not invent MAGA humor; nevertheless, he encouraged it to crawl from the basements of the manosphere and into the living rooms of the cultural mainstream. Paying attention and capitalizing on this transition has been an army of conservative comedians, some of whom languished during the pre-Trump years, and some who created new start-up comedy modeled on their leader’s. Together, they constitute today’s MAGA comedy network.
At the center of the network is the star of MAGA humor, Greg Gutfeld. Like many Republicans, Gutfeld opposed Trump when he was just a candidate in 2015; like them, too, a year later, he was forced to decide whether to stand by his principles as a RINO in the wilderness or make a strategic U-turn and enjoy the fruits of new career opportunities. In choosing the latter, Gutfeld transformed himself from a libertarian into an apologist for authoritarianism, in the process shedding his broad satire for partisan posturing.
In a recent interview with the comedian, David Marchese describes Gutfeld! as “insult-heavy, aggressively anti-woke and relentlessly pro-conservative.” A self-proclaimed rebel and “king of late-night comedy”, Gutfeld apes the boasting, arrogance, and infantilism of Trump, using the mask of comedy as permission to gaslight, cajole, and manipulate his audience with various gradations of Fox-style “truthiness”.
On the one occasion I forced myself to endure one of his opening monologues, I saw a snapping terrier at work, doggedly combative with (and lost without) his liberal foils, seemingly oblivious to any news of the day that might impugn the president. When Trump is addressed, the nonsense and non-sequiturs the president utters are presented as examples of abstract performance art, or as high-level chess moves (or red pills) outwitting the dull rationalists and “normies” outside the enlightened in-crowd.
In their book, That’s Not Funny: How the Right Makes Comedy Work for Them, Sienkiewicz and Marx characterize Gutfeld as the hub from which the spokes of other MAGA comedy have jutted out into society. The authors cite paleocomedy, religio-rational satire, libertarian podcasters, and neo-Nazi trolls as interconnected subgenres within the network wheel currently in motion.
Cited in the chapter “Trolling the Depths of the Right-Wing Comedy Complex” is The Daily Shoah, a podcast whose punny title riffs on the Hebrew term for the Holocaust. The authors report that this show is “drenched in every conceivable element of homophobia, transphobia, sexism, Islamophobia, and racism,” but that “it is comedy”. The Daily Shoah may be a far (right) cry from Gutfeld!, but in the right-wing comedy complex, one is only an algorithm-assisted click away from the other.
Befitting its participation in the cultural wing of the MAGA movement, the right-wing comedy network has also produced its own theorists. From “scholars” like Ben Shapiro, Steven Crowder, and Michael Malice, one can learn about why the liberal-left is no longer funny, why the only risk-taking comedy is coming from the right, and why trolling is the apotheosis of contemporary wit.
“No One’s Laughing: Cancel Culture is Killing Comedy”, Shapiro writes for The Daily Wire; trolling makes respondents into participant-performers, argues Malice in his book The New Right: A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics. Gutfeld has weighed in, too, offering his readers a “blueprint for banter” in his instructional manifesto, How to Be Right: The Art of Being Persuasively Correct. Judging by the chapter headings—“Hijack the Language”, “Co-opt Their Grievances”, and “Look Like Them”—much of his advice to aspiring right-wing comedians seems to be to steal from more accomplished liberal ones.
Humor reflects those who produce and consume it, and MAGA humor voices the values of its followers and the man who leads them. In response, liberals can continue to complain or deny its existence, but like MAGA itself, this humor is not disappearing any time soon. Thus, it is incumbent upon the opposition to find and deploy strategies of resistance.
For liberal-lefties, that means honestly recognizing why comedy terrain is being ceded to the right, and what culpability they have in that development. Then they have to rediscover (and regenerate) the art form that gave us Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken, and George Carlin. Their humor had cultural currency, promoting popular civic beliefs without sacrificing the intellect, innovation, and inspiration that real cutting-edge comedy is capable of.
Works Cited
Gutfeld, Greg. How to be Right: The Art of Being Persuasively Correct. Crown Forum. 2015.
Marchese, David, “Fox News Wanted Greg Gutfeld to Do This Interview. He Wasn’t So Sure”. The New York Times. 8 November 2025.
Sienkiewicz, Matt, and Nick Marx, That’s Not Funny: How the Right Makes Comedy Work for Them. University of California Press. 2022.