Conservatives aren't funny, but liberals are even worse.
It was October 29, 2019. Bernie Sanders was campaigning for President. Tom Jorgenson was upset. He took to Twitter, and posted a since-deleted tweet: “Between B*rnie, my ex-wife, the tenant from hell, and general chumpfuckery, this has been a cromulent fuckcrustable of a day. Tommy needy drinky.”
Tommy is one of many liberals who believe bizarre compound swear words are funny. Tommy’s writing is a sea of unnecessary modifiers. Not only does he create new compound words with “fuck” in them, but he further modifies each with adjectives—“general” and “cromulent.”
(Cromulent itself is a made-up word. It was not created by Tommy, but The Simpsons. In season 7, episode 16, Lisa the Iconoclast, students watch a short film about Jebediah Springfield, the founder of their town. In the film, Jebediah says, “A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.” We cut to the back of the classroom, where Edna Crabapple says to Ms. Hoover, “Embiggens? I never heard that word before I moved to Springfield.” Ms. Hoover responds, “I don’t know why. It’s a perfectly cromulent word.”
Both cromulent and embiggens were invented for this episode. Both words are now in dictionaries. Cromulent is a thus a made-up word of some renown. Pair it with a brand-new compound word featuring “fuck” and we have ourselves a very specific joke a very specific type of person would make. (They probably have a “But Her Emails!” bumper sticker.))
Tommy is not the only liberal to follow this formula. Here are some others I encountered recently: Doc_Blox of Minnesota called Donald Trump an “insufferable cockwaffle,” while someone I screenshotted but forgot to save citations for called him an “immoral shitweasel.”
This style feels like the writing of a precociously intelligent child who wrote long whimsical sentences in school assignments, was told he had talent and intelligence, and then decided to never develop as a writer from that day forward. This is swearing that calls attention to itself as transgressive when swearing isn’t even necessary. This is the writing of a guy who loves stylistic flourishes more than conveying meaning.
I say “guy” intentionally. These all read like educated, white, middle-class males writing angry screeds at a world leaving them behind. They want to be funny. They need to be heard. But it’s not working.
The far right and left dominate online political discourse. Young people are either becoming right wing groypers fetishizing fascism or Leninists in polycules. Meanwhile, Tommy, Doc, and the guy who wrote “shitweasel” consider the liberalism of LBJ and Obama as the moments when America was truly great. But their version of liberalism is dying out.
The right has free speech warriors posting Wojaks and Soyjaks, whose “free speech” is mostly using slurs about marginalized identities. They are on the leading edge of something terrible, but they are on the leading edge of something. Meanwhile, the “dirtbag left” has had wildly popular podcasts like Cumtown with styles of humor we’d never heard before. (“Cumtown” is a compound word with a “naughty” word in it, but it’s short, to the point, and not modified by a five-syllable adjective.) The online right and left both have jokes that work and go viral. Liberals have Tommy and his “chumpfuckery,” and he was mocked for it so much he deleted his tweet. (Until recently, liberals also had Steven Colbert, who was gently mocking Republicans using a show format pioneered by Steve Allen back before TV was in color.)
A punchline has to hit you with something you didn’t see coming. A dying ideology will never bring us anything unexpected. It’s the political tendencies with new outlooks that are generating the jokes that work.
The liberalism that burst into the world with the French and American Revolutions is disappearing. As it dies, it recedes from the forefront of our minds and the popular imagination. It’s not there for us to quickly assemble into an understood punchline. As we struggle to remember what these guys think, we fail to make sense of their jokes.
Tommy-style “fuckcrustable” jokes are liberal attempts to join the world of transgressive online humor. The authors of these posts are projecting a self-image into the Internet, an online avatar demanding a place in the political discourse. They scream to be let in: “Immoral shitweasel!” “Insufferable cockwaffle!” “General chumpfuckery!” No one laughs. Very few listen. They write even longer sentences with even more modifiers and swear words. No one laughs. No one listens. The odd dog barks. The world moves along.