Rightwingers may not be into environmentalism, but they sure love recycling jokes. Conservatives seem to have at best five gags in their repertoire and they make them again and again and again. Every single conservative comedy special seems to have the word “triggered” in it, for example, and all these self-identified comedians make the same cringey joke about pronouns. Over and over, someone who doesn’t seem to understand the basics of grammar will stand on stage and say something like: “My pronouns are ‘kiss my ass’,” and think they said something clever.
These aren’t just my woke lefty observations, by the way. There are various studies that show that rightwingers aren’t funny. “When looking only at humour’s structure, rather than its target, conservatives are still significantly less likely to appreciate humour than liberals,” one study found. They do appreciate any opportunity to camouflage bigotry as humour, though. Take the hard-right Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert, for example. She recently helped make the phrase “lesbian dance theory” go viral after telling Fox News that Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness programme is “robbing hard-working Americans to pay for Karen’s daughter’s degree in lesbian dance theory”. She didn’t come up with that phrase, to be clear. As I said, conservatives love recycling jokes and “lesbian dance theory” has been circulating among rightwingers for years now. Boebert just helped the phrase explode in popularity and become the latest anti-liberal insult.
Lesbian dance theory is obviously a meme, not a real thing. But wouldn’t it be great if it was an actual degree? As someone on Twitter noted: “Conservatives always frame objectively cool hypotheticals as the worst things ever.” Remember in 2016 when the co-founder of Latinos for Trump warned that if the US didn’t do something about immigration there would be “taco trucks [on] every corner”? Wall-to-wall taco trucks catering to people shimmying out of their lesbian dance theory classes? Sign me up for that alternative reality, please.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
