By Cathy Keim
“Laughter is an instant vacation.”
Milton Berle
In my previous post on propaganda, Stella Morabito stated that good comedy and satire are two of the more important remedies to debunk propaganda. Evan Sayet, a conservative comedian and author, was the next speaker and he explained how to use humor to win the discussion.
This is not an easy topic for me because I am the person that always mangles the punch line of the joke. Evan refused to let anybody off the hook with that excuse. He said that you can learn to use humor so get to work. A professional like himself has to have new material constantly, but for our purposes old jokes are fine. Sayet added that we should treat it like a job and to keep a file of jokes – if you hear a good joke, put it in your file.
Conservatives are serious people that want to transmit serious ideas so they do not think that humor is appropriate because it will undermine the subject. Evan counters that humor is just another way of delivering information and one that can be very memorable.
Those on the right are also often portrayed as dour, inhuman Nazi types. The fastest way to break that stereotype is to make people laugh, and it can allow you to advance your narrative. For example, this joke from the Cold War era (an old joke) illustrates the scarcity of goods in the Communist countries, but it is done with a smile.
An old man was standing outside a grocery store in East Germany with an empty shopping bag. He couldn’t remember if he had already done his shopping!
Evan contends that modern liberals’ mental development is halted at age five when they enter kindergarten. From then on they are rewarded for conforming, so they never mature. They possess knowledge but reject it, and think that everything you “think” is a reflection of your bigotry. Discriminating thought is a bad word to them, so use humor to advance your narrative in a memorable way.
Every speaker must know their audience, so you must choose your message to suit it. Here Evan gave an example from when he was doing a tour entertaining troops along the Pacific Rim. He was the headline comedian, but there was a young lady before his act who did not adjust hers to fit her audience. She was speaking to troops who were either coming out of the fighting or heading into the fighting.
She would close her segment with several minutes detailing her fight with cancer, so Evan said that he used that to start his act. He would open by saying, “It is very brave of Debbie to share about her battle with cancer. I am a cancer survivor also.” At this point the crowd would flinch since she had not been funny and now the headliner was not being funny, until he delivered the punch line. “I married a woman born in July.”
Evan has a plan to retake America, one he calls Adopt-a-Democrat. Each conservative needs to find one Democrat so that they can tell them truth gradually. Say your Adopt-a-Democrat friend complains about prices: You respond with yes; the Obama economy is terrible. Remember to smile and act happy, and don’t drag others down. You don’t have to win every argument, just treat them like children and use teachable moments.
For instance, here is a teachable moment and a joke that I stole – so feel free to steal it from me. If somebody laments that the national debt just hit the $19 trillion mark, you can say:
“I love to go to Washington – if only to be near my money.”
Bob Hope
The liberals own the media, but we own the truth. Conservatives must articulate our ideas in a memorable, pleasant way. Evan wears a circular white lapel pin with a single black dot in the center. When people ask what it stands for, he replies: “Remember when Obama said you could keep your health insurance, period? That is the period!”
He addressed microaggressions as conditioned emotional responses because the liberals are surrounded by one world view. If they are exposed to other views they are distressed. I must admit that at this point I wondered if humor could break through to a poor dear that is so overcome with trauma by being exposed to an alternate view that they must flee to a safe space.
This is political correctness being used to control people to the point that they cannot even function. The poor dears are separated from one another by their fear of expressing their feelings and their anger is cultivated to turn them against anyone who challenges their accepted dogma.
Evan encourages us to take the time to learn to use humor. It is work, but it is our best method to be able to persuade a liberal to hear our point of view.
As Bob Hope once said, “You can always tell when a man’s well-informed. His views are pretty much like yours.”