Laughing at the Lowlifes: A Missing Piece in Explaining Online Radicalism”

Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate, and the Underrated Power of Shock Laughter

There are all these theories about why young men turn to toxic messaging and maybe they’re all true to a certain degree, but most treatments on the subject miss a huge reason: Lolz.

I see this blindspot in the New York Times’ recent obsession with Nick Fuentes, a Zoomer internet show host who somehow combines explicitly racist White identity politics with support for a Kanye West presidency. I won’t claim to understand all the intricacies of Fuentes’ “groyper movement,” but a lot of it tracks if you’ve got a background in old school 4Chan nihilism. Fuentes has had a cult following for awhile, a sway he managed to parlay into a 2022 dinner with Kanye West and Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Now Fuentes is back on the mainstream radar after Tucker Carlson hosted him on Tucker’s podcast. The friendly interview provoked a crackup in conservative media, because some wish to distance themselves from Fuentes’ racism and antisemitism, plus Carlson by extension, whereas others seek to make peace with people they perceive as having a slice of the zeitgeist.

Michelle Goldberg at the NYT writes:

If you’re not familiar with Fuentes’s ideology, he helpfully distilled it on his streaming show, “America First,” in March. “Jews are running society, women need to shut up,” he said, using an obscenity. “Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part.” His sneering, proudly transgressive attitude has made him a hero to legions of mostly young men who resent all forms of political gatekeeping. The conservative writer Rod Dreher, a close friend of Vance, warned, “I am told by someone in a position to know that something like 30 to 40 percent of D.C. G.O.P. staffers under the age of 30 are Groypers.” The figure is impossible to check, but it captures a widespread sense that Fuentes’s politics are ascendant.

If true, that seems…not great. Personally, I take it “seriously, but not literally.” As in, there are consequences to the popularity of sociopathic people with bleak messaging, but I’m also not going to pretend that such engagement-seeking figures promote a deeply felt cohesive ideology. I also believe that, if we are to truly understand what’s happening, we should admit the non ideological reasons for the success of bad actors.

We now see explorations of just why so many young men are into Fuentes, similar to the preceding “manosphere” think pieces on the rise of Andrew Tate. Why would these kids turn to this malevolent Michael J. Fox character? Are young males OK? Is it the lack of housing? A broader sense of decline? The inability to find romantic partners? DEI backlash? I’m not dismissing any of these theories, but explorations almost always miss a main reason for a toxic cult figure’s popularity: Lolz.

It’s hard for a New York Times writer to admit that its villains can be funny. For years I’ve witnessed this struggle from people disgusted with the current president. There’s a correlation between abhorring Donald Trump and not finding him funny. But, whether you hate him or not, he’s hilarious. As the world’s most powerful man, his consequences might not be so amusing, but the man himself is a gifted comedic character.

I get the reluctance to admitting as much. We want the people we hate to have none of what we purport to like. “Funny” is a charismatic power people are reluctant to grant adversaries. You see this happen whenever a comedian makes jokes that offend ideological sensibilities. The sin is more often framed as “hack” or “unfunny” than what’s really grinding the critic. The tacit assumption is that no person violating your taboos can be hilarious in the process. “Funny” just has to be “good.”

Growing up, I passively believed that “funny” was a higher order quality in a person. Conan O’Brien was a God to my teenage self. His humor wasn’t simply a talent, designed to keep me watching celebrities hawk their movies, but instead a pure extension of genius. I was a better and smarter kid for staying up past midnight to watch this goofy guy do his “String Dance.” Jon Stewart wasn’t merely clever. No, his jokes landed because he was smarter and better than his ideological targets. At least that’s what I thought. Now, looking back, I conclude, “Those were smart guys, who happened to be funny, which tells me very little about whether they’re correct in an assessment of how the world should be run.”

Being funny can demonstrate an elevated understanding, but not necessarily. Nick Fuentes is a bad guy with bad ideas. He’s also funny. I’d argue that it’s actually pretty hard to get far as a bad guy with bad ideas without being funny.

It’s a similar dynamic with aforementioned Andrew Tate. I saw this clip of his highlights from the Your Mom’s House podcast, hosted by comedian couple Tom Segura and Christina Pazsitzky. Tate’s outrageous proclamations had the professional standups repeatedly bowled over.

The jokes pop because Tate is a terrible guy who’ll confidently express shocking opinions. Surprises ensue, standard conversational patterns are broken.

Tate tells a story where a girlfriend assumes he wants her to act independently because a smart guy like himself would grow tired of “a robot.” Tate’s succinct response of, “Bitch I wish you were a robot,” is darkly hilarious. If the story is true, it’s both sad and funny that she’d expect anything deeper from this lowlife she’s invested in. Perhaps it’s not humorous to you, because comedy is somewhat subjective, but I involuntarily cackled, as did the comedians.

Even Candace Owens is occasionally funny, also in part because she’s gleefully mean. When Owens isn’t babbling about her latest conspiracy theory, she’s getting laughs at the expense of her earnest targets. I dislike Owens, but will concede that her send up of pop star Sabrina Carpenter is (you guessed it) quite funny.

I can’t give you a unified theory on “funny,” beyond broadly recognizing why something works. Some have theorized that humor is a game of “benign violation” and I suppose the Internet can make almost everything feel at a slight remove, thus benign. One can emotionally react to an evil man’s menace in the way they’d take in a cartoon’s colorful villain. This is the flip side of how the Internet can also make almost everything feel dangerously real. We are constantly absorbing stimuli from outside our immediate surroundings, so whether we’re terrified or tickled can often just be a matter of perspective.

I can’t find the clip but comedian Andrew Schulz recently said in an interview that, against his better judgment, he wants the algorithm to serve up whatever “wild shit” Nick Fuentes is saying. It’s not an endorsement of what’s being said, but instead a recognition of how entertaining the shock value is. A decade ago, I had liberal friends sending me clips of Alex Jones for similar reasons. They weren’t partial to Jones’ conspiracy theories, though doubtless many people are, but my friends quite enjoyed the spectacle of a boisterous insane man acting absent boundaries.

I’m not trying to cope about the direction of society here. You can find someone “funny” as the prelude to earnestly mirroring their takes. I don’t believe that the interest in these modern figures is wholly divorced from their destructive social/political messages. I also think that the rising popularity of these messages constitute a form of backlash to Great Awokening Era’s taboos.

I’m merely pointing out that the shock laughter component gets underrated by people whose focus tends to be on Big Ideas. To many writers, everything that resonates speaks to underlying deprivations. And sure, maybe there’s a component of that, but you don’t have to be deprived to laugh at, and occasionally with, the depraved. Once we disengage from the belief that funny people are better, we can more accurately get a sense of why the worse keep getting engagement.