Chapo Trap House and the Culture of the Contemporary Left
Radical voices: The Chapo Guide to Revolution and the character of Millennial humor
My older contemporaries on the Left are mystified by or unfamiliar with Chapo Trap House. It’s fast-paced and ironic, so it tends to leave the ponderous, literal-minded Boomers like us behind. But any opposition has its characteristic sense of humor. In order to sketch a critique of the Millennial Left’s humor or at least one important variant, I’ll compare it first to a similar 60s leftist comedy, Firesign Theater, and then to my gold standard, the thoughtful, subversive wit of Bertolt Brecht.
For the uninitiated, here is the Wikipedia description of Chapo:
Chapo Trap House (also referred to as Chapo) is an American socialist political comedy podcast launched in March 2016. The show is hosted by its three co-founders: Will Menaker, Matt Christman, and Felix Biederman. Amber A'Lee Frost and Virgil Texas joined as recurring co-hosts in November 2016, though the latter left the series in May 2021.… Chapo Trap House is aligned with the dirtbag left, a style of contentious left-wing political discourse that eschews civility in favor of casual, blunt, often vulgar expression.
As the description says, they see themselves as a socialist venue. They tend to reject the more prevalent identity and grievance politics. They despise Liberals. Some of their best satire is aimed at the guilt-driven liberal evangelists of White Fragility and the like. They are right to argue that there exists a not-so-marginal industry of venal sensitivity experts, hired by businesses and institutions. Guilt and grievance pay. This is a rich material for satire. Chapo refuses to turn it over to the Right.
We need to give Chapo credit for creating an appealing culture of leftist opposition. The heyday of Chapo coincided with the ascendancy of Bernie Sanders, and I respect their devotion to him. When I listen to him, I see my own superannuated self, going on and on about injustice—the sort of cranky uncle you dread sitting next to at the Thanksgiving dinner table. Chapo is not devoted to Bernie because he is cool; it’s because he adheres to the truth against all odds. Bernie will fight in the halls of Congress, he will fight them on the beaches and in the hills. We shall never surrender! That’s the uncool, unironic spirit of old Bernie. Fortunately, to the jokers of Chapo, nothing is evidently cooler than his lack of cool. Thank you for that, Chapo.
The pioneering model for a podcast like Chapo is the format devised by the NPR broadcast Car Talk. It is riveting because the mirthful banter of the host-presenters is contagious. Many listeners of Car Talk knew little if anything about the mechanics of automobiles, and I am guessing that of those, few became expert by listening. It was the Groucho-like antics of the street-smart wise-guy presenters that kept a rapt audience tuning in week after week. The Chapo audience is likewise entertained by the infectious amused and amusing exposé of current events especially involving the Right and the Liberal Left. The socialist Left is rarely if ever a target.
The Chapo Guide to Revolution is not a guide to anything but more like an expanded extract from their podcast shtick. Jacobin’s Bhaskar Sunkara—without pretension or irony—offered nothing less than a socialist manifesto with a program for practical politics. I’ve written elsewhere that his manifesto was useful but uninspiring. But the Chapo crew—wary of overshooting the sublime and landing in the ridiculous—cover themselves with a protective Kevlar outfit of jocularity and self-ridicule. As their blurb says, “Chapo Trap House, a collective of self-described ‘assholes from the internet,’ offers a fully ironic ideology for all who feel politically hopeless and prefer broadsides and tirades to reasoned debate.” Who would point a finger at guys who already admit to being “assholes from the internet”? Who would challenge them if they’ve already surrendered to the reigning sense of reality? It’s the universal internet gesture: just kidding.
Actually, this is rather unfortunate. Not only do the Chapo folks know lots of things; their judgment is often precise and discriminating They eschew the broad strokes of leftist rhetoric. But the sticky coat of jocularity makes it difficult to pick up on their fine points and unpack the implications. Their art would only work both as humor and as a dissemination of radical knowledge at a party of history graduate students at the end of an advanced American history seminar. You would need to know a lot already. The takeaway for everyone else is the prestige of hanging with this clever crowd. The implicit relationship of the artists to their public is that of a group selfie with the public leaning in to be in the scene. The listener isn’t so much converted or enlightened as anointed as an initiate of the cool crowd.
If Chapo and its fans are like a collective selfie—an affirmation of identification but rarely an occasion for conversation—the relationship of artist to audience was different in a popular leftist entertainment from the late 60s and early 70s: Firesign Theater. On the surface, this was a parody of radio drama which lost its appeal when television became popular in the course of the 50s. Firesign Theater was a satire of the teenager comics of the late 50s featuring Archie and Jughead who existed in the innocent world of high school culture before drugs, serious sex, or politics came on the scene. Accordingly, Firesign productions like “High School Madness” had a built-in temporal duality in which the goofball teenage reality of the 50s is infiltrated, as in a dream, by the alarming and disturbing themes of the 60s.
High school rivalry plays out between More Science High and Communist Martyrs High. In a pep talk by principal Poop, students are urged to “line up and sign up.” The goofball buddy declares that after graduation he intends to “find a bunch of people who dress alike and follow ‘em around.” But when they arrive for graduation, More Science High has vanished, stolen by Commie Martyrs High. The post-Sputnik science race faces the nightmare of the Red Scare.
This is a humor that, like Chapo, uses satire and association to intimate that nothing is really what it seems. Surface motives are subterfuges. But the relationship of the public to the performance is different: the listener is drawn into a surreal narration which coincides with the awakening of the young person in the 60s. Things are not what they seem. As in David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet the prevailing schmalz is laden with cyanide. It is more participatory and dialectical than Chapo, but it still entertains rather than instructs. Like Chapo, it recruits the listener to be in the know and identify with others who already are. It’s funny, but it’s not revolutionary art.
To aspire to revolutionary art, it’s necessary to incite the public to think critically. My favorite example for this is Bertolt Brecht, the great Marxist dramatist and poet. The poem I like to cite recalls the G.I.-student antiwar movement of the 60s. It induces critical thought by modeling it:
General, your tank is a powerful vehicle It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men. But it has one defect: It needs a driver. General, your bomber is powerful. It flies faster than a storm and carries more than an elephant. But it has one defect: It needs a mechanic. General, man is very useful. He can fly and he can kill. But he has one defect: He can think.
All wheels stop, all weapons go silent if we and our comrades think and act.
Brecht is the genius. The further removed from him, the more his simplicity and his equality of poet and reader get replaced by the hierarchical in-the-know stance of the artist. We on the Left imagine ourselves as egalitarians, but especially in the wake of critical theory, we cannot quite resist lording it over our audience.