Comic Cons

Let’s say your side’s got the executive branch, the House, the Senate, a plurality of the Supreme Court justices, a couple of cable channels, The Wall Street Journal, the bulk of AM gasbags, every major corporation and is even now engaged in, er, “hands on” promulgation of its beliefs in two separate desert kingdoms. How would you feel?

If you’re the American right, the answer, of course, is marginalized. Still. Even in comedy, where the laughs generated by Republicans tend to the unintentional — take those old “I’m a Brownbacker” stickers, for example. So it has fallen to the Right Stuff, a loose confederation of conservative comics, to liberate club comedy from its leftist oppressors — or something like that.

“In L.A., when people find out you’re a conservative, they have this question,” says coheadliner Steve Elbin. “They ask, ‘Are you out yet?'” Republican comics aren’t exactly blackballed, Elbin says, but they learn quickly that, onstage, their political opinions don’t go down as easily as the dick jokes. “Stars can be controversial,” he says. “But others can’t.”

“We’re not politically correct,” promises Right Stuff mastermind Eric Peterkofsky. “It’s not a George W. rally. We make fun of stuff that all sides can agree are silly, like tree huggers. And really, with a great sense of humor you can laugh at anything.”

Except, perhaps, John Kerry. “It’s hard to write a joke about him,” Elbin says. “You’d have to know what he stands for.” This point is emphasized at the merch table, where Peterkofsky will have someone hawking “John Kerry Flip-Flops” — rubber sandals that commemorate either the Massachusetts senator’s double talk or the right’s distaste for nuanced positions. Other veins they’ll be mining: the French, of course; the animal-rights crowd, naturally; left-leaning celebs such as Michael Moore and Janeane Garofalo, you better goddamn well believe. Elbin says, “We had a joke in Boston: What’s the difference between Janeane Garofalo and a dead cat?”

Wait for it. Wait for it.

“A dead cat’s kind of funny.”

It’s not just politics that separate this from a typical night at Stanford’s. These boys won’t be working blue. “We did a Bush event,” Peterkofsky says, “and you don’t want to let out an f-word in front of Lynne Cheney.” Peterkofsky calls it a PG-13 show, with innuendo and maybe a bite me or two, which points out an interesting contradiction: For all their relief at being allowed at last to express their politics, the comics are watching their language much more than usual.

Elbin, who is bright and thoughtful and speaks movingly of performing for U.S. troops in Afghanistan, claims each of his jokes has a point. “You can’t put on a good show without meaning,” he says, which, his politics be damned, is refreshing — especially when this writer’s recent visit to the Overland Park Stanford’s found three comics climaxing with bits about blowing their loads in the faces of pets or family members. Maybe what’s happening here is bigger than the canard that conservative viewpoints can’t find expression in our popular culture. Perhaps, at last, it’s the return of comedy with more on its mind than cut-your-mullets and women-be-different-from-men.