Who’s laughing now?

Sunday, July 23, 2006 | 7:40 a.m.

For so long liberals were neither fun nor funny. No meat, no cigarettes, no ethnic or sexual jokes. They were a joyless lot, with their public radio droning on about some faraway genocide or the latest trend in rooftop organic gardening. And for a magazine, the left had The Nation, printed on cheap and - surprise! - recycled paper filled with obscure debates about Alger Hiss.

Add to this giant buzzkill the feckless Democratic Party - with its wooden Kerrys and Gores and embarrassing Clintons and Bidens - and the result is a vacuum.

For years, the Republican message machine, especially talk radio, filled that vacuum with punchy sound bites and aggrieved, melodramatic outrage that bounced around the political universe like a superball.

"There's a gap that had to be filled," Lewis Black, a comedian known for his eye-popping, finger-jabbing rage about the country's rightward lurch, said in an interview. He begins a run Thursday at the MGM Grand's Hollywood Theater. "The Democrats just kinda laid down, and Republicans thought Christ had officially recognized them as the best team."

The public has flocked to Black, as well as a new set of comedians, writers and bloggers whose chief rhetorical tools are sarcasm, irony and withering ridicule. Even if the Democratic Party doesn't always get the plot, many of the party's voters and potential voters do. As such, these new satirists have become the de facto loyal opposition, often succeeding with humor where Democrats have failed with their earnest position papers, dull talking points and cowering.

For millions of Americans who share a left-leaning sensibility but are turned off by the sanctity and self-seriousness of 60s-era liberals, Black is a gift. He and others like him - Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi, the satirical newspaper The Onion - represent a black and anarchic humor they feel is perfectly suited to dark times.

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"There's a new kind of person who's disaffected with everybody," said Taibbi, who offered a devastating portrait of the 2004 Democratic primary, "Spanking the Donkey," while covering the campaign for the New York Press, an alternative weekly.

He left there after an uproar over a piece he wrote titled, "52 Funniest Things about the Upcoming Death of the Pope." (22: "Mankind scrambles to choose new leader of inflexible, sexually morbid institutional anachronism; heretofore anonymous bureaucrat will instantly be celebrated as world's holiest man as he travels to AIDS-stricken Africa to denounce the use of condoms.")

Predictably, New York politicians - Republican and Democrat, including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton - climbed over each other to find a microphone to denounce Taibbi.

Taibbi carries on at Rolling Stone in the tradition of the late Hunter S. Thompson, though his writing is sharper and not (quite as) drug-addled. In a recent portrait of Tom DeLay, he described the disgraced former majority leader thus: "His religious conversion came while watching a videotaped James Dobson sermon, which means that the most important moment of his spiritual life occurred as he sat in front of a television."

Taibbi believes he has tapped into a whole segment of the population that until recently has had no voice: "There's a lot of people out there who look at George Bush and say, 'My God, how can this clown be president?' But then I go to anti-war marches, and there's a humorless earnestness that's really a turnoff. It doesn't speak to me."

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There's now some evidence that a wide swath of the public shares the Taibbi dark vision of American politics. Nearly half of Americans between 18 and 24 watch "The Daily Show" - a satirical newscast on Comedy Central - at least occasionally, according to the Pew Research Center. Jody Baumgartner and Jonathan Morris, two East Carolina University political scientists, recently published a decidedly unfunny paper titled "The Daily Show Effect," which examines this audience and then attempts to determine what impact the show has on its political attitudes.

Compared to CBS Evening News viewers, "Daily Show" watchers distrust politicians and media and have more trust in their own ability to decipher what's really going on. They also blame America's current predicaments on political and media elites.

Certain high-minded types seized on the study, or at least one reading of it, to claim "The Daily Show" is bad for America because it could keep these newly cynical voters at home.

"So maybe ridicule and invective, though entertaining, and a refreshing alternative to the mainstream media's passivity and reserve, isn't the boon to democracy it's cracked up to be?" Lee Siegal wrote on The New Republic Web site.

Nevertheless, it certainly plays a new role in political discourse. "The Daily Show" often uses a few snippets of video to reveal doublespeak, contradiction, or farce, a technique not employed by the mainstream media, except occasionally on Fox News, which uses the tool mostly to embarrass Democrats.

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There may be no publication more at odds with The New Republic, another old doyenne of establishment liberalism, than the Rude Pundit, which can be found at rudepundit.blogspot.com. One recent post involved an entire riff about Bill O'Reilly and stripper poles. The details can't be printed here.

The author, Lee Papa, is, of all things, a professor of English and drama at City University New York, College of Staten Island. "It's a much nicer campus than it sounds," he said sheepishly.

He began writing in the Rude Pundit in 2003 after Al Franken published an anti-Bush book, "and there was this uproar about how it had lowered the level of political discourse. I thought, 'No, let me show you lowered discourse,' " he said.

Papa grew up in Florida and New Orleans, and he said his writing is a reflection of the way he and his friends talk. "It's that conversation, on acid, more intensified," he said. Papa said his goals are first to be funny but also "to show how the language of everyday people is used to make valid political points."

Papa, who has a one-man show based on his Rude Pundit persona, said it's fun to be on the left again, to a large degree because Republicans control all branches of government and a significant chunk of the mainstream media now.

Powerlessness has been useful, he said. He compared his material to the raw, early days of talk radio for the right, when Rush Limbaugh used sound effects mimicking an abortion.

"There is a big market for undiluted rage, and also for somebody who can take that rage and direct it away from a five-state killing spree, and make people laugh instead," Papa said.

Enter Lewis Black.

For a long time, Black was a struggling Yale-educated playwright and comic. A fellow comic told him that he should do something with all his anger on stage.

"It was a revelation," he said.

This was just about the time the country went Republican, and Democrats seemed to have lost all their fight and energy, or as Black screams, "The Democrats are the party of no ideas, and the Republicans are the party of bad ideas."

Black was exceedingly polite and pleasant during a phone interview, and for the most part relaxed. Still, a few subjects are mainlined to his adrenaline glands. On tax cuts for the rich: "How do you people not get it? Why is it you're so hell-bent on protecting rich people?" He proposed having the rich submit a complete list of everything they want, delivering it to them and confiscating the rest of their money.

He calmed down and said sometimes he feels like his whole act these days could be sitting on the stage and reading the newspaper, because the news can seem so surreal.

Black is clearly very grateful to his fans who now recognize him on the road and say thanks. As for his new political influence, "We do find it weird, and we try to deflect it as much as possible."