Babylon Bee CEO says leftist comedians ‘lost their sting’

Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon asserted during a Wednesday interview that much of the comedy emerging from the political left has ceased to be effective because comedians care more about enforcing ideology and kowtowing to power than being funny.

“I think one of the ways that they lost their sting was because they purposefully adopted this hands-off posture, where the politicians that they like, the people that are in power, and the institutions that control our public discourse — everything from media and entertainment, education, the big corporations, all this stuff — is all dominated by people that they’re in ideological lock-step with,” Dillon said on the “Your Welcome” podcast with Michael Malice.

“They don’t see these things as being funny; they see them as being good and true and [that] we need these things,” he continued.

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Dillon offered gender ideology as an example of a topic that is seemingly off-limits to many leftist comedians despite its self-evident absurdity, which he provided as evidence of the fact that many contemporary comedians “want to protect the narrative from criticism.”

“These are really radical and crazy ideas, and it used to just be mocked and laughed at kind of universally, and now you do find very few instances of people on the left who are willing to make fun of it at all,” he said.

“So you end up hearing from a lot of comedians who are basically giving a sermon from the stage, they’re preaching to the audience, and they’re going for ‘clapter,’ as someone called it, where it’s like this applause of affirmation instead of laughter from the audience.”

“I always thought the first rule of comedy is to be funny, it’s to be subversive, it’s to poke holes in the popular narrative, not try to prop up the popular narrative and promote it,” he added. “So that’s really where everything has kind of gone off the rails with comedy, in my view.”

Dillon said many comedians are no longer funny “because the things that are most deserving of mockery are the things that they are least likely to touch.”

Dillon praised HBO host Bill Maher for ridiculing the idea of transgender surgeries for kids by joking about how glad he was that nobody ever scheduled him “for eye removal and peg leg surgery” when he wanted to be a pirate as a boy.

“He’s mocking something that never should have been taken seriously in the first place, and he’s doing it at at a time when you’re not supposed to, when it’s considered hate speech to even go there,” Dillon said of Maher. “Was it, like, crazy hysterical? No, it was mildly funny, but profoundly important.”

Dillon’s interview aired on the two-year anniversary of Babylon Bee being locked out of X for a satirical tweet announcing U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel (Richard) Levine as their “man of the year,” which he claimed was an example of the ideological restraints on comedy and the “privilege” many on the left exhibit despite their claims of oppression.

“The idea is that this hateful conduct, this kind of joke that needs to be prohibited, is punching down on someone who’s marginalized,” Dillon said. “We have power and privilege; this person doesn’t. They lack power and privilege, and so when we make a joke about them, we’re punching down on them, and that’s wrong, it’s like bullying, it’s mean.”

“And I’m sitting there thinking to myself, ‘You know, this is a white male high-ranking government official, and they’re on the cover right now of USA Today receiving an award.’ If this person is marginalized, then the word marginalized has no meaning. There’s nothing about this situation that indicates being oppressed or marginalized.”

Dillon noted that if the biggest problem in one’s life is someone potentially joking about their gender, then they are “pretty d— privileged.”

“I think that is profound privilege, and beyond that, if you can have somebody censored for so much as joking about you, you’re one of the most powerful people who’s ever lived,” he added. “Kings have that power.”

Malice noted that Levine’s privilege is such that others ran interference for him “before the ink was dry” on Babylon Bee’s tweet. 

The Christian satire website had its account restored in November 2022 following CEO Elon Musk’s purchase of the company. However, Dillon remembered that when Musk first reached out to them privately on the platform, they could not respond because their account had been locked.

Later in the hour-long interview, Dillon also spoke about how he was raised as “a pastor’s kid” and detailed the history of his family’s Christian faith, noting how his mother was raised Jewish and his father was agnostic until they converted.

“I’ve been a Christian for basically as long as I can remember, but I will admit that, as a teenager, I [was] repeating the sinner’s prayer over and over again, trying to make sure that I was saved,” he said. “I did that for a little while before I started to actually rest in the promise of Christ without feeling my own inadequacy, making it seem like it was was invalid.”