I think it's the opposite actually. I think 'satirists' now are expected to be so extreme that the only think people think is funny is "the other side is composed of dribbling morons". Humor that suggests that the people with different political views may have feelings and brains is completely unacceptable.
They simply wouldn't buy into the idea that people from "the past" would have different views and that you can't try to understand them absent that context. Otherwise everything since before 2005 is likely "wrong" somehow (I'm being horribly simplistic, but you get the idea).
It's like when I hear a lot of views right now about the CIS region, from people who have no recollection of the Cold War, or think the Cold War "was stupid". As someone who lived through the Cold War, I might even agree it was stupid, but I also understand that when I was 10-15 I was living IN it realtime, not pondering it decades after the fact.
Do a web search for O'Rourke's "Foreigners around the world" and report back.
> Humor that suggests that the people with different political views may have feelings and brains is completely unacceptable.
I think this may be a case of politically polarization widening as the range of allowable humor narrows. What would be an example of a joke that would have been career ending for an edgy American comedian or satirist 40 years ago, but not now?
The SNL sketch between Richard Pryor and Chevy Chase is emblematic.
http://cbldf.org/about-us/case-files/obscenity-case-files/pe...
Two quick examples are thestranger.com (under the leadership of editor Dan Savage) and Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Whatever point, perhaps even meritorious, they're trying make, it's buried under sarcasm and insults.
Absolutely exhausting.
Maybe this cycle started with TV. All the slapfights. Gore Vidal v William F. Buckley Jr. Shows like Crossfire.
He was terse, and spoke things out loud about the American subconscious that was often uncomfortable (much like Mencken) across the political spectrum. To plagiarize a BBC article: PJ O'Rourke memorably said that the American public viewed the Bosnian war as pitting the "unspellables" against the "unpronounceables".
You can view that as heartless detachment, or you can see it as an unvarnished observation of the total disconnect the American people had with what happened in the Balkans at the time. I suspect PJ left those kinds of statements open-ended for the exact purpose of having to make people think about them...were they capable of mustering the electricity between the ears (knowing that some likely wouldn't).
Enjoyed by both liberals and conservatives who managed to take away very different messages.
* I also revered Twain and Mencken, but PJ/HST/MI were contemporaries and in my time, which carried a more visceral stamp to them.