https://twitter.com/TheDailyShow/status/1636106733490778113
i'm gonna do an "uhhhhh acktually" here because there's so many libs in the replies going "it's not that hard to work out, they're making fun of the woman who wrote a book about woke who can't define it, get a sense of humour commies":
If the joke is to lampoon Mandel for having her brain BSOD on live TV and not be able to define woke after writing a book on it, and you literally replace "Woke" with "Capitalism" and "Bethany Mandel" with "Karl Marx", then your joke is based on one of two suppositions:
- EITHER you are implying that Mandel is actually smart and worth comparing to one of the most notable economic theorists and philosophers of all time, just because she wrote a book too and everyone can have a brain fart sometimes;
- OR you are implying that Marx is also a fucking dummy who didn't actually know what he was critiquing and wouldn't be able to define Capitalism if asked directly because he was a dumb commie
so, go on then libs, tell me which one of those makes it funny
You're overthinking it. Its a dumb joke but you're applying way too much thought into it because you take Marx too seriously. Commies don't need to get a sense of humor here, because the joke is still bad and lame, but they do need to kind of get a stick out of their ass and stop clutching pearls when Marx is the subject of the joke. Because they're right. The daily show is SIMPLY saying "this would be like if Marx couldnt define capitalism". Thats the entire joke. Its not a good one, but that is the purpose of it.
“this would be like if Marx couldnt define capitalism”
which directly implies that Mandel is an authority on wokeness because Marx is an authority on capitalism and critiquing it
cmon my man, we'll gladly make fun of Marx for shit that actually makes sense (like him being a slob who findommed Engles) but context does existI stand by thinking thats overthinking it. Like I don't think you have to make a 1:1 comparison between Mandel and Marx by making this joke.
Like I get your point I just think you're putting more thought into it than they did and it isnt really necessary.
I agree with you. I'd wager 95% of people outside of a socialist country knows what Marx did other than "Har Har capitalism bad, communist manifesto". Even people who know that Marx was an economist or a philosopher don't know he's THE capitalism guy, who understood it so well to know that it's irredeemable and that it must be destroyed.
This woman sounds like someone who hates/opposes wokeism, so if all you know is "Marx hated capitalism, he even wrote a book about it", it's not hard to associate it with her name and wokeism.
Marx also literally defined capitalism. I don't think Mandel created the term woke to definite a social relationship.
If you didn't know that though I can see how it flows.
Eh I take it to be "Haha can you imagine literally any other supposed expert or critic being unable to define the thing they are railing against?"
I mean the third option is "could you imagine if an academic dedicated their life purporting to study something, but then couldn't define it?"
which circles back to the implication that Bethany Mandel is an academic or is even smart - she's a dumbass fash column writer
This is why the whole thing falls on its arse - because Mandel is a fucking brainlet and you can't suspend belief enough to think otherwise
But it's not saying that, the absurdity is imagining an academic who was dedicated to a single topic do what she did. It's calling her a pseudointellectual.
picking an academic who not only spent their life studying it but also literally going out and explaining it to people
Karl was an incredibly bad comunicator, his work is readable only thanks to Jenny and Fred
I did a mental groan and then an even bigger one when I noticed it was the daily show not the daily wire
I don't think thats the point of the joke the Daily Show is making here. The joke is "what happened with the anti-woke lady is kinda life if Karl Marx had that reaction when asked about Capitalism" not "Karl Marx WOULD DEFINITLY have that reaction when asked about capitalism"
To be clear, i still think its a bad joke.
KARL MARX: Capitalism is...uhh..hang on. (15 seconds of silence as he pulls 3 books out of a briefcase)
No piece of media has declined as hard in my brain as the Daily Show. To think I used to think this shitshow was leftist.
The deep urge of libs to deboonk Marx without ever having engaged with his material at all baffles me. Marx certainly had his poor takes (like dismissing the lumpenproletariat as reactionary, the Chinese communists provided ample proof to the contrary) but none of these fucking dullards would ever know because they are so entirely subsumed by their ideology that they never even came close to ever even consider any criticisms of it let alone read the theoretical foundations of their own ideology. None of these idiots ever read The Wealth of Nations, The Road to Serfdom or even the fucking bee parable by Mandeville but internalised it’s proposed rationale so thoroughly that they dismiss any criticism of it outright as irrational since their ideology is perceived as logic itself and void of any axiomatic framework.
Libs genuinely believe that exposure to anything Marx wrote will forever be branded on your forehead and make every other point you ever make moot.
They are idealists after all. They believe ideas warp reality. This is why they also never shut the fuck up.
To libs, reading Das Kapital is the same as reading the Necronomicon. Both drive the reader mad with ridiculous ideas and turn them into raving cultists.
They're not entirely wrong.
The Spectre of Communism is right behind me, isn't it?
Is that the "impending financial collapse" signal? Oh, awesome, dude!
Oh, the rate of profit is falling? I guess that just happened.
Please, try not to step on the "exploit workers more lever or..." (the clumsy comic relief character steps on the lever right at that moment). Whoops.
Author of an "anti-woke" book was asked to define "woke" live on TV/Youtube and just went "uuuh, ooom, uuumm" for like ~30 seconds.
It would be a good joke if they just posted a picture of a wall of text with tiny font that took 10 minutes to read.
holy shit, she defined it as "the belief we should re-do society in order to create hierarchies of oppression." Like I'm not even a reactionary scumbag and I could define what they mean better than that. Wokeness as they say it is "a collection of beliefs that propose that mainstream society contains a multitude of oppressive practices not limited to racism, transphobia, and exploitation of poor people. Adherents of wokeness believe they have a moral duty to end these oppressive structures."
they can't define it like that because it sounds too reasonable. What, are you for oppression? Is racism not real? They can't give good definitions of what wokeness is or else they'll just sound like maniacs.
they can’t define it like that because it sounds too reasonable.
that's a best case scenario, like if you were arguing on the news that Silicon Valley Bank failed because it was "too woke" and then you were asked, "ok but what does woke mean and how did that contribute to SVB's demise", what answer can you possibly give that doesn't make you sound like an insane person
they can't really answer something like that directly. The only way to sound normal is they have to complain about diversity requirements or mandatory sensitivity training. They take the faux progressiveness of a bank at face value.
with specific questions like "how does wokeness hurt a company and what does it mean" they'll maybe spew transphobia or panic about bathrooms, they'll maybe say it's actually sexist to hire too many women, maybe they'll say there's an anti-white agenda. Honestly they'll just say the same things as what that one Google employee did years ago. The guy who wrote that bizarre manifesto about how women are genetically disinclined to do coding work.
I don't think there's a way to avoid sounding insane, but there are ways of saying it to sound reasonable to the average American who doesn't know anything
Its an awkward joke to me too but I think the point of the joke is "what happened with the anti-woke lady is like if Karl Marx couldnt define capitalism" not "Karl Marx probably couldn't define capitalism if asked" so idg the reaction in here.
we would literally deploy the "leftist meme.png" as the punchline itself
Marx knew more about capitalism than almost every lib on earth combined
Me, pointing at the guy who quite literally wrote the book "Capital: Critique of Political Economy" then wrote a second volume and died with a pile of drafts for a third: "You don't know anything about Captalism"
You, Karl Marx: "Mind telling me how much it cost to make your coat?"
Capitalism is the force that finds a standup making jokes laughing at striking miners who got murdered and decides to elevate him to a major late-night hosting gig he's not qualified for
