Will comedy change if political jokes are skipped?
'The Big Weekend Show' panelists react to comedian Jay Leno deciding to stop making political jokes in order to avoid angering people.
Comedian Kevin James said on Tuesday he won't include politics in his latest stand-up special "Irregardless."
"Very early on when I started doing stand-up, I knew that if I was going to get a spot on ‘The Tonight Show’ or another TV show I had to change my act," James told The New York Post about "Irregardless."
"I didn’t want to be limited by these things… and I wouldn’t write about politics or current events and I didn’t want to lose my material," he added. "I wanted to be as universal as possible and not have to edit my act to go on TV. It kind of stuck with me that way and [my act] grew into being more family-friendly — it’s sometimes trickier and harder to write that way, but I like it."
In "Irregardless," James jokingly discusses aging, including the fact he is "pre-diabetic," according to his doctor, as well as topics like fear, trust, raising kids and his childhood, the New York Post reported. He also said he is currently shooting a documentary about getting in shape. "Irregardless" was filmed during his 2023 comedy tour, and he is about to kick off his next comedy tour "Owls Don’t Walk" on Feb. 29.
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"I have a couple of projects coming up; one is an action-comedy that I have to be in shape for and the other was a movie I already shot… but I fell out of shape and we had to do some reshoots," he said.
"The documentary is me trying to get back to that place again and see if I can stay there consistently… or if it’s too late, and I’m just going to be [98-year-old] Dick Van Dyke for the rest of my life — who, by the way, is in better shape than me."
James isn't the only comedy star beginning to avoid politics. Late night talk show legend Jay Leno announced last week that he would also no longer be making political jokes to avoid angering his audience.
"I just stopped doing politics in my act altogether because—you know, when I did 'The Tonight Show,' the idea was you make fun of both sides equally," he said on the Fox Nation show "Piers Morgan Uncensored."
"Now you've gotta take a side and people are angry if you don't, and I find that when I start to tell a political joke, they want to know the punch line before, is this for or against, you know," he added. "So, I just stopped doing it because I just want people to come and laugh and have a good time. That's the idea of doing a comedy show."
Leno candidly said in 2021 that the landscape of comedy today is such that if you don't "change" for the audience, then you "die."
Jay Leno told Piers Morgan he has cut political jokes from comedy act to avoid angering Democrats and Republicans. (Fox Nation)
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"In football, you have certain rules," Leno said at the time. "And when the rules change, if you don't conform to them, you're out of the game."
A new study from the Media Research Center found that 81% of all political jokes told on major late-night comedy shows in 2023 targeted conservatives.
The media watchdog analyzed each of the 9,518 political jokes told between six major daily late-night shows from January 3 through December 22, 2023, and found that 7,729 of them took aim at "someone or something on the right side of the political spectrum."
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Fox News' Nikolas Lanum and Brian Flood contributed to this report.