Edmund Burke would not make a great stand-up.

From What happened to British comedy? by Ed West.  The subheading is "No one really wants to punch up."

Complaining about comedians being too Left-wing is like complaining about basketball players being too tall. The personality trait openness correlates both with artistic ability and left-of-centre politics, so comedy as with other creative fields will always have a liberal slant. It is also the case that conservative ideas are obviously stupid and absurd, but paradoxically work, which is hard to turn into comedy gold where timing is of the essence. Edmund Burke would not make a great stand-up.

He elaborates.

Most of all, as comedian Stewart Lee once argued in explaining why there are few Right-wingers in his trade, it is about ‘punching upwards’. As he put it: ‘You’re on the right. You’ve already won. You have no tragedy. You’re punching down.’

[snip]

Stand-up is the art of relieving tension caused by the norms and taboos we’re all forced to live by in order to rub along. Live comedy in Britain was once mostly working-class and apolitical, but from the 1960s it became far more Oxbridge-and-university dominated, and interested in current affairs and power. Humour was often aimed at the conservative social mores of the time, as well as the social institutions that enforced them, especially the Church, judiciary, monarchy, military and aristocracy — the ‘establishment’.

Today, with the exception of our miniscule armed forces and the royal family, no arm of the establishment is less progressive than the public at large (and even the royals are shifting in the Meghan Markle era). Whether it’s academia, the civil service, the third sector, legal profession, finance or the Church, the overwhelming majority of high-status people have broadly liberal social views.

When Dave Allen used to make jokes about Catholicism in Ireland, he was poking fun at an institution with real cultural and social power. His observations were funny because a lot of people had those same thoughts but were anxious about voicing them publicly. Today a comedian can rage against a Tory government for its welfare cuts, or take part in a night for asylum seekers or a people’s vote, but there is no tension there between social ideal and comic reality.

I think much the same dynamic is at play here in the US.  Exacerbated, perhaps, by a very explicit desire of most left-leaning comics to berate and denigrate those, the majority, who do not share their ideology.  It is one thing to fail to amuse your audience.  It is quite another to deliberately insult them.

Progressive politics is highly moralised, a vision of how the world should be, which is one reason it’s a comedy dead end, and inevitably prone to intolerance.

Sounds right, but is it.  I had to think it through.  

In the 1950s and 1960s we had both Spike Milligan (middle or lower middle class) and the Monty Python gang (upper middle class).  Both punched upwards against the prevailing institutions and both also self-deprecatingly mocked their own aspirations, their own social norms.

Both were a delightful mix of wit, acerbic humor, antic humor, self-deprecating humor.  Not everything they said or did was funny but there was always something to laugh at.  And they rarely punched down.  

Mixing countries and times, today you have the likes of Jon Stewart, Noah Trevor, John Oliver, Samantha Bee, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Steve Colbert.  They rarely mock institutions, they certainly do not mock their own class, and they punch down all the time.  Colbert, as a template of them all, can be witty on occasion but he really likes being the bully, knocking down those with sincere beliefs which he does not share.  

With Milligan and the Pythons, you felt like this was humor between and among us, mocking our common circumstances, our aspirations and the tensions between what we expect from our institutions and what we experience from them.  

With Cohen, Stewart, Trevor, Oliver, Bee and Colbert, the sense is of a gentleman's club (but what low gentlemen) mocking the riffraff away from the doors.  They would never make fun of themselves and their beliefs or aspirations, nor would they mock those ideological kindred in powerful institutions.  But they are perfectly comfortable making fun of those whom they see as social and ideological inferiors.  There is no grace or gentleness about them.  Their humor is cuttingly malicious humor.  

We live in a time where those in mainstream media, government, education, and large corporations are  wealthy in mockability but no comedians will make any withdrawals.  They abhor ordinary people and aspire to power.  But what a malevolent power.  The power of punching down.