The Interpretive Traps of Ironic Performance

The question of irony is the most pressing right off the bat for any viewer of the Tim Dillon Show. Unlike, for example, the Colbert Report, which parodied right-wing media personalities but with many winks and nods to its liberal audience, Dillon doesn’t leave much daylight between performance and intention. With guests like Alex Jones and Candace Owens, it’s easy to lump him in with most right populist media, either because he’s just that guy or because he’s irony-poisoned himself into functionally participating in that sphere.

Still, there’s something about Dillon that eludes the standard forms of left-liberal criticism of right-wing media, of which I think there are two prominent strains. The first is straightforward mockery and dismissal. Think of Jon Stewart playing a clip of Tucker Carlson and then knowingly staring at the camera while his audience laughs. The second strain of criticism offers a more symptomatic reading: “Make America Great Again” is regressive nostalgia, but it does point to a kind of postwar working-class prosperity that the Left should be seeking to recreate. Or, the homesteading and trad-wife fantasies presented on right-wing social media are silly, but they do point to a kind of family stability that the Left should support by different means than the Right. In this second way of looking at right-wing media, there might be a kernel of truth to digest beneath the repulsive coating of xenophobia, sexism, and so forth.

These two forms of interpretation don’t help us much with making heads or tails of the Tim Dillon Show. Blank mockery of heavily ironized, often contradictory rants don’t work here. If Stewart tried to pull his usual moves on Dillon, he would be the object of the joke, not its executor. On the other hand, there is no redeemable political lesson to be saved from the reactionary sludge. The whole point of Dillon’s persona on the show is to be vile without remainder: so self-serving, cynical, and bleak that no rational nugget can be unearthed. After the Los Angeles fires, he explained that he was lying about losing his home to get sympathy and money. Near the end of a recent episode, he claimed he would do his set at the Riyadh Comedy Festival “in the blood of someone who just got beheaded.” When you aren’t laughing, the only sane reaction to both the form and content of the show is to be gripped with horror.

If Dillon is merely another right-wing populist media figure, then he’s an unintelligible one within the coordinates of the left-liberal worldview. But at this point, someone might reasonably suggest that the whole attempt to make sense of Dillon along the political spectrum is misguided. In this view, Dillon’s there to be funny; the sheer entertainment value is the point. Like many comics, he pushes boundaries and flirts with being offensive, and since the Right is where that kind of thing is generally more embraced than on the Left, his brand of comedy naturally gravitates toward certain political leanings. But to think the social or political commentary is primary is to misunderstand the nature of his enterprise.

I’m not convinced. There are innumerable comics out there building their brand on saying shocking and outrageous things, and none of them return so consistently to Dillon’s preferred themes: political corruption, social atomization and collapse, cultural decadence and perversion, and their interrelations. Indeed, you don’t need to watch the show for very long to discern some identifiable shape to “Dillonism,” which is something like the following:

The world today is structured by the actions of powerful crime syndicates, often headed by thought leaders deranged by their own wealth and influence. Sometimes it is competition between such groups that makes waves, but more often than not it is their alliance against the interests of ordinary people, for whom they have overwhelming disdain, that is driving political-economic developments forward. Bandied about by these alienating forces and left to confront the true emptiness and meaninglessness of contemporary American culture, many people have become deeply sick, deluded into odd habits and antisocial gratifications as a means of coping with the insanity and inanity of life in the twenty-first century.

Framed so, it should be unsurprising that Dillon comes to many conclusions that one could well read in these pages. For instance,

• “When you’re deporting people randomly in a church parking lot, when you’re putting children in zip-tie handcuffs, when you’re showing up at high school graduations deporting people, it’s barbaric, it’s inhumane.”
• “[Netanyahu] is committing a genocide. I don’t think anyone’s even denying that at this point.”
• “Is the administration that got elected to purge the deep state actually using the deep state to compile a list of data on all the people that live here?”

But again, this funhouse-mirror leftism reading could be applied to any number of right populists, and the second you nail him on one point, Dillon’s already contradicted it and parodied the contradiction. The very attempt to make sense of the appeal of his political philosophy is ludicrous, and indeed, Dillon seems to understand the essentially pre-political nature of his endeavor, identifying his typical audience member as oscillating

from the far left to the far right. One day he’s a literal neo-Nazi, the next day he’s a far-left anarchist. And all the while he listens to the Tim Dillon Show every day. He has no idea which way I’m going to go. He has no idea. He just knows I’m angry at things, and he likes that, and he listens to my show. But one day he’s an Antifa, and the next day he’s a Proud Boy. He’s just angry. He’s full of hatred. He’s full of hatred because the rent keeps going up and nothing makes sense.

You’re Going to Work on a Boat

So theTim Dillon Show is not standard right-wing populist fare, but neither is it apolitical or wholly cynical. There is a worldview there, but it’s an anger-fueled, pre-political one, which lends the show both an essential political ambivalence but also its paradoxical authenticity — paradoxical because everything is cynicism and callousness all the way down, and that goes for Dillon himself.

It’s difficult to point to a clip or episode wherein the spirit of the show is distilled, but if I had to, it would be his “Life on a Boat” rant. As with much Dillon content, it’s directed at a nebulous “you,” involving a kind of false personalization that has been a mainstay of critical analysis of right-wing media since the Frankfurt School. But in this case, the parasocial relationship he’s encouraging is not a comforting one; in fact, quite the opposite.

You’re going to work on a boat. Between Memorial Day and Labor Day, you’re going to work on a boat. And then you’re going to go down to Florida and continue to work on a boat off season. But in Florida it’s actually on season. The vast majority of people in this country are going to be struggling against forces that they cannot even comprehend, that I can’t even comprehend. Things like AI that are going to transform our entire society. You’re going to work on a boat. You’re not starting a business. You’re not gonna run a hardware store. You’re not gonna invent something. You’re not gonna start a profitable restaurant. The novel you’re writing sucks. You’re not going to do anything in your mind that you think you’re gonna do. You’re going to work on a boat.

While working on this boat, Tiësto’s “The Business” will “never not be playing in your head.”

And there’s gonna be a guy on the boat, and you’re gonna f-ck him. You’re gonna have sex with the guy that works on the boat. Neither one of you are going to have the emotional capacity to understand anything outside of the physical, and that’s actually preferable, and beautiful. It’s gonna make a lot of sense. Your interactions with this person are going to be confusing because both of you lack the layers that would be needed to build and sustain something outside of this drunken life that you find yourselves in. But it doesn’t matter, you don’t want any of that. It’s the next port for you.

At the end of the episode, Dillon returns to this “ship wench witch” character that he’s created and walks us through “your” suicide.

It’s very hard to grow old in that lifestyle. You’re gonna have to have the strength to walk to the. . .  stern. And you’re gonna hear it in your head. “Let’s get down, let’s get down to business.” And you’re gonna think about how fun it was to dance. “Let’s get down, let’s get down to business.” You’re gonna get up on the stern, and you’re gonna be really drunk. And you’re gonna drown yourself. You’re gonna jump off the boat, and you’re going to drown, and they’re not going to find your body.

This episode, wherein Dillon mostly walks his audience through an alienating life of stunted psychic development and eventual suicide, has 725,000 views on YouTube. Dillon is entertaining, but clearly many people find this bleak fantasy compelling as well. Why?

When Socrates says that “god-sent madness is a finer thing than man-made sanity,” he means, among other things, that the experience of being disturbed allows us insight into the nature of the soul and some access to the truth of our condition. The experience itself can be a difficult one, involving “feeling contempt for all the accepted standards of propriety and good taste.” But it is being “sick with passion” in this way that creates the wonder that is the origin of the pursuit of truth.

The “Life on a Boat” rant is a dreamlike presentation of life in late capitalism (and for those skeptics of that term, we can now define it as a form of capitalism wherein the Tim Dillon Show exists). It is disorienting and disturbing, but it is also captivating to lots and lots of people; if that is so, it’s because it reflects back to us the disorientation and disturbance of contemporary society in pseudo-personalized form. I say “pseudo” because nobody wants to identify with the “you” of Dillon’s story. But the magic works anyway, and we’re jolted into a fantasied confrontation with the horror and unsustainability of a world we barely understand.

In a way, Dillon plays the role of Colonel Joll in J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, a sadistic representative of “the Empire” whom the book’s narrator, a frontier magistrate in that empire, must reckon with. It’s easy to blithely condemn this callous mouthpiece of an imperial regime, but an ethical confrontation is avoided in doing so. The more difficult task is to uncomfortably inhabit the position of magistrate-narrator in the book, and to come to understand how both Joll and Magistrate, hardened executor and reticent functionary, are enmeshed in a brutal, violent form of life that also appears on the edge of collapse.

But to inhabit the narrator’s position means rejecting easy forms of condemnation and some genuine wonder at precisely what kind of madness is on display: “I have never seen anything like it: two little discs of glass suspended in front of his eyes in loops of wire. Is he blind?”