The Left Can’t Meme

This is the true story of how one side lost its sense of humor, the other side found it, and what happened when the clowns crowned a king.

In 2016, the Left owned comedy. It had Jon Stewart’s smirk, Colbert’s satire, and every late-night desk in America. And it had the institutions: the networks, the newsrooms, the campuses, HR. Comedy that once skewered power started lecturing, policing, and crying on SNL. Meanwhile, the people it lectured (anonymous shitposters, exiled comics, a generation of frustrated young men) picked up the only weapon that was free. A cartoon frog. “Let’s Go Brandon.” A three-hour podcast. By 2024, the clowns had the best seats in the house.

In her highly anticipated debut, comedian and cultural commentator Bridget Phetasy shows how humor became the most powerful force in modern politics, and lays down the one rule you can always count on: comedy always comes for whoever’s in charge. So don’t get too comfortable.

Phetasy tells it from the inside. A bleeding-heart Los Angeles liberal, a Playboy advice columnist, and a stand-up comedian who started at the Comedy Store, she watched the scene she loved trade laughter for chapter. Her own decade of pile-ons, blacklists, red pills and Rogan appearances is the story of how millions of Americans came to see the Left losing its mind, and why she refuses to pretend the side she landed on can’t lose its own.

From the heyday of the The Daily Show to 4chan, Pepe, the podcast bros and the 2024 election, The Left Can’t Meme is a bar-stool history of the culture war, told by a mouthy broad who was in the room and never could shut up.