Why aren’t liberals funny? And how come conservative columnist David Brooks, formerly a stylish, witty, sharp-eyed writer, got to be such a plodding, stuffed-shirt prig when he went to work for a liberal publication?

Brooks’s book Bobos in Paradise is an example of an old-fashioned, way-we-live-now sociology—drawing the great social caricature—that is hardly practiced anymore (sociology, which used to be aligned with journalism, is now a quantitative discipline). His subject was middle-class identity and particularly, even though he’s a conservative, liberal-middle-class identity. As an observer of manners, Brooks was a little hyperbolic, a little reductive, and clever to a fault.

But then he went to the New York Times op-ed page. The Times, temperamentally resistant to the hyperbolic, the reductive, the too clever, took Brooks’s style away. Sociology without style is pomposity.

The complicated condition for liberals, or, anyway, for liberal wits and stylists, is that so much of the liberal media—the constricting liberal media—has defaulted to a kind of consensus *Times-*ness. Hence, in defensive mode, and in a careful estimation of our market opportunities, we are all—we well-employed, Ivy League–ish, culturally engaged, upper-middle-class chattering types in the mainstream news media—self-serious, earnest, striving, humorless, correct people, seeking to become ever more earnest, faultless, evenhanded. We’re Hillary (or we’re her base, and she’s courting us by becoming as worthy and flat as we are).

Not to put too fine a point on it, but liberals, in their desperate quest to be taken seriously, are the new conservatives.

Conservative opinionists in the burgeoning right-wing media—from Fox to talk radio to Rupert Murdoch’s Weekly Standard to the Wall Street Journal editorial page—are, on the other hand, often facile, funny, irreverent, eccentric, jaunty, pithy, as well as aggressive and wrongheaded (that improbable creature Ann Coulter is all those things), as well as operatic (Terri Schiavo was an opera). As well as, on occasion, inebriated. (The character note of a liberal these days is sobriety—no drinks, no carbs, no jokes. The conservatives run amok while the liberals are corporatized.)

Obviously, conservatives have reason to enjoy themselves, while liberals do not. But then, too, it may reasonably be the conservatives’ sense of verbal sport, of going too far, of showing off, that’s helped get them into their catbird seat. And, conversely, the liberals’ dullness and depressiveness—“little constipated souls,” in the recent description by Ben Bradlee, who is from the liberal media’s jaunty age—that’s contributed to their fate.

So why no oomph? No joy? No jokes?

In the exception-that-proves department, every liberal jumps up at this point demanding, “What about Jon Stewart?”

“And Maureen Dowd.”

“And,” add a few liberals in rarefied radio markets, “Air America and Al Franken.”

“Andy Borowitz!”

“Wonkette.”

“Michael Moore” (but with lessening enthusiasm—more and more embarrassingly he mistakes himself for a serious fellow).

These are the humor anomalies (pretty much the sum total of the humor anomalies). The genre-ists. It’s liberal comedy.

This is part of the liberal-journalism ethos. Editors and libel lawyers insist: if you mean it to be funny, you have to make it clear that it’s humor. Literalism—that pre-Asperger’s condition of wonks everywhere—is part of liberalism.

The conservatives have no appointed clowns. Rather, exaggeration is built into their argument. Is it shtick or isn’t it? Peggy Noonan is as exaggerated as Maureen Dowd, but she isn’t regarded as the in-house “crazy lady.” The talk-radio screed is as amusing as it is incendiary—it’s equal parts knee slap and outrage. Seriousness, the conservatives recognize, is, or ought to be, a fluid substance. Here’s the answer to the elemental question: Why can’t liberals do talk radio? Because they don’t know how to tease.