Conservative comedians tend to be conservatives first and comedians second—making a point takes precedence over making a joke.

They’ll even drop the pretense of tying to be funny if it gets in the way of whatever message they’re trying to get across, as Elfwick did in the tweet that allegedly got him banned the first time around.

Elfwick lost his cool during a spat with BBC presenter Gary Lineker. According to his fans, he was banned for this tweet alone, but the suspension was for “targeted harassment,” so it’s unclear if there is more to the story.

Someone more talented than Godfrey would have found a way to make this statement without breaking character.

Instead of coming out and saying what he thinks, the satirical thing to do would be to take Lineker’s side and justify his exorbitant salary using some comically inane rationalization.

But comedy is hard.

Not truly funny

Satire is an art, and like other forms of art, it is only good insofar as it expresses some sort of deeper truth.

Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal” was so impactful because it spoke to an obscene social reality. The outrageous idea of the Irish selling their children to the rich as food merely exaggerated the real callousness of the wealthy elites to grotesque proportions.

The starting point of satire is the absurdity that exists in the real world, which the satirist then accentuates for comedic effect.

When Godfrey first gained notoriety with his #Wrongskin hashtag back in 2015, his trolling was at least relevant to a real phenomenon: the case of Rachel Dolezal. But it even then it wasn’t exactly satire because there was no added value. He simply imitated something that was already ludicrous to begin with.

Most of us only wish we could go back to a time when the most ridiculous thing one could imagine is a few people asking to be called xim and xher.

And to the extent that this was ever really a thing, it didn’t reflect a reality most people had actually experienced personally. I still have yet to meet a person like this online, much less in real life.

Today, we have deeper wells of absurdity that renew themselves on a daily basis—namely an oafish president who creates a readymade punchline for late-night talk show hosts every time he opens his mouth.

A meme lampoons an Israeli Defense Forces propaganda poster that originally read “Hamas’ tools for infiltrating Israel” It originally included “rocks,” “rope tied to fence,” “arson kites,” “disabled civilians” and “children

Things happen in the world that are more laughably surreal than anything the most brilliant satirist could conjure up, like that time the IDF Twitter account tried to deflect from the massacre of 60 Palestinians with a tweet that said “Hamas can turn anything into a weapon of terror.”

Its list of terror tools included things like “arson kites,” “disabled civilians” and the deadliest of all: “children.”

It takes real talent to make something like that any more absurd than it already is, but an even greater feat is to take that which is not funny at all — something tragic or depressing — and find something to laugh about.

Many a comedian developed a sense of humor as a way to deal with the pain of being fat or unattractive. Good satire is likewise a coping mechanism to make bearable life in an ugly world.

Its political ideology built entirely on a distorted view of reality, the right really has no compelling truths to tell through comedy.

The closest Godfrey Elfwick ever came was briefly touching on the issue of inequality — comparing Lineker’s salary to that of a nurse — but even then it was an insincere, clumsy attempt to play gotcha with a “virtue-signaling” liberal

Also, it’s hard for the alt-right to sustain the lie that it’s some kind of counterculture defined in opposition to the establishment when their side is in power. Still, they bend their minds into knots to convince themselves that by taking shots at trans people, immigrants and other marginalized groups, they’re somehow “sticking it to the man.”