Donald Trump may not have entirely killed satire, but he’s helped sunder it into two countervailing forces, neither of which are very funny.

The liberals used to be the class clowns. But while the counterculture of the 1960s spawned Saturday Night Live, Monty Python, and the stand-up-comedy-industrial complex, its political heirs are now the pious, self-serious ones. Modern-day liberal satirists like Stephen Colbert get uncomfortable when audiences laugh at his straight-faced assertion that CNN is an objective news source. Their role is ever more a therapeutic one, intended to flatter and reassure Democrats that they are sane and upstanding.

Meanwhile, the pro-Trump “Barstool conservatives” are now playing at the role of provocateur. Much of today’s very online right seemingly wants to Make America the Aughts again, crawling back into the gutter to retrieve the anti-intellectual and sexist “bro culture” of that era, where the slurs of yore and tired jokes about pronouns stand in for true wit.