Skylanders Academy: The Comedy Bible For Understanding Conservative Humor
Image; TeamTO (animation); Activision Blizzard Studios
There is this joke that conservatives aren’t funny. It’s an American meme perpetuated by everyone from YouTubers to emerging scientific research. Conservatives are often so focused on “owning the libs” that they don’t bother to see if their jokes actually land.
We could point to a lot of conservative media to highlight this trend of “punching down” for cheap laughs. The Daily Wire media organization has put a lot of energy in the last few years into creating comedies such as Lady Ballers (2023) and The New Norm (2024) that pretty exclusively have humor maligning identities they disagree with.
Yet today, I want to choose a more off-the-beaten-path example to highlight this tension: Skylanders Academy (2016–2018), a cartoon show about various mythical creatures saving a fictional world called the Skylands from the forces of evil. This derivative work has some of the most explicit conservative humor that I have seen in a modern kids’ show (that is not advertised as such), and I think that provides us a fascinating window into what conservative humor looks like.
Prison humor for kids
If you are a little skeptical that this children’s show has conservative messaging, take the season one episode titled, The Hole Truth, which is about the Skylander group volunteering as prison guards for a day. The entire episode hinges on the gimmick of the crew sending prisoners to “the hole,” aka solitary confinement, which in real life has been classified as torture.
“To the hole,” the Skylander guards say, almost gleefully.
For context, that would be like a kid’s show having a running bit in an episode where, as temporary torturers for the CIA, the main characters are waterboarding prisoners for fun. The whole point of the joke is for the characters to “punch down” at others they have a power differential with — in this case, guards vs prisoners.
The good guys are punishing the bad guys; cue laugh track.
This episode also has a spoof on the classic “don’t drop the soap” prison joke, which is traditionally all about how men are so unsafe from their fellow prisoners that the moment they bend over to pick up dropped soap in the shower, they will be sexually violated. It revolves around “weak” men getting their comeuppance when they show vulnerability (see also the “I wouldn’t do well in prison” joke).
“Don’t drop the soap” is the type of joke where the punchline is rarely said explicitly, mentioned more as a line of humorous caution. In the case of this episode, it is subverted to remove the allusion of rape entirely. “Because prison soap is expensive,” one of the inmates chimes in, with a plausible enough explanation for the kids watching at home while their parents can still “get” the more mature context.
These homophobic jokes are “funny” to many conservatives as a way to revel in the sense of perceived superiority, one of the earliest theorized sources of humor according to philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle. Note: not every advocate of the superiority theory believes all humor comes from this element (see weak claims). I contend that an important element of conservative humor revolves around reinforcing hierarchy. The humor comes from mocking people and groups that are perceived to be at the bottom of the supremacist hierarchy, in this case, homosexuality.
As another example, a very common joke in conservative circles is the “I identify as an attack helicopter” spoof and its many variants. The whole point is to parody gender identity. If someone can identify as the gender they weren’t assigned at birth, why not an inanimate object or animal? To many conservatives, that position is just as inherently ridiculous.
And listen, the “identify with X” joke can be funny when done empathetically. Hannah Gadsby did a pretty funny “I identify as tired” bit in her standup special Nanette (2017), but often, American conservatives do not ensure that the material connects. The utterance of the insult is seen as enough to get a chuckle, and so when your audience doesn’t agree with that sentiment, it often creates a disconnect.
Hence, the meme that conservative humor isn’t funny. When you aren’t operating under that same framework of superiority, it just doesn’t land.
Fantasy cops
This sense of hierarchy is built into Skylanders Academy’s foundation. The show arguably falls within the genre of “copaganda” (i.e., shows that promote pro-police sentiments). The Skylanders operate as police officers for the fictional Skylands, and our protagonists often punish offenders for robbing banks, not paying a subscription fee, and other forms of property theft. They are shown to work not only with the prison system but also with this society’s court system.
Furthermore, unlike the complexities underbidding the causes of crime in the real world (i.e., poverty, housing, etc.), the Skylands are governed by a binary. Good guys have a certain amount of light inside them, and bad guys have darkness.
For example, in one episode called Who’s Your Daddy?, the character Jet-Vac (Greg Ellis) is alarmed to learn that his new child is acting quite mischievously. Jet-Vac worries that he is raising a bad kid. He then discovers that there was a mix up with his egg, and he had picked up the egg of a Greeble, a species predisposed to evil.
The dichotomy of good and bad is clear and simple.
A lot of the humor in this show revolves around those “evil” characters suffering. For example, Kaos (Richard Steven Horvitz) is the main antagonist in the series, and the running joke is that he is an incompetent “mama’s boy.” He lives at home in his mother’s former outhouse. In essence, he is what conservative influencers would classify as not a “real man” and, therefore, a ripe target for superiority-based humor.
There is even a point in the episode Space Invaders where he is compared to a “beta.” This comes from an outdated classification system derived from an old study of wolves in captivity by researcher David Mech, in which wolves were believed to have a hierarchy of alphas at the top and betas below them. This study does not resemble wolf packs in the wild, and Mech has done a lot of work to try to set the record straight, even taking out of print one of his old books from the 1970s.
But still, moral entrepreneurs continue to apply this erroneous framework to humans, claiming that human males could be alphas, betas, or lowly omegas. The alpha-beta rhetoric is so prevalent that we are seeing it in this children’s show. Kaos is very briefly able to become an “alpha” through your normal cartoon shenanigans, only for his fortunes to reverse by the end of the episode.
His “beta-ness” ultimately sabotages his goals.
Another dynamic is Kaos’s relationship with his “servant” Glumshanks (Norm MacDonald), a troll who is referred to as his slave on at least one occasion. Glumshanks has an adversarial relationship with Kaos, who tortures him regularly, both on and offscreen.
Once again, the humor comes from a lowly person being punished.
A conservative conclusion
Now some may dismiss my criticisms by saying that Skylanders Academy is just a kid’s show. A common stereotype is that these kinds of shows are not meant to be serious, and so they should not be criticized.
Yet artists who make children and young adult work do imbue serious themes within them (see Bridge to Terabithia, Matilda, and even Bluey), and their audience, while still learning, usually has a lot more comprehension than many adults tend to give them credit for. Kids are not “unintelligent,” and there are plenty of kids’ shows that respect their audience and advance complex themes.
When I watch Skylanders Academy, I see a lot of conservative humor based on supremacist thinking. The good guys exist in a world where morality is clear-cut, and the villainous characters always get their comeuppance. The humor comes in the reinforcement of this dichotomy.
This is a useful framework for understanding how conservative humor works, as it is based on a very rigid hierarchy. Conservatives are not funny to those on the left because many of us (though not all) possess a different intellectual framework that is usually more conscientious of power dynamics. We do not exist in the same political bubble where we find beating up on our subordinates to be funny.
As the left and the right become increasingly detached from one another, not even a laugh may be able to bring us together.