Right-leaning celebrity alert! Watch the comedian Drew Carey

National Review, Oct 22, 2007 by John J. Miller

ON the September 18 broadcast of Power of 10, a new game show on CBS, host Drew Carey asked contestant D. J. Burgduff this question: What percentage of Americans are willing to pay higher taxes for the government to provide universal health care? While Burgduff thought it over, Carey performed a comic riff: "Personally, I can't wait for universal health care." Then, in a mocking voice: "From the folks that brought you FEMA, the TSA, the DMV, the IRS, comes universal health care! It's going to be fantastic, to have the government in charge of our health!"

Nobody who watched the program could have mistaken Carey's opinion of socialized medicine: He thinks it's a stupendously bad idea. Yet Power of 10 isn't a talking-heads program on a cable channel--it's a quiz show on a mainstream network with millions of viewers. Carey nevertheless has turned it into an occasional platform for his right-of-center libertarianism. It's not his only platform. On October 15, when Carey succeeds Bob Barker as host of The Price Is Right, the Reason Foundation, a libertarian think tank in Los Angeles, will debut the first in a series of public-policy videos starring Carey. At the end of the month, Carey will attend his first meeting as a member of Reason's board of trustees. Following years of success in stand-up comedy and on sitcoms, Carey is on the brink of becoming one of the Right's most visible celebrities.

The 49-year-old Carey was born and raised in Cleveland, and joined the Marine Corps after attending Kent State. He credits his time in the military with turning his life around: "The things I learned in the Marine Corps have stayed with me to this day," he wrote in his 1997 book, Dirty Jokes and Beer. "I hate being late, I'm very organized, and I'm not afraid to take responsibility for my own actions." The Marines left a visible impression on him as well: He kept his crew cut. Combined with his horn-rimmed glasses and suit-and-tie wardrobe, it gave him one of the most distinctive looks in comedy. He's like an anti-hippy.

Carey caught his big break in 1991, when he performed a six-minute routine on The Tonight Show. Johnny Carson loved it and Carey was launched. Two years later, he starred in a Showtime comedy special. After that, he earned a supporting role in a short-lived NBC program. The experience taught him the art of the 22-minute sitcom. In 1995, The Drew Carey Show premiered on ABC. At the height of its nine-year run, the program attracted 17 million viewers. Carey also performed in Whose Line Is It Anyway?, an improvisational comedy show. "Drew is a really sweet guy," says Penn Jillette, part of the Penn & Teller comic duo. "He's the kind of person you would want to sit next to on a plane, even if you didn't know him."

Political humor was never a central part of Carey's act--if it had been, he might not have had his chance at fame. "A lot of the gatekeepers in show business are liberal," says Tim Slagle, a comedian who has performed at conservative confabs. Yet Carey didn't steer totally clear of politics, either. As far back as the early 1990s, he cracked jokes about global warming. Having suffered through long winters in Cleveland, he didn't think hotter temperatures were necessarily a bad thing. He also lampooned the Hard Rock Cafe's do-gooder slogan, "Save the Planet." In the pilot episode of his sitcom, Carey's character denounced a nosy bar patron as a "safety Nazi."

His book includes plenty of the lewd content for which he is well-known--Carey is no social conservative--as well as a fair amount of political material. His targets are bipartisan, though it's obvious that he enjoys telling Kennedy jokes. Carey's critique of Bill Clinton could warm the heart of any free-market wonk: "You even sent your daughter to an exclusive private rich-kid school. Nice going, especially since you're so vigorously opposed to school vouchers which would let the average Joe provide the same opportunities to his daughter that you gave to yours."

Carey's appreciation for military culture shines through, too, especially when he mounts a politically incorrect defense of the Navy over the Tailhook sex-harassment scandal: "I don't want a navy full of fighter pilots who've been to a sensitivity seminar. I want mad-dog, rabid killers going to battle for me and mine." In 2003, Carey led a team of comedians to Iraq to entertain U.S. soldiers. "We just came here to tell you that we appreciate you and that we support you completely," he said from a stage in front of what had been Saddam Hussein's palace in Tikrit.

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During the second season of The Drew Carey Show, Reason magazine invited subscribers in the Los Angeles area to attend a meet-the-editors mixer. Carey showed up. "Before Drew, says editor Nick Gillespie, "I think the biggest celebrity we'd seen was Curtis Armstrong, the guy who played Booger in Revenge of the Nerds."

Before long, Carey fell into the Reason Foundation's orbit. He sat down for a Q&A with the magazine. "You should never depend on the government for your retirement, your financial security, for anything. If you do, you're screwed," he said in the interview. He wore a Reason T-shirt on his sitcom. When Reason senior editor Jacob Sullum's anti-anti-smoking book For Your Own Good came out, Carey proposed a publicity stunt: They held a "smoke-in" at a local restaurant to protest anti-smoking laws. "The whole thing was his idea," says Sullum. "We thought it would get local attention, but it got national attention." The public interest, of course, came from the fact that Carey, a non-smoker, was willing to leverage his fame to score a point against hyper-regulationist ordinances. "Sacramento shouldn't tell you what to do," he told a Los Angeles Times columnist. "They think they're your nanny. Pretty soon they'll be telling you how to dress, what time to be in bed."