A laughing matter?
The role of satire in politics
If you don’t know by now how important Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Bill Maher have become to political discourse in America, you must be living in a cave (or even worse, without cable). Each comedian has his own style – Maher the most polemic and serious of the bunch, Stewart letting expertly-spliced clips of the day’s pundits and politicians do much of the work for him, and Colbert relentlessly sticking to his over-the-top play on conservative commentator Bill O’Reilly.
Political humor has caught on, so much so that a recent internet poll by TIME magazine, asking “Now that Walter Cronkite has passed on, who is America’s most trusted newscaster?”, identified Stewart as the clear winner, with 44% of the vote, ahead of Brian Williams, Charlie Gibson, and Katie Couric.
Stewart regularly deflects those who suggest his role has risen to something more than mere comic relief, saying, for example, “I am a tiny, neurotic man, standing in the back of the room throwing tomatoes at the chalk board. And that’s really it.” But no amount of self-deprecating humor on Jon’s part can diminish the extent to which Americans, and particularly young, liberal Americans, have come to rely on him to cut past the spin – even if he must engage in some ‘spin’ of his own.
Andrew Sullivan takes Stewart seriously, writing that he, along with Maher and Colbert, “were critical to alerting the younger generation to the dysfunction in Republican governance.” Perhaps satire is simply our best tool for coping with harsh realities. Sullivan candidly suggests that “Sometimes the world is so fucked up only a comedian can tell the truth.”
In a 2003 interview with Bill Moyers, Stewart seems to echo Sullivan’s suggestion. “I think, honestly, we’re practicing a new form of desperation”, he says, “where we just are so inundated with mixed messages from the media and from politicians that we’re just trying to sort it out for ourselves.” Satire, according to this view, is what emerges from our exhaustion in the face of bad news and combative talking heads.
But not everyone is patting political comics on the back. Christopher Hitchens is interested in saving satire from the likes of Stewart, who, he writes, has become intellectually lazy, taking his nodding, liberal audience for granted and avoiding the mantle of true critique epitomized by Mark Twain. Hitchens, who was rambunctious enough to title his book on Mother Theresa “The Missionary Position” and to apply the slogan “No Child’s Behind Left” to the Catholic Church, nevertheless finds contemporary political comics to be boorish and timid. Can they be funnier, smarter, and fairer, or are we now simply asking too much? Popular as they are, our modern day Twains have a role and social meaning that are largely undefined.
It appears that the state of cable TV political journalism looks something like this: we have sources like FOX News and MSNBC which are widely thought to be biased, yet pride themselves on integrity and neutrality – “We Report, You Decide”, and “Fair and Balanced.” Then there are the comedians, who have won the trust of millions and yet claim no journalistic bona fides at all, instead calling their product “fake news” and laughing cynically at the idea that they are taken so seriously.
Whether they like it or not, comics are now part of our engagement with politics. Their status as sideline jesters, flinging friendly zingers at the political stage, is illusory. Now these relentless critics must acknowledge their power and their complex relationship with truth, public awareness, and political influence. Likewise, any serious attempt to understand American political culture must account for the space comedy has come to occupy, and like Hitchens, assess the extent to which its practitioners are able to divorce themselves from the bias, laziness, and triviality that many associate with today’s news networks.
Indeed, it is becoming increasingly difficult to determine what is and what isn’t “fake news” in today’s commentariat. With each voice allegedly masquerading as something else, and no clear boundaries between journalism, entertainment, commentary, and satire, we may have little choice but to sit back and laugh.
–Colin
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