The Joke's On You: Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert considered harmful

[salvorhardin]

Last edited Wed Aug 8, 2012, 07:51 PM - Edit history (1)

Among the hacks who staff our factories of conventional wisdom, evidence abounds that we are living in a golden age of political comedy. The New York Times nominates Jon Stewart, beloved host of Comedy Central’s Daily Show, as the “most trusted man in America.” His protégé, Stephen Colbert, enjoys the sort of slavish media coverage reserved for philanthropic rock stars. Bill Maher does double duty as HBO’s resident provocateur and a regular on the cable news circuit. The Onion, once a satirical broadsheet published by starving college students, is now a mini-empire with its own news channel. Stewart and Colbert, in particular, have assumed the role of secular saints whose nightly shtick restores sanity to a world gone mad.

But their sanctification is not evidence of a world gone mad so much as an audience gone to lard morally, ignorant of the comic impulse’s more radical virtues. Over the past decade, political humor has proliferated not as a daring form of social commentary, but a reliable profit source. Our high-tech jesters serve as smirking adjuncts to the dysfunctional institutions of modern media and politics, from which all their routines derive. Their net effect is almost entirely therapeutic: they congratulate viewers for their fine habits of thought and feeling while remaining careful never to question the corrupt precepts of the status quo too vigorously.

Our lazy embrace of Stewart and Colbert is a testament to our own impoverished comic standards. We have come to accept coy mockery as genuine subversion and snarky mimesis as originality. It would be more accurate to describe our golden age of political comedy as the peak output of a lucrative corporate plantation whose chief export is a cheap and powerful opiate for progressive angst and rage.

Fans will find this assessment offensive. Stewart and Colbert, they will argue, are comedians, offering late-night entertainment in the vein of David Letterman or Jay Leno, but with a topical twist. To expect them to do anything more than make us laugh is unfair. Besides, Stewart and Colbert do play a vital civic role—they’re a dependable news source for their mostly young viewers, and de facto watchdogs against media hype and political hypocrisy.

Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times offered a summation of the majority opinion in a 2008 profile of Stewart that doubled as his highbrow coronation. “Mr. Stewart describes his job as ‘throwing spitballs’ from the back of the room,” she wrote. “Still, he and his writers have energetically tackled the big issues of the day . . . in ways that straight news programs cannot: speaking truth to power in blunt, sometimes profane language, while using satire and playful looniness to ensure that their political analysis never becomes solemn or pretentious.”

Full essay: http://www.thebaffler.com/past/the_jokes_on_you

[djean111]

1. This reminds me, for some reason,

of Tucker Carlson sneeringly asking Jon Stewart why he never asked the "hard questions".

[salvorhardin]

3. Similar criticism has been made of Scott Adams too

Scott Adams draws and writes Dilbert. A common left wing criticism, which I may have first read in The Nation, is that his strip actually serves to marginalize and delegitimatize workers.

[marasinghe]

2. the "MIT" press?

doesn't MIT accept funds from the DoD, for R&D on more efficient means of slaughter? one might imagine a modicum of self-analysis would be in order.

[dogknob]

9. "Senator, we're all part of the same hypocricy"

[Fawke Em]

4. I'm seeing a lot green in this essay.

And not the recycle kind.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

5. maybe later I'll be happy...but I am currently pissed at Jon for his condescending smashing

of Harry

[dogknob]

6. Even Maddow has a leash.

Her show, Stewart's show, Colbert's show are ultimately just that: shows.

They are the TV equivalents of the "designated protest area;" they are never allowed to approach anything that could actually accomplish anything tangible. When they do manage to stealth their way into actual effectiveness, you can bet that their bosses at GE, Comcast and Viacom have something to say about it.

The only reason these people have jobs is because they are profitable and they toothlessly allow people like Limbaugh and O'Reilly -- who are truly unrestrained media activists -- to whoop ass on the straw man of the "liberal media."

[WhollyHeretic]

7. You might want to delete the /print at the end of your link

[salvorhardin]

8. Ah, you're right

Thanks.