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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
OK, it's fictitious -- but so is our presidency. Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show" pulls the pants down on the fakes and fanatics who are leading us into the future.
Apr 8, 2003 | Jon Stewart has gotten his groove back, and not a moment too soon. In the first few days after the war began, Stewart's late-night satirical news program, "The Daily Show" (Monday through Thursday at 11 p.m., 10 Central Time, on Comedy Central), seemed to go briefly toothless. Stewart and company resorted to parodies of entertainment journalism, dumb war-related jokes that involved plugging the names of various nations into an NCAA playoff bracket and guest appearances by Ringo Starr and actor Eddie Griffin, neither of whom seemed capable of saying anything about the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq -- Topic A for just about everyone else on the planet. That was a letdown, considering that in the weeks leading up to the March 19 commencement of the conflict, "The Daily Show" had been consistently offering the best political humor on television. Fortunately, the lull was brief.
Stewart, his team of "correspondents" (particularly Stephen Colbert and Ed Helms) and the show's head writer, David Javerbaum, have used their chosen format -- a parody of local newscasts with a talk-show guest segment awkwardly grafted onto its back end -- to skewer not just the Bush administration's single-minded march to war, but also the social temperament that let all this happen. Four nights per week, "The Daily Show" demonstrates the creeping obsolescence of, say, a performer like Bill Maher, whose Enlightened He-Man persona has proven itself barely viable outside the hothouse environment of the Clinton years.
Take, for example, a "Daily Show" segment called "Oh, Come On!" It mimics the tone of knowing suspicion found in cut-rate exposés of government waste and other supposed liberal boondoggles. The correspondent, Rob Corddry, starts out in a playground, gravely explaining: "We've all heard it before. It's an age-old saying that the children are the future. Our society bends over backward for the children. We feed them. We clothe them. We educate them ... But are children really worth the investment? [close-up on Corddry with narrowed eyes and a belligerently tilted jaw] I mean, come on!"
Corddry's investigation takes him to a storefront in New York, where he discovers, to his incredulity, "children get help with their homework -- for free," and to interviews in which he grills tots about alternative energy sources (they recommend poop) and asks them to put names to photographs of political figures (they identify Sen. Joseph Lieberman as "Grandma"). He even faces off against a 4-year-old girl on a basketball court (and trounces her). "The kids I know don't vote, they don't pay taxes," he complains. "Are the billions of dollars we're spending on the children paying off, or are they just teat-sucking parasites?"
The segment is silly (and hilarious), but the barbs hit home. "The Daily Show" doesn't just make fun of broadcast journalists (as "Saturday Night Live" has for decades), it mocks the underlying know-nothing mulishness that passed for trenchant common sense back when the president's sex life seemed like the most pressing moral issue facing the nation. Now there are bigger fish to fry. Asking whether "the billions of dollars we're spending on the children are paying off" isn't that far from the mentality of a government that can stand by as schoolteachers are laid off by the score in California and yet still find plenty of money to award tax breaks to rich people.
Political humor used to belong to the left, but that all changed in the 1990s, when the priggishness of political correctitude injected new vitality into a segment of the population that had been shut out of comedy's pantheon: assholes. Suddenly, a guy could flaunt his most petty and vindictive prejudices and still get to feel like a champion of truth and freedom. You could rail against "victimology" when, say, sexually harassed workers dared to resort to it, and then turn around and avail yourself of the same trend by claiming that a pack of censorious puritans was trying to shut you up. In fact, the appeal of shock jocks and other bad boys mostly lies in the idea that they're offensive to somebody else, someone you can imagine gasping in horror at each transgression. Without political correctness (and that's fading fast), a big chunk of what passes for contemporary American humor would be flapping in the wind.
It helps (comedy, at least) to have plutocratic religious fanatics with imperialist ambitions occupying the White House, and "The Daily Show" has been at the forefront in finding a new way to make political humor in the age of Dubya. Some of that feels tentative: Stewart is still honing his persona. He's an everyman with the intelligence to spot a crock, the humility to ask questions and a nifty way of keeping his mouth shut to let the absurdity of the naked facts sink in. He does, however, occasionally smirk, though he seems to be morphing that mannerism into a daffy eye-rolling gesture reminiscent of Jack Benny.
Here's what Stewart isn't: self-righteous. And that is more than Maher can say. The comparison is illuminating. Granted, Maher is a rigorously tough interviewer, and the unscripted conversations on his new HBO show, "Real Time," are the best things about it. He can get in the ring, deliver a sound drubbing to a cant-spouting Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., then step down and shake hands like a gentleman afterward. The debate segments of "Real Time," which corral Maher and three people drawn from a rotating group of feisty polemicists on both the right and the left (Dennis Miller, Arianna Huffington, Ann Coulter, Janeane Garofalo and Ted Rall, among others), are riveting. By contrast, Stewart is too nice to get much out of the talk-show segments of "The Daily Show," and his assortment of guests is peculiar, ranging from forgettable starlets to the editor of the Nation to the president of the Council on Foreign Relations.
But the sorry truth is that everything on "Real Time" that's meant to be funny isn't, including Maher's opening monologue, regular Paul Tompkins, and (especially) the guest comics who perform at each show's end. It all feels tired and smug. Infinitely pleased with himself, Maher needs to realize that the value of being the smartest guy in the room varies considerably with the quality of the rooms you choose to hang out in. His hodgepodge conglomeration of pet positions -- for the legalization of marijuana, against the demonization of porn, contempt for religion -- developed more of a moral center with his opposition to the Iraq war, but it's still rooted in a self-congratulatory rejection of other people's sanctimony. He's pious about his own impiety.
