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Category Archives: General
The Future of the Daily Show
I wonder about the future of “The Daily Show.”
I don’t mean because of the writers’ strike — hopefully that will end and the show will come back before, say, next summer’s presidential conventions.
What I wonder about is whether, if a Democrat wins the presidency, “The Daily Show” will be as popular in 2009 as it is right now.
The Bush administration, while it has ruined the country and the world, has been a boon to Jon Stewart. It’s not just that Bush is so idiotic and loathed that the headlines write themselves; it’s not just that Stewart’s audience is pretty liberal and that we love to see Bush and other Republicans get skewered. (I always laugh at Stewart’s fake Bush cackle, no matter how many times he does it.) The main reason Stewart’s popularity has grown in the last few years is because we feel so angry at what Bush has done, so aghast that he’s been able to get away with it, and so powerless to change anything about it — so outraged and depressed at the same time — that the only non-destructive outlet we have is laughter. We’ve needed Jon Stewart during the Bush years, in a deep psychological sense.
What happens after?
There was a telling moment on the show this past summer. Stewart did a sequence of Hillary Clinton jokes. This was before Obama and Edwards started getting more aggressive against her, before the media started picking up the “Hillary’s making missteps” narrative. Outrage against the Iraq “surge” was at its height, General Petraeus’s testimony was approaching, and we still felt pumped about there being a chance to turn the surge around — before Congress folded and apathy set in again. We were angry.
And Stewart did some Hillary Clinton jokes.
The audience reaction was tepid, at best. Stewart eventually had to tweak the audience.
I guess it’s partly that the jokes weren’t very funny, but it’s also that the audience wasn’t with Stewart. We wanted more cathartic comedic exasperation at the state of the world; we weren’t looking for anti-Hillary jokes.
Maybe it will be different if Hillary gets elected. She’ll hold power, she’ll be the president, so she’ll be a legitimate comedic target. (The powerful always get skewed.)
When Stewart made fun of Hillary that night, it almost seemed as if he was trying to remind us that he’s an equal-opportunity offender — warning us that we shouldn’t get too comfortable.
In Praise of Bob Herbert
Bob Herbert is underappreciated.
If you’re not a New York Times junkie like me, you probably don’t know who he is — he’s one of the paper’s seven or eight op-ed columnists. Others — Maureen Dowd, Tom Friedman, David Brooks, Paul Krugman — they’ve got buzz. Bob Herbert? More of a buzzkill. He writes largely about the (primarily black) disenfranchised among us — those in the inner cities, those who are poor, those without health insurance.
T.A. Franks in the Washington Monthly asks: Why is Bob Herbert boring?
His underlying problem turns out to be simple: he doesn’t write with his audience in mind…. If he’d overcome his indifference to “chatter” and elite opinion and instead try to attract and coopt it—in other words, think about who his audience is and what he wants it to do—he could be one of the most powerful liberal voices in the country.
Herbert’s writing isn’t usually flashy or sexy or witty, but he almost always makes great points. It’s too bad more people don’t read him.