Over at The Baffler, Steve Almond writes that those of us who think The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are comedic genius are just not smart enough to understand that they’re not that funny. According to Almond, the fact that so many of us revere Stewart and Colbert 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.
Gee, thanks Mr. Almond for explaining why we are all dupes of big corporations and big media. I just didn’t have enough self-righteous left-wing bile in the air I breathe--what with all my supposedly more left-wing friends refusing to vote for Obama because he’s compromised and preferring instead a Romney victory since “the sooner things come apart the sooner we can rebuild a new world.”
Almond will no doubt get a lot of publicity for his swipe at Stewart and Colbert, but what will be lost in much of the debate, no doubt, is a little something called nuance. Anyone who has ever lived in a state that in no way, shape or form represents the interests of the majority of the population, but somehow produces a lot of propaganda that it does--let’s say the Soviet Union as I did for many years or... hmmm... what would be another country that says it’s by the people, for the people, but is really making laws and passing policies that benefit the personhood of corporations... hmmm... what would an example be? Oh yeah, the U.S.
But it is the very absurdity of such systems that also makes them fertile ground for political satire. Of course such satire must be produced within conditions not of the comedians own making. There are rules (or censors or lawsuits or paychecks on the line). And of course at some level allowing us to laugh at the absurdity of the system does, as Almond argues, allow the system to continue. But it also allows us, as individual subjects of such absurdist regimes, to continue.
Our very survival and the survival of hope for anything like change is predicated on guffawing at Colbert and Stewart’s satirical shtick. That’s because their satire is a scream--a collective scream--that the emperor is not wearing any clothes. If we didn’t have them to remind us, night after night, that we are not alone in thinking something has gone seriously wrong, our lives would be no less absurd, but a whole lot less bearable.