Cheap Shots at a Steep Price?

Some of the best coverage of the Republican and Democratic national conventions came not from a news source, but from a fake one--Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.” For two weeks, the cable series hosted by Jon Stewart dispatched its straight-faced correspondents onto the convention floors in Philadelphia and Los Angeles, and mocked leaders, delegates, the news media--and most of all the notion that something of social import was actually taking place. It was all a lot of fun.

And yet, one couldn’t help feeling that “The Daily Show” wasn’t slinging incisive political arrows at the political establishment so much as showing up at a gathering of adolescent math nerds and pointing out how all the kids had pens in their pockets and grease in their hair. The jokes had the tone of something “establishment” too--designed to make us feel part of an “in” crowd that assumes the worst of politicians but skips past the issues (what issues?), and in the process sends us deeper into our snooze of cynicism. Political comedy--at least in the grand tradition of a Swift or a Sahl--is supposed to be unsettling, not reassuring. But to a young electorate getting a kind of passive political education from entertainment programming in growing numbers, “The Daily Show” and others offer a safe and comforting message: Care even less than you already do.

To a large degree, the job of the late-night comedian is to affect no politics in particular while lampooning politics in general, a principle scrupulously adhered to by Jay Leno, David Letterman, Stewart and most of their late-night compatriots.

This is nothing new. When Kenneth Tynan profiled Johnny Carson for the New Yorker in 1978, he encountered various no-fly zones in the course of his interviews, among them “all subjects of political controversy.”

“It is only fair to remember that he does not pretend to be a pundit, employed to express his own opinions,” Tynan wrote of Carson. “Rather, he is a professional explorer of other people’s egos.”

Far from achieving a Carson-esque neutrality, however, the late-night gang these days do, through their unending stream of easy cynicism about the political system and the leaders running it, communicate a point of view. Disaffected and blase, they are the embodiment of today’s apathetic voter.

“We know that some people watch us for the news, but there’s not much we can do about that, unless we open up some sort of mental welfare agency,” says comic Lewis Black, a regular contributor to “The Daily Show” who admits to being somewhat chagrined that the show, which Comedy Central says averaged about 575,000 viewers during the two convention weeks, passes as political news for some.

Created in 1996 to lampoon the fatuousness of broadcast news in general, “The Daily Show,” for instance, had correspondent Mo Rocca question the Democrats’ use of actor Pat Morita to sing the national anthem at their convention, noting that as the proprietor of Arnold’s Diner on “Happy Days” he tolerated less-than-satisfactory working conditions in his kitchen. At an event that played like the Golden Globe Awards without the dresses, such a joke works. But the message of “The Daily Show,” however on point, is less political than cynical: There’s no need to watch what you’re already not watching. In fact, it’s hip not to watch.

It would be difficult to take comics to task for mocking politics, but there is a tonal difference in the mocking--an absence not so much of humor as of a lack of commitment to whatever the politics being lampooned.

“The earlier political comics were more opinionated and less indiscriminately and bitterly dismissive,” says Todd Gitlin, professor of culture, journalism and sociology at New York University.

Gitlin is the author of “The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage.” The ‘60s were also halcyon years for political comedy, marked by performers like Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce and Dick Gregory, who busted through prevailing taboos about race, sex and politics--outsiders attacking the establishment from several angles. Nobody can expect the same of a late-night comedian today. But why, at a time when comics have far more creative latitude than they did 30 years ago and information has never been more readily available, has the satirical political commentary grown so paradoxically safe?

“You cannot expect to be a fantastic political humorist and have a broad audience. Look how many times Mark Twain went broke,” says Gregory, who turned racial stereotypes and prejudice into comedic weapons three decades ago, paving the way for Richard Pryor and Chris Rock. Now 67, the comic-turned-social activist lives in Massachusetts but still travels the country, giving as many as 300 speeches a year, he says. (You can read his opinions on everything from racial intolerance to genetically engineered food on his Web site, https://www.dickgregory.com, thoughts that at times play like conspiracy theories without punch lines.)

Maybe, as some suggest, we simply live in satirically moribund times. Sahl, by contrast, bit into the news when the news was less an extension of a network’s entertainment division--when there was a Cold War on and political humor wasn’t so sanctioned (Sahl worked at a time when a gig could result in bodily harm.). Bruce went to the mat over the 1st Amendment, taking his comedy into both the clubs and the courtroom. “Saturday Night Live,” another cultural landmark for political humor, emerged in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

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Among those pioneering “SNL’s” political humor were Al Franken, a liberal, and Jim Downey, whom Franken calls a conservative. “If you look at the heyday of our political stuff, it tended to be a little bit more sophisticated. And that was because both of us kind of cared. We cared enough to pay attention,” says Franken, today a sometime pundit and the author of two books of political satire, “Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot” and “Why Not Me?,” which imagines a Franken presidency.

Franken is also part of what, today, amounts to a niche crowd--a comic with politics. But that doesn’t mean the late-night hosts, by cleaving to the disinterested middle, don’t impact politics in the process.

“Jay Leno likes to say, ‘I’m an equal-opportunity offender.’ Well, then you’re not offending anyone,” says Michael Moore, the renegade filmmaker whose documentary series, “The Awful Truth,” on cable’s Bravo displays his confrontational brand of sociopolitical satire--extensions of the film “Roger & Me,” in which Moore hounded then-General Motors Chairman Roger Smith over plant closings in his native Flint, Mich.

“When you take that position, you increase the cynicism in America. Because what you’re doing is you’re saying to the public, ‘I don’t have political beliefs. I hate it all. I think it all stinks and you should too.’ And once people think it all stinks, they don’t want to participate anymore,” Moore says, citing the fact that less than half of eligible voters cast ballots in the last presidential election.

“The guys who have major national audiences do affect politics by the relentlessness of their joking,” agrees Harry Shearer, a political satirist with a decidedly smaller bully pulpit in the form of “Le Show,” his public radio program, now in its 17th year and heard locally on KCRW-FM (89.9).

“It’s the Dan Quayle effect,” Shearer says, referring to the critical mass of jokes that defined the former vice president out of political viability. “The dream of the satirist, which is to have an effect on the thing you’re making fun of, they are in fact doing. People in the inner loop of the media political complex measure the degradation. If anybody falls prey to the Dan Quayle effect, it marks an end to their viability. If you are ridiculed too often on those shows, it’s a death warrant. It’s why I thought Clinton was going to have to resign.”

Moore and Shearer, of course, are outsiders--or at least satirists without a mass audience and corporate bosses to placate. This is hardly Leno’s mandate; five nights a week, he will tell you, he is paid extremely well to deliver topical, softball jokes for the tender amusement of people ending their long day. As such, Leno doesn’t think his monologue reflects a prevailing cynicism; instead, he says, he is feeding a nation that remains blissfully uninformed and uninterested in politics generally.

“Americans think they like politics the way they think they like cars,” he says. “Americans don’t like car racing, they like car crashes. It’s the same thing with politics. They like politics? No, they don’t, they like Monica Lewinsky and people caught with their pants down.

“Mort Sahl would go on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’ and do Joe McCarthy jokes to a country frightened about McCarthy,” Leno adds. “He was preaching to the unconverted. Not everything he said was a joke, but it was extremely clever. In the TV world right now, funny beats clever.”

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Sahl, not surprisingly, doesn’t see funny or clever in political comedy discourse nowadays. What he sees are easy jokes about political leaders whose ideological differences aren’t as circumscribed as they were in the 1950s and ‘60s. What he sees is a school of performers who couldn’t elevate their material even in a more politically charged environment.

“What if you had John Kennedy right now, and he meant it, and he was opposing Nixon, and he meant it. Would that mean that Bill Maher would move his art up and meet the challenge?” Sahl says. “He is what he is. And those guys on late-night [TV] are what they are.”

Maher, host of ABC’s “Politically Incorrect”--a show that is perhaps best described as a town meeting at which celebrities, right- and left-wing activists and nonspecific media types trade knee-jerk opinions--bristles at being lumped in with his late-night brethren. Interviewed in his office after taping an episode during which he shouted down the Rev. Jerry Falwell for declaring global warming a myth, Maher says: “You’ll have to excuse me for saying I should not be lumped in with the other shows, because I shouldn’t. They are cynical and I’m not. Even though my [HBO] special was called ‘Be More Cynical.’ I believe people need to be more cynical, but only to the point that they can see through what the truly cynical are doing.”

Maher, a self-described libertarian, has been playing both sides of the political comedy fence lately--blurring the distinction between an “I’m just here to entertain” populist comic and a comic with an agenda, including campaign finance reform, a topic on which he spoke at the Shadow Convention, the Arianna Huffington-produced smorgasbord of sociopolitical discourse that ran concurrently with the Republican and Democratic conventions.

“Jay Leno is an incredible stand-up comedian, and he does a great monologue; Jon Stewart is a great stand-up comedian, does a great monologue; Letterman--but they don’t have a dog in the fight, they don’t care,” he says. “They just make jokes, and sometimes good jokes, but they don’t have a point of view. This show has a point of view; that’s why it’s alternative.”

But even anger, in Maher’s universe, comes with show business realities--not the least of which is the fact that “Politically Incorrect” airs on ABC, which is owned by the Walt Disney Co. (Maher has broad freedom to tackle subjects and is muzzled only in terms of how freely he can promote the legalization of drugs.)

On mainstream politics, though, Maher is free to sound off and often does both onstage and off. “The scandal is that these politicians are bought--lock, stock and tomahawk,” he said in his office the week of the Republican convention, repeating a line he used at the Shadow Convention. “This convention itself is owned by these companies, and of course these politicians are going to do their bidding.”

For those wanting to get into the political comedy field, there’s your setup. You need only provide your own punch line.