Political Satire - Good, Bad, or Just Plain Funny?

This is a short, non-academic essay I recently wrote for one of my classes. It reflects some of my research interests, which are satire and the convergence of politics with popular culture. Thought it would be fun to share. Enjoy!

Esquire writer Tom Junod recently suggested that the primary difference between Republicans and Democrats is personified by the comparison of Roger Ailes and Jon Stewart. The former is current president of FOX News Channel, and often perceived as an evil genius. The latter is often portrayed as a genius of perceived non-evil.

"Oddly enough,” Jon Stewart as says of FOX News, “[It] and our show have a tremendous amount in common, in that we are both reactions to the news and to government. We’re both expressions of dissatisfaction. [Ailes], I think, happens to be a slightly more powerful version."

Perceptions of power aside, both media influencers are deeply rooted in political ideals, which says a lot about the state of modern American partisan politics. Both FOX News – and all cable news outlets, for that matter – are primary deliverers of information to American media consumers. Satirical programs, like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, are usually dependent on traditional news channels for their content. And, while that’s still true to a certain extent, by parodying both the news of the day, and how that news is delivered, satirical news programs have turned into primary news sources for some.

Since its ancient inception, satire has always often used to entertain and inform, but to what cost? Some say that parodies weaken journalistic integrity. However, is it possible that these satirical news programs are more capable of producing that which a proclaimed “fair and balanced” news network cannot? Again, some would argue that modern television satire programs have the potential to do nothing except point a finger at the other side and laugh – as if it were the bullying victor in a media equivalent of a middle school dodge ball game. But, not only is it not in satirists’ nature to care about such questions, it is also a moot point in an era in which a surprising number of the up-and-coming generation of voters are solidifying their opinions about politics from humor-based media.

Comedians and satirists don’t have to be nice, because that’s not their job. Nor do they necessarily need to concern themselves with whether or not their actions are healthy for American media consumers. Columnist Stacey Glenrock Woods said the following of being a former writer for The Daily Show: "When I tell people that I used to work for Jon, the thing they ask, all the time, is 'Oh, is he nice?' Now, I would never think of Jon Stewart as 'nice.' He's a comedian, and comedians aren't always particularly nice people.”

The purpose of satire is a dual one. Influential satirists like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher, and the cast of Saturday Night Live primarily utilize it to point out glaring omissions in logic. They ultimately want to be informative, yet they also want to be persuasive of their own cause or beliefs.

After that, they just want to entertain.

The first objective is shared with traditional news outlets, and probably overlaps many mission statements laid forth by media companies like CNN, The New York Times, and even FOX News. But the second is exclusive to satirists. They depend on laughs at the expense of their subjects and justify their farcical efforts under the guise that “it’s all comedy.” How it affects or reflects political culture, or popular culture, is secondary to the measurement of its influence in entertainment value, which often comes from just the right amount of antagonism. Just like there’s no crying in baseball, there’s no softballing in satire, and this can often produce mixed messages.

Throughout American media history political news – whether via radio, television, or the Internet – has often been delivered in a straightforward manner, and not with an accompanying punch line. Yet in recent elections, television satire has become intrinsic to voters’ media consumption habits because of the clever and irreverent angles with which it is delivered. The role of satire in American mass media has steadily grown larger in the last two decades. According to a recent poll, many now see Jon Stewart as the most trusted man in television news. Many other media experts have pointed out the influence of Saturday Night Live‘s rotating troupe of Presidential impressionists, and specifically Tina Fey’s recent impression of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin during the 2008 presidential election cycle. Satirical parodies can influence viewers about both the candidates themselves, and the ideologies they represent.

Christine O’Donnell, and her failed 2010 senatorial campaign in Delaware, is a recent casualties in the political war waged by satirists. In an Rolling Stone interview earlier this year, late night satirist Bill Maher used her as an example of how the whole comedy sphere can get in on a joke that sears a brand on a candidate, resulting the kind of scarring for which there is no remedy. He mentioned a skit on Saturday Night Live that joked about O’Donnell and her denial of being a witch. This denial was necessary after Maher showed a clip of O’Donnell in the nineties talking about how she once dabbled in witchcraft before becoming a born again Christian.

“I was amazed at how much people just latched onto that,” he said. “‘It’s perfect, we can understand that, a witch, she’s a witch!’ But let’s get real, she wouldn’t have won anyway. She was not a credible candidate, and Delaware is not a stupid state. We gave people something to laugh about, and made a marginal candidate even more marginal.”

It’s a valid point, and Maher freely admits to being a participant in her demise. In this case, he knowingly contributed information he knew to be true to the national news cycle. SNL simply picked it up after traditional outlets had carried it. Waiting for the interim step of FOX News, CNN, or MSNBC to break it as a story was unnecessary.

Take Jon Stewart and The Daily Show as another example. Much research has been done on whether Stewart’s fake news program actually contains real news, and research has shown that it contains a substantial amount of informative issue coverage. The National Annenberg Election Survey even found that during the 2004 Presidential election regular viewers of The Daily Show were able to better process and remember political information better than those of traditional broadcast news shows. Some of this can be attributed to the very presence of humor. Heavy exposure to continual joking can lead to tremendous audience intake of candidates’ platforms and positions.

Media scholars identify this as a result of the “agenda setting function of media.” That’s the notion that news media doesn’t specifically tell a viewer what to think, but instead, through the choice of what topics to cover, suggests subject areas that they should think about. Often television satirists’ focus is on lambasting whomever they see as ridiculous, regardless of nuances like party affiliation. However their criteria for what is “ridiculous” often varies. For a liberal satirist like Maher, making fun of Democrats usually involves jokes rooted in the notion that they are not liberal enough. The converse is the same for a conservative satirist like Dennis Miller.

No matter what party the jokes are rooted in, they are often generalizations and caricatures. Republicans are from red states and love their old time religion and guns. Democrats are from the northeast, or worse – California – and they love weed and abortions. Republicans hate taxes. Democrats love socialism. Republicans hate. Democrats love.

See how easy it is to reduce parties with thousands of elected officials to two simple punch lines? Television satire often focuses on these certain perceived caricatures of partisan ideals and traits, and often they are perceived as negative because, again, satirists don’t concern themselves with being nice. They frame conversations for entertainment purposes, and sometimes set parameters based on their own personal biases.

Other times, when satirists see a target greater than their partisan nemeses, they overlook their biases and aim higher. A recent content analysis of The Daily Show‘s 2010 mid-term election coverage showed that the show’s tone was negative 85.7 percent of the time Democratic candidates were mentioned, and 88.9 percent of the time Republican candidates were mentioned. Stewart has a known liberal bias, but it’s almost as if he remembers that the first rule of satirizing is to not be afraid to lambast one’s own team if their actions deserve it.

This is especially true for satirists who parody the news media, as Seth Meyers often does on SNL’s Weekend Update, along with Steven Colbert and Stewart on their respective programs. That same content analysis also found that 70.59 percent of the time conservative media pundits were discussed it was done so negatively, and 87.5 percent of the time of liberal pundits were mentioned they were also the objects of ridicule. Because they set aside partisan politics to focus on humor and parody, these shows become part of the same media news cycle they are simultaneously critiquing. This provides an ironic chicken-and-egg dilemma that would make Marshall McLuhan’s head explode. Which creates more partisan bias: the news media’s original coverage, or the satirists’ coverage of the news media?

When asked about the influence of his program compared with that of traditional news, Jon Stewart is quick to separate himself from journalists. He is a comedian, he says. Last year, during an interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Stewart said that what she does is harder than what he does. He has the luxury of being opinionated, subjective, and ultimately able to hide behind the protective Kevlar that comedy provides. His claim is that bi-partisan satire allows the satirist to bounce back and forth on the political spectrum, using comedy to expose corruption no matter where it lay. Other satirists, like the liberal Bill Maher, do not share this view.

“[Jon] is smart and funny, and does a great show,” Maher said in a recent interview. But he went on to decry the notion of bipartisanship. To Maher, it seems ludicrous to extend an olive branch to even moderate Republicans. “There are no moderates in the other party. ‘Moderate Republican’ is like ‘friendly shark’…It just doesn't exist,”he said.

However, it doesn’t seem like Maher, Stewart, or Miller are driving more of a wedge between the two parties any more than a small tremor could redefine the landscape of the Grand Canyon. If there is a direct effect from these satirical programs it seems more likely that satirists are driving a wedge between viewers and politicians. Eventually those who laugh at Democrats because they are proud Republicans – and those who laugh at Republicans because they are staunch Democrats – will simply be laughing at all politicians. So, in one sense, that seems like a healthy, unifying outcome from television satire. But is it relevant?

British satirist Peer Cook, once said that, people overestimate the power of satire. When somebody said to him that the most powerful satirists in history were the cabaret artists in Berlin during the 1930s, Cook replied, “Yeah, they really showed Hitler, didn’t they?”

But they were missing a mass audience. Maybe if those cabaret artists had played to a nightly average of 6 million people, they would have been more effective. The sheer number of people who watch, interact with, and are influenced by television satirists makes them as powerful as 24-hour news networks like FOX. Jon Stewart may not be the president of a news network, but people listen to him. Plus, he can say the F-word on TV and get away with it. Even Roger Ailes can’t do that.