The ever-trenchant Steve Almond invokes Bill Hicks, Mark Twain, and George Carlin in his sharp critique of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. I’m not sure he explicitly calls them corporate shills, but that’s the gist:
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.
Read the whole thing. And just ’cause:
I read that one earlier this morning. It had some thematic issues. For one, he did a lot of rhetorical deck stacking, saying that fans of the two shows only wanted a laugh, and nothing more…Even though both shows do more than that I think, and do it well.
And this false dichotomy between poking fun and “directly confronting.” What the hell would this direct confrontation he wants look like, exactly? ‘South Park,’ it would appear, or Bill fucking Maher. I think he forgets that for political comedy to work, it does need to be funny, which ‘South Park’ often isn’t, and Bill Maher pretty much never is. In Maher’s case, it’s generally because he’s too busy trying to score a cheap joke in lieu of making the larger point.
There’s a couple other old favorite arguments in there I can’t really get with: Rich and Famous making fun of other Rich and Famous = Hypocrisy. Okay. Let’s see how much of an audience me and my no dollars can reach with my very astute political comedy there….oh, I could go on.
As writings from radicals often do, this boils down to “WHY AREN’T PEOPLE AS OUTRAGED AS I AM ABOUT THE STATE OF THE WORLD?” and “by not actively trying to smash the status quo, Colbert & Stewart (C&S) are further enabling it.”
Whether Almond likes it or not, C&S have done more to advance progressivism than Almond will ever do to promote the radical change he seeks.
This is just sour grapes that the market of citizens want what C&S are selling (progressive change from within the existing system), not what Almond is selling, (a wholesale reordering of society from without). While C&S have the clout to give coherence and texture to the prevailing current of liberal thought, they didn’t create the current. In other words, if the prevailing mood were more radical, people would agree with Almond that C&S were harmless, Will Rogers types offering irrelevant politics.
Almond starts from the perspective that he is empirically correct in his diagnosis and cure, while ignoring that only a tiny fraction of other doctors agree with him on either point.
Keep calling the rest of us blind, cowardly sheep while you keep ignoring the possibility that maybe your point of view has actually been considered and rejected by other, equally thoughtful people.
And of course he loves Bill Hicks. I like Bill Hicks too, but I’m not really sure that what he was practicing was comedy. He was mostly just standing on a stage ranting about things that bothered him, and audiences laughed because they weren’t really sure what to do otherwise. In any case, that’s not an example of how to politically motivate an audience, either.
Reminder, the brother of Mr. “everyday people” Jon Stuart Leibowitz is the chief operating officer of the NYSE. He has also served as the managing director and chief operating officer at UBS, “the leading global wealth manager, a leading global investment banking and securities firm, and one of the largest global asset managers”, as they describe themselves.
I wonder if he’ll ever have his older brother Larry on the show so he can ask him directly about the flash crash of 2010, which he presided over?
I got to the end of the first page, realized it was actually 4 pages, and stopped reading. That article sucked.
Commentary Colin nailed the point: this guy is bitching that Stewart & Colbert are not radical enough. What a pussy whinny bitch thing to do. It might be worthwhile to complain that there are not as many radical comedians these days, but instead he attacks people who are just going for cheap laughs.
If you expect Stewart & Colbert to be leaders in a Revolution, then you should probably kill yourself. The angst you will experience throughout your life is going to make it very, very terrible. Stop complaining about the revolution and start leading a revolution. People are not going to do it for you, and the it won’t be televised.
Come on, Alison. It’s *George* Carlin.
There’s some wheel-spinning Sociology 101 argumenation in there that makes me glaze over like I did as a sophmore in college.
That said, Stewart’s shtick is ham-handed and reaks too much of choir preaching. But to me his great existential value is to piss off trolls like Spindles which also makes him great and extremely valuable.
Colbert I find much more subversive because his character is post-modern and his point can be made indirectly but no less stridently. He also has great value in confusing those same aforementioned trolls into still thinking he’s a real conservative while delivering a contradictory message. I do wish his interviews were normal, though.
Stewart stabbed the unemplyed American workers in the back and is very biased in favor of endless immigration favored by big business that want more and more cheap compliant foreign labor.
Jon Stewart is THE MAN on lying to America about immigration!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5kgNwvSHyc
El Gordo—er yeah, of course it is, thanks.
In all seriousness folks – it was an intelligent, well written article. Totally recommend it.