I thought I'd put this in the TV section, except it deals with The Daily Show satrizing politics and their approach.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/20/ar...rint&position=
April 20, 2003
Jon Stewart's Perfect Pitch
T'S Andy Rooney's job to make us laugh. So it was somewhat startling to hear him decry the war on the eve of Baghdad's fall. Instead of offering his usual wry postscript to "60 Minutes," he sounded nearly as bleak as the anchor who threatens to commit suicide on camera in Paddy Chayefsky's "Network."
"I've lived a long while now and I don't remember any more unpleasant times than these," Mr. Rooney said. "I'm not even interested in reading the sports pages. I hate everything about this war except that we're winning. You can't even be critical, either, without sounding unpatriotic. . . . There aren't any good wars, but this one is especially bad. . . . The only real good news will be when this terrible time in American history is over."
If you were in the market for that rare TV commentator who might dissent from the gung-ho view of "War With Iraq," Mr. Rooney, a card-carrying member of the greatest generation, was your man. But funny he was not. And neither were most of the other wits charged with offering a much-needed comic counterpoint, or at least some comic relief, to the often oppressive triumphalism of the war weeks. For sketch material, "Saturday Night Live" came up with a roly-poly Saddam, played by Horatio Sanz, who bellowed about the lapsed TV reception in his bunker. (Had his TV functioned, he could have watched the funnier Saddam cartoons on "South Park.") On "Real Time With Bill Maher," the host had to order his liberal and conservative panelists alike to "stop yelling at each other" last weekend during what was supposed to be amusing, "Politically Incorrect"-style repartee about the war. Don Imus dialed down his usual comic pieces to go into all-news mode on his morning radio show. David Letterman was on sick leave. And Leno was Leno: "What do the Iraqi Republican Guard and the Clippers have in common? Neither one is going to be around for the playoffs."
It's in this context that the nightly laughter generated by "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart," an 11 p.m. fixture on Comedy Central since 1999, has been all the more extraordinary. Throughout the war, Mr. Stewart has turned his parodistic TV news show into a cultural force significantly larger than any mere satire of media idiocies. It does not take genius to make Geraldo look like a clown. (You can just show the actual video, as Mr. Stewart is wont to do.) But it does take a certain kind of brilliance to mine the comic absurdities in a continuing news story featuring such sobering phenomena as a grotesque tyrant, the wholesale loss of human life and a president even his political opponents are afraid to take on. "Catch-22" and "M*A*S*H" emerged only after their respective wars were long gone, not smack in the heat of battle.
What's more, "The Daily Show" has fulfilled its mission without being particularly ideological. On the day of Baghdad's liberation, Mr. Stewart told his viewers that "if you are incapable of feeling at least a tiny amount of joy at watching ordinary Iraqis celebrate this, you are lost to the ideological left." Then he added: "If you are incapable of feeling badly that we even had to use force in the first place, you are ideologically lost to the right." He implored "both of those groups to leave the room now." That would still leave a vast audience. The coordinates of his comedy, falling somewhere between the poles of left and right, may delineate the precise location of the ambivalence and anxiety that many, if not most, Americans have felt about their first pre-emptive war (even in victory, according to last week's CBS/New York Times poll). If that means Mr. Stewart has located the political center, his humor is so sharp that it never seems like the mushy middle.
The heart of his show is the faux "news" broadcast that opens it each night. A typical segment consists of byplay between Mr. Stewart, who serves as anchor, and Stephen Colbert, the self-important, terminally patronizing "senior correspondent" who is reporting from the "scene" (a bogus backdrop) of whatever story is at hand. The staff of "The Daily Show" finds laughs by taking the facts of a news story more seriously than real TV journalists sometimes do. Right through the war, for instance, most TV reporters mindlessly parroted the Pentagon speak of "coalition forces" without qualification, as if the dozens of allies touted by the White House were providing troops to the American war effort. On "The Daily Show," by contrast, "Coalition of the Piddling" has from the start been a continuing logo for reports on coalition "partners" like Morocco, whose contribution to United States forces was 2,000 monkeys enlisted to set off land mines. (That's not satire; "The Daily Show" picked up the story from The Washington Post.)
Mr. Stewart and company were on top of "The Halliburton Connection" (as another segment logo has it) well before much of the media spoke up loudly about the nexus between Dick Cheney's former employer and lucrative government wartime contracts. When Mr. Stewart asked Mr. Colbert for his take on whether Saddam was dead or alive, the correspondent answered, "One thing is certain: If Saddam is dead, it greatly reduces his ability to control Iraq." But wouldn't his death end his control entirely? asked Mr. Stewart. Not necessarily, argued Mr. Colbert: "When this man appears in public no one is sure it's actually him, and yet he's held an iron grip on power since 1979 — 24 years of brutal dictatorship, all while only maybe existing. The point is we can kill Saddam Hussein but we won't win the war until we kill the idea of Saddam Hussein. So what we need to do is develop bombs that kill ideas."
In an interview with Mr. Stewart and Ben Karlin, the show's co-executive producer, I asked why material like this has failed, as yet, to make "The Daily Show" a target of the patriotism police who have tried to impose a rigid wartime speech code on most of American discourse, pop culture included. "It's different coming from us than the Dixie Chicks," said Mr. Karlin, who was formerly an editor of the satirical newspaper The Onion. "It's more expected that we're going to process a news event and have a take on it." Maybe, but it's also a matter of tone. As Laura Miller has observed in Salon, Mr. Stewart is not self-righteous — an increasingly rare quality right now. This is a time when antiwar voices have often felt (not without reason) that they have to be strident to be heard above the military music, and the keepers of jingoistic political correctness feel they must be just as shrill to shout them down. "The Daily Show" is anomalously rational. "Our audience can watch without feeling like we're grabbing them by the lapels and shouting `This is the truth!' in their faces," said Mr. Stewart. "Our show is about not knowing what the truth is."
"The Daily Show" prides itself on its bipartisanship. "People ask, `Why aren't you really making fun of Democrats right now?' " Mr. Stewart says, "and we say we'd love to if we knew where they were." But what makes the show original is that it tends not to even recognize party-line categories. In Mr. Stewart's view, "Liberals and conservatives are two gangs who have intimidated rational, normal thinking beings into not having a voice on television or in the culture." He argues that they are on their way to extinction: "Liberals and conservatives are paradigms that mean nothing to anyone other than the media. Liberals were relevant when there was a giant cause to fight for — civil rights. They accomplished it so well that the only thing left for them to do now is to get women into Augusta. So what are they? And what are Rush and the Ann Coulters battling? They're still fighting the cold war. You know, Russia gave up a long time ago."
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Mr. Stewart caused a stir by shunning comedy entirely. He shut down "The Daily Show" for a week, then returned with a tearful monologue about the attack on his city. "This time," Mr. Karlin says, "we all thought at the beginning there's no way we're going to be able to do the war." The default position was to stick with jokes about the media. But the war itself increasingly became the subject, and the jokes about President Bush depart from the late-nite clichés. The Bush on "Saturday Night Live" may still be frat-boy simple, wishing that "Shock and Awe" had been named "Tango & Cash," but "The Daily Show" sees a slicker operator. After the president told the Iraqis in a subtitled TV address that they were "a good and gifted people" who "deserve better than tyranny and corruption and torture chambers," Mr. Stewart cited it as proof that "condescension knows no borders." Nor is the show taking at face value the White House's professed devotion to postwar Iraq. "We won," said Mr. Colbert in his "report" from Baghdad 10 days ago. "Rebuilding is for losers. Time to party! Then it's off to Syria for the next invasion."
But the relief that a viewer can take away from "The Daily Show" has less to do with its specific point of view than with its unfailingly polite but firm refusal to subscribe to anyone else's program. For those who share Andy Rooney's gloom, it's a place to find a smart take on the war that does not abide by the strict guidelines that come with either blind support or apoplectic rejection of "Operation Iraqi Freedom."
"It's so interesting to me that people talk about late-night comedy being cynical," Mr. Stewart says. "What's more cynical than forming an ideological news network like Fox and calling it `fair and balanced'? What we do, I almost think, is adorable in its idealism. It's quaint." He's not wrong. During this war, the notion of exercising cant-free speech on an American TV network, even a basic cable network, has proved to be idealistic, quaint and too often restricted to Comedy Central at 11 o'clock.
The Daily Show.
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