Thought I saw Jon Stewart's point of view last night. "Clowns don't take the field."

DirkGently

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Fri Nov-12-10 11:50 AM
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Thought I saw Jon Stewart's point of view last night. "Clowns don't take the field."

After the Stewart / Colbert Rally to Restore Sanity, I thought, as I think a lot of people did,

1) Great -- lots of decent people, notably liberals, coming together to mock the insanity we've seen take over the national debate, and, by the way, twice as many as showed up to help Glenn Beck reclaim Civil Rights for white people, or whatever the hell that supposed to be about, but

2) Stewart seemed to stretch, again, to suggest that rhetorical insanity is equal among left and right commentators, which is clearly not the case. E.g. Hannity's or Beck's blatant lies are not the same as Olbermann being strident or shrill. These differences are real, and they're important. I'd seen Stewart stretching on this subject before, straining particularly hard to call out Rachel Maddow over some emphasis or another she put on a story about the Haitian disaster. It rankled then, because it didn't ring true.

I still think that.

But in listening to the interview last night -- which clearly suffered quite a bit due to Stewart's illness -- the man was GRAY -- I heard him say that he sees the role of a satirist as a specific thing; a discipline unto itself, which first of all must not appear to be an advocate for ANY side. He's trying quite deliberately not to contribute to the left / right dichotomy that so much of the cable TV noise has devolved into. There are reasons for that.

For one, I thought he made a point that the dichotomy itself is at least partly false, and has become a convenient, oversimplified narrative for the 24-hour cable cycle. There are of course real pollitical differences that we're all talking about for good reason. But like any dichotomy, viewing everything through the left / right lens oversimplies and dumbs things down. It can be blinding when people either embrace or dismiss something as being from their camp or "the other guys." Everything that needs discussion doesn't fit into a liberal /conservative box.

Again, the man was ILL. But my takeaway was he sees his role a satirist to be specific. His process is supposed to be apolitical. A satirist, or comic, or clown, is there to articulate and ridicule the Stupid in society. 'Cause Stupid is funny. Now, if a particular group falls into the Stupid category more often than another, so be it. Stewart made the point that the Daily Show really does NOT treat Fox and MSNBC equally, not because of whatever we might call Fox's ideology, but just because it is more Stupid, and thus more funny, more often.

The other point that flowed from that was that becoming a partisan of any kind is immediately limiting. Stewart talked about not "taking the field" the way Rachel does. If he made his show about Liberals vs. Conservatives, and pressing for a win of one over the other, he'd just be dismissed, the way anything now that can be identified as being one or the other is dismissed by one side. He'd become part of the "noise" of the left / right narrative and lose the comic mojo that defines him.

I think he's right about that. Rachel pushed back, and well, I think, to say that while she publicly self-identifies as a "Big L / little L Liberal," she's very serious about being honest and fair, but I also took Stewart's point that Rachel using a comic tone from a political point of view is not the same *process* as a comedian ruthlessly looking to make fun whenever and wherever it rings true.

As he pointed out, Stewart's position as a comic is unfair. He claims (rightly) to be a clown, and clowns don't "take the field." He doesn't risk being on the "wrong" side of things, because his only argument is to be funny. But that's no small thing, because if it's funny, he's RIGHT. He didn't express this as well as he might have as he wobbled nauseatedly in his chair, but comedy is a kind of self-adjusting truth filter. He doesn't have to argue that something is worthy of ridicule. If he ridicules it, and people laugh, his job is done.

That's a powerful thing because, as Rachel recently pointed out, it's become easy to dismiss someone stating a fact as being a dishonest partisan. It's much harder to dismiss a laugh.

Gvien that, I still think the critique of false equivalency critique was legitimate, because I still think the Daily Show has stretched and strained at times to make sure liberal Stupid doesn't get a free pass where conservative Stupid gets nailed. I suspect someone on the show was tasked with finding a liberal source to poke fun at, and some kind of informal quota arose to try to be "fair."

But Stewart's also right that he's not actually responsible for being fair. It's not up to him to demonstrate whether conservative-flavored Stupid is more important or more common that liberal-flavored Stupid. That's OUR job. We can figure out, for example, what if may mean that the "Rally to Restore Sanity" was strangely free of Tea Partiers. Or that there simply is no liberal equivalent of Glenn Beck or Sharron Angle.

But I think Jon also harbors a hope if everyone focused on laughing at the Stupid itself, wherever we find it, that we might all get a little smarter.

I think he's got a point.