The Great American Joke

Since the 70s, the American public’s confidence in news media and the government has been on a steady decline. It’s almost natural that something like The Daily Show (TDS) would come out of this time of distrust to ridicule these rotting institutions. In the beginning when TDS just premiered at Comedy Central, it was a simple comedy show that uses news format only as a framing for the jokes. After the original host Craig Kilborn left the show in 1998, Comedy Central found Jon Stewart, at the time a leather-jacketed Gen X wisecracker famous for his hip MTV talk show, to take over. For the next 16 years, almost every night, Stewart would go in front of the camera for 22 minutes and deliver a brilliant comedic performance discussing the major news of the day. In his hands, TDS transformed from a spoof to a platform for “political, media and social critique”. By the year 2007, TDS had grown into a more popular and more trusted source of news than many of the competing “real news shows” on FOX and CNN. With the rise of the show, Stewart himself also became an influential media figure. He was even voted as the most admired journalist by Americans younger than 30 years old. Behind his world class eye-rolling and over the top Robert De Niro impression, Jon Stewart uses comedy performance as a tool to execute the responsibility of a public intellectual. By critiquing American politics and media with humor, Jon Stewart directs his viewers’ attention to important issues and urges them to form their opinion critically and independently.

Although Stewart repeatedly denied that his show can be considered journalism, the audiences of TDS seems to be highly informed. In fact, a survey showed that regular viewers of The Daily Show were “most likely to score in the highest percentile on knowledge of current affairs”. The power of the TDS lies in the fact that Stewart, unlike his late night peers who use news topics only as a set-up, always puts the news themselves at the center of the joke. He uses his blunt and honest reaction to the matters to not only bring out laughter but also build a connection between him and his viewer. In this way ensures that his audience recognizes the importance of these issues and are willing to investigate further. We can look back at a 2015 segment on TDS about Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran for example. In this clip, Stewart first brought up that a potential nuclear deal with Iran was proposed by Obama. He contrasted the limited effect of this draft of a treaty to the over the top push back from republican congressmen who claimed such a deal must go through congress. Furthermore, he exposed the hypocrisy of these politicians by showing their past claims that there is no need for the approval of congress when it comes to starting a war. By the end of the segment, he straightforwardly conveyed his frustration at the war mongering behaviors deeply embedded in American political institutions by saying,

That’s the kind of goodness baked into our constitution. To make peace Two-Thirds of the senate need to come along. You want to go to war, though? Simple majority. And a quick tip, if you call it something else, you can do whatever the (Bleep) you want.

Feeling Stewart’s anger and frustration, the audience could clearly see how hard it is for such a peace deal to survive and became eager to learn more about its fate in the future. This bluntness in Stewart’s reaction is in line with his ideal of “no bullshit” journalism. He once articulated this idea at a forum in 2004:

You could create a paradigm of a media organization that is geared towards no bullshit – and do it actively – and stop pretending that we don’t know what’s going on. And stop pretending that it’s a right/left question. I don’t buy that the world is divided into bi-chromatic thoughts like that.

Comedy is the perfect place to actualize this ideal. The carelessness of comedy relieves him from the traditional journalistic burden of objectivity and the need to present arguments from both sides. He is allowed to be absolutely honest with his own opinion, which in turn motivates his audience to stay informed about the important affairs.

Another key function TDS plays in American political discourse is the role of a media watch dog. In fact, much of The Daily Show’s airtime was dedicated to critiques of news media. As we already see, Stewart holds strong ideals for what journalism should be and is deeply disappointed at its current state in the U.S. On his show, He often ridicules cable news’ tendency to fill their 24 hours air time with sensationalized “infotainment” and brain-dead arguments that contribute little to informing the public. For instance, we can look at this TDS segment on the cable news coverage of the missing flight MH370. In this clip, Steward showed the audience how CNN desperately tried to fill their air time by showing all the irrelevant details of the missing flight using graphics, models, and holograms. Then he mocked CNN for asking the experts about sensationalized conspiracy theories like “is it a black hole?” He finish this segment by showing how this incompetent coverage by CNN become a news itself and news channels ends up covering each other’s news coverage. Segments like this gives Steward’s audience a big picture view of the media, which encourages them to look at their information sources critically. Moreover, Steward’s comedic critiques of the media oftentimes have direct impact on the media themselves. In 2004, Stewart appeared as a guest on the program Crossfire, a CNN debate show that had been running since 1982. On the show, he “vehemently chastised the shows hosts, Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala, for irresponsibly (and badly) covering politics”, telling them to “Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America.” Clips of Stewart’s appearance quickly went viral, and the program was canceled after a few months. The president of CNN, Jonathan Klein, later commented that “I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart’s overall premise [about political debate shows].” In this way, as a public intellectual, Stewart uses comedy to “keep the pot boiling” and pushes for better discourse in the public as well as the media.

Over the years, Jon Stewart has been repeatedly criticized for presenting arguments that lack nuance and depth. One of such instances happened in 2013, when TDS aired a segment ridiculing the idea to solve the national debt ceiling problem by minting a trillion dollar coin and depositing it in the federal reserve. This segment faced immediate backlashes from political commentators and economists for not doing enough research into the topic. Economist Paul Krugman criticized Jon Stewart and his team for their “lack of professionalism” in his blog post “Lazy Jon Stewart” , saying that

Stewart seems weirdly unaware that there’s more to fiscal policy than balancing the budget. But in this case he also seems unaware that the president can’t just decide unilaterally to spend 40 percent less; he’s constitutionally obliged to spend what the law tells him to spend. True, he’s also constitutionally prohibited from borrowing more if Congress says he can’t — which is a contradiction. But that’s the whole point of the discussion.

It is true that in this case, and in many other cases, Jon Stewart failed to present the whole picture to his audience. Oftentimes, he oversimplifies the issue and uses this oversimplification to craft his jokes. However, we must not overlook the fact that Jon Stewart operates with the limitation of a short comedy show. His audiences in front of the TV are expecting jokes and will simply leave if it turns into a lengthy lecture on economics or politics. Moreover, with only 20 minutes of air time each night, his TDS cannot not have the time or the resources like the 24 hours news channel like CNN or Fox News. Thus, in each comedy bit, a choice of what information to cover and what to discard must be made. This problem of scope does not diminish the contribution of Stewart as a public intellectual. For Stewart, his main responsibility for the American public is not presenting a holistic view on current affairs but directing their attention to the important issues. The viewers themselves have to find multiple sources of information and fill in the gap left by TDS. The result of this, as we mentioned above, is that frequent viewers of TDS do rely on multiple sources to stay informed.

Jon Stewart left The Daily Show in 2015, right before American politics was forever changed by Donald Trump and his presidency. It’s hard to imagine what would have happened if he had stayed on the show. Would it change the result of the election? Would there be less radicalized Americans? However, the sad truth about this reality is that there is never an if. It’s simply impossible for anyone to stay on air forever no matter how important or how influential he or she is. We can take consolation in the fact that the possibility of using comedy to inform the public and to inspire independent thinking is opened up after Stewart’s 16 years run on TDS. Many new creators, including some of TDS alumni like John Oliver and Stephen Colbert, are creating their own version of The Daily Show to help the public orient themselves in this age of propaganda and misinformation. The time has changed and the media has changed, but comedy will stay powerful as a tool to counter the force eroding democracy.

Send comments to my email at: linghanz@usc.edu