The Daily Show is credited as evidence of irony's post-9/11 renaissance, but it's been on cable's Comedy Central since the Clinton administration. (Handy trivia tidbit: What was the next-before-last job Craig Kilborn left?) So, too, with South Park, the other Comedy Central program often tagged with political influence. South Park readies its 10th season with creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker enjoying credibility as political mavens, their "philosophy" celebrated in a book by Brian C. Anderson titled South Park Conservatives.
What is new is the seriousness with which comedy is treated as political commentary. Newspapers, including The New York Times and the Weekly's sister publication, the Las Vegas Sun, regularly report the quips of Leno and Letterman, and ABC's venerable This Week with George Stephanopoulos airs a late-night-comic feature. (Leno: "Today, President Bush said the United States is still under the threat of attack and will continue to be right up until Election Day.")
More important, comedy is a crucial source of information for many Americans. Baumgartner and Morris cite research showing that half of Americans aged 18 to 24 watch The Daily Show at least occasionally, while only one quarter of the cohort follows "hard news" closely. What this means, exactly, is hard to quantify. For instance, another survey, conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center in 2004, found that viewers of The Daily Show and late-night monologues answered more "political knowledge" questions correctly than did nonviewers. It also found that Daily Show viewers aged 18 to 29 scored better on the test than their peers who watched Leno or Letterman.
It's useful to ask, then, what comedy delivers. Studies are careful to balance left and right, jokes about Kerry and jokes about Bush, and Stewart has interviewed famous Republicans as well as Democrats. But any regular viewer of The Daily Show would have to conclude that it's murder on the Bush administration. ("America's Administration's Got Talent!" is but one particularly wicked send-up.) Maybe that's why conservatives got so riled when Stewart chewed out the hosts of CNN's Crossfire two years ago, for their "partisan hackery." Asked to defend his "softball" interview with John Kerry, Stewart observed that his show is comedy.
Bloomberg News columnist Andrew Ferguson dredged up this episode by way of hoping the ECU profs' report "might persuade some viewers, at long last, to stop paying attention to Jon Stewart—an outcome that becomes increasingly urgent as the 2008 elections approach." This might be all the more critical for conservatives to hope, given that those South Park conservatives have jumped ship, as John Tierney recently reported in The New York Times—angered by fiscal irresponsibility and piety politics, libertarians are abandoning the GOP. "The Republicans didn't want the government to run your life, because Jesus should," Parker tells Tierney. "That was really part of their thing: less government, more Jesus. Now it's like, how about more government and Jesus?''
One wonders what Stone and Parker liked about the earlier formulation, given that South Park has not been kind to religious figures in general, unless it was the general assumption of most libertarians, and not a few secular conservatives, that if you'd allow the godly their little corner of the action, they'd leave the rest of us alone. Fat chance.
And hardly surprising that Stone and Parker would miss this point. South Park has its moments of incisive social commentary, but for the most part its visual crudity emblematizes the puerility of its humor. The essence of its libertarianism is "we can say anything we want!"
Ferguson notes that young Daily Show viewers in the ECU study "‘reported increased confidence in their ability to understand the complicated world of politics.' Stewart is raising their self-esteem at the same time he makes them dumber." Ferguson calls this "a familiar phenomenon in the contemporary U.S.—rising ignorance accompanied by rising self-regard."
He's right on this point. It might be the central, crucial problem this nation faces today. But "self-regard" is really no different from South Park swagger; the appealing certainty is that everything serious can be made ridiculous, and therefore must be ridiculous. Parker and Stone deserve no more serious attention as political observers than Stewart, who at least is wise enough to disclaim it.
Trusting the breezy confidence of the uninformed has long ceased being funny.
Chuck Twardy has written for newspapers and magazines for more than 20 years. His website, www.members.cox.net/theanteroom, has a forum.