Getting the Last Laugh

"Fake news" anchor Jon Stewart. Courtesy The Comedy Network.

Although Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show had been a winning enterprise since the host took over from Craig Kilborn in 1999, its ratings jumped 22 per cent in the months immediately prior to the 2004 American election – a period when millions of TV viewers apparently preferred “fake news” to the real thing.

Last October, Stewart’s mock history, America: A Guide to Democracy Inaction - a self-proclaimed, “Bridget Jones’s Diary for the comedic non-fiction government textbook set” - leapt to the top of the U.S. bestseller lists.

And the plaudits kept coming – The Columbia Journalism Review placed Stewart fourth on its list of U.S. election campaign reporters who rose “above the superficial to do original and insightful work.” No other TV broadcaster made the top 20.

As anyone who followed real news in the last six months knows, however, the liberal performer’s show would seem to have hit a snag last fall when, despite all Stewart’s fine work, George W. Bush won the American election. In the weeks following, columnist William Safire despaired at how liberal thinkers were wallowing in The Slough of Despond. It was time, he said, for the so-called media elite to put its shoulder to the wheel. Otherwise, the left wing would be left behind.

All true. And fans had to wonder if Stewart would succumb to TSOD. How much of The Daily Show’s success was explained by the series’ invigorating, pre-election fight-club bluster? With the election lost, would Stewart be left behind?

Apparently not – a recent new survey reports the series recently concluded its best-ever quarter among American viewers aged 18 to 49. The show’s continuing success underlines something Stewart fans have known all along: for all Stewart’s obvious political-journalism savvy, The Daily Show succeeds on its host’s party moves. No dub club M.C. is better at mixing sound bites. And what with Jim Carrey having retreated to making holiday family films, no comedian is better at power pop-culture riffing.

For strangers to Stewart’s TV world, The Daily Show is a half-hour recasting of a day’s actual news cycle. The show borrows and toys with other network’s reports. Stewart responds by making faces and editorial comments. He also calls upon his own fake correspondents – comedians Stephen Colbert, Toronto-born Samantha Bee, Ed Helms and Rob Corddry – to achieve further mischief.

Two weeks ago, Stewart led off with a news story from CNN. Reporter Rick Sanchez stood in front of a police firing squad and shouted “Do it!” to a cop wielding a 50,000-volt stun gun. The officer complied. Sanchez buckled, his hair going wild for a moment. Throwing off a shiver, the newsman recovered to offer a succinct report on the effectiveness of the controversial police deterrent:

“It hurts,” he said.

But it was what happened next that made the bit painfully funny. A tickled Stewart didn’t so much play the CNN segment, but play with it, airing it first at regular speed, then in slow mo, whereupon Sanchez’s “ Do it!” and “It hurts!” became strangled electronic moans:

“Duh-eeenh... Enh-hunnh!”

After that, we saw Stewart weaving behind his desk as if floating under water, baying, “Ohh-nooooo … stun gun make Sanchez talk like Chewbacca…” (Chewbacca, remember, was the Star Wars fur-ball who spoke in prolonged monosyllables.)

A better example of The Daily Show’s ability to compact real news into sketch comedy came during President Bush’s January state of the union address, when the president proclaimed, “The state of our union is confident, strong.” At which point Republicans lifted stained-purple index fingers in approval, expressing solidarity with Iraqis who cast election ballots with smudged fingerprints.

Stewart responded with another movie skit. First we saw Bush’s remarks, then the waving of fingers. A spooked Stewart then observed, “It’s like the president and the union are bound in some kind of cosmic relationship – like E.T. and Elliott. When one is sick...” Here he began to lift his finger like E.T. waving goodbye, then sobbed, “The other is sad..."

Stewart’s ability to translate news stories into pop culture lingo is crucial to The Daily Show’s success. North Americans’ interest in politics and TV news is shrinking. The most startling bit to come out of Dan Rather’s retirement as CBS anchorman was a New York Times report that the average age of American network news viewers is now 60.

During last year's presidential election, Jon Stewart interviewed Democrat candidate John Kerry. Courtesy The Comedy Network.

The Daily Show understands its 18-49 audience. It hopes we’re interested in current events, but knows we’re addicted to entertainment. And so when Stewart recently mocked Bush’s press conference rationale for choosing Paul Wolfowitz as president of the World Bank – “He’s had lots of ah... experiences” – the comedian went right for a show biz punchline:

“Hey, Mötley Crüe has lots of experiences...”

Stewart’s show also understands television. Previous TV news satires, from Saturday Night Live’s news updates to Rick Mercer’s rants on This Hour Has 22 Minutes, relied on verbal shtick. But Stewart’s show follows the broadcast dictum, “TV is pictures.” Every night we see the freshest absurdities from that day’s cycle of news clips.

Stewart gets the pictures – more important, of course, he gets the picture. His coverage of the Republican and Democratic conventions last summer turned dreary, staged spectacles into rewarding comedy. Instead of wading through hours of tedious propaganda, we could follow the pseudo-events in uproarious two-minute clips on The Daily Show.

My favourite comedy moment in 2004 came during the Republican convention, when Stewart snuck into Lynne Cheney’s homespun recollections of her teenage courtship with the future VP:

“While most of the boys I knew saw the charm of driving back and forth, time and again, between the two A&W stands in our small town, Dick did not,” Cheney told the Madison Square Garden convention. “And, when practically everybody in Casper, Wyoming, started doing the twist, I can tell you, Dick did not...”

The Daily Show then cut from the convention for a brief moment to Stewart, inquiring, “And when all those young men were forced to go to Vietnam...”

“... Dick did not,” Lynne Cheney replied.

Perhaps the secret to Jon Stewart’s ongoing TV success is his understanding that The Slough of Despond is a TV eternal. Politics is perpetual bad weather. So, seemingly, is cable news. Stewart’s series is something unique and necessary: a late-night tonic that allows us to laugh off the day’s awful news. Months after it hit its stride, it remains true that no TV night is complete without The Daily Show.

Stephen Cole writes about television for CBC.ca.