Jon Stewart's Perfect Pitch
By Frank Rich
IT'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....
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. ...
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....
In an interview with Mr. Stewart and Ben Karlin, the show's co-executive producer, I asked why [this non-mushy] material ... 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." ...
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/20/arts/20RICH.html?pagewanted=all&position=>
Carl
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