A LETTER TO JON STEWART.
Dear Jon by Lee Siegel
Dear Jon Stewart, As the entire world knows, you'll be hosting the Oscars this coming Sunday for the first time.
On this august occasion, please allow me to appeal to you as someone who wants to be a fan but hasn't been able to enjoy you so far. Please allow me to appeal to you as a public service. You of all people know from public service, since you are the very man who has enlisted comedy in the cause of civic clarity. I can't imagine that what I say will make a difference to you--if you even happen to read this. No matter. Like you, I have a job to do.
First, this business of the entire world knowing that you will be hosting the Oscars; this craziness of journalists worrying over how you will handle an "older crowd"; over how you will bear up with stars like Jack Nicholson scrutinizing you from the front row, and with distinguished predecessors like Billy Crystal and Whoopi Goldberg gazing at you from their summits of historical accomplishment. Doesn't all this attention to an event of almost astronomical triviality make you worried? I ask because you seem actually to care about the quality of cultural and political life--there was your now-legendary moment with Tucker Carlson, for example, when you demanded that political talk shows get serious. Demanded. Live free or die, dude. But then you went and had on the Hollywood lackey Roger Ebert, whose highly visible coverage of the Oscars will of course include his evaluation of you. And there you were, pandering to him, and obsessing over your upcoming administration of the Oscars.
Jon, be honest. Has being Mr. Civic-Minded Serious Satirist of Our Debased Public Life merely become a successful shtick for you, based on its unexpected popularity during the 2004 presidential campaigns? Is it a trusty routine, like Jack Benny's stinginess, or Rodney Dangerfield's hilarious bad luck, both of which were a lot funnier than your current comedic hallmark? I recently tuned into your show and found you bravely trying to explain deficit spending even as you were bravely trying to make a joke about deficit spending. After informing the audience that the war in Iraq has cost the equivalent of $2,083 per taxpayer, you said:
The United States is actually taking out long-term loans from banks and foreign governments. So don't think of it like $2,000 that you don't have. Think of it as $200,000 your grandchildren don't have. [Photograph of grandchildren-looking children appears behind you.] And, seriously: [Bleep] them. [Wild laughter.] They think you smell like ass. [Delirious laughter.]
I'm sorry, Jon, for me, the right kind of laughter is almost synonymous with life itself, but I think that is the very opposite of funny. And this was a typical bit. There's no fresh surprising ironic contrast, no weirdness, no original explosive reconfiguration of wearily familiar features of reality. There's just a tedious economic point made with a political edge, a point that every adult who cares enough to check into what's going on in the world has already seen elaborated in the newspaper dozens of times. The only oomph the bit has is the sudden obscenity, the spurt of adolescent anger, and then another obscenity. I notice that you often, when a joke falls flat--which seems to happen a lot on your show--refer to your balls or something. (But that's a definite style now. Whenever Wonkette ran out of nothing to say on her blog, she referred to her vagina or something. It's like insecure rappers touching their genitals as a display of power.) You know, as unappealing as he was, Tucker Carlson never told anybody that they "smelled like ass." I don't even know what that means. Is it something bad? Sometimes good, sometimes bad, depending on the context? Maybe it's a young thing.
That's really what I have to talk to you about, Jon. The "young thing." It makes me fear for your future. Because, you see, I get glimmers of authentic wit from you. You did a bit about Al Qaeda holding a convention at a hall in the Jupiter room, and then the Zimmerman bar mitzvah booking the Jupiter for 10:30 that had me going. You seemed to ad-lib at the end of that one; you're so quick that another time you made me laugh simply by explaining that the theme music at one point was so lengthy because you had to walk two feet to a different spot in the studio.
You're shrewd, too. You remind me of Jerry Lewis in that way. The practical, hard-headed funny guy. You did some time in the dreadful Aristocrats, and you refused to get pulled in to telling that awful joke. You dropped a brief token obscenity. But you stayed aloof, like Robin Williams, a comic genius who provided almost the movie's only funny moments.
And you had them filming you while you were in a star situation, in your dressing room being groomed for, one assumed, your show. The impression you produced was that this movie, The Aristocrats, was small-time, about as important as the pomade you put on your hair before the big-time event that is "The Daily Show." I admired your manipulativeness. It was as if you sensed that something was off about those two third-rate comics, Penn and Teller, who ended up creating a movie that made other comics look unfunny, mad to please the camera, as helpless to resist invitations to tell the joke as the critics were to resist the pressure to look hip and sexy and praise the film. It was really a movie about how easy it is to kill off implicitness in comedy. Eagerness to please the camera, implicitness--that brings me back to the young thing.
I see, Jon, that you're still doing the easy bits at the beginning, showing Bush or Rumsfeld uttering some absurdity, or what seems to be a lie, and then adding a kicker, or simply making a funny face. The kicker always makes explicit the comical juxtaposition. Nothing is left to ironic chance. One segment that tried to satirize Anderson Cooper and the new crop of anchorperson-emoters started off beautifully. I thought real comedy was on its way. We saw the guy playing "The Daily Show" correspondent resolve to out-feel Cooper and the other actors. He gravely and emotionally tells an astonished reporter: "I refuse to interview a woman who is menstruating." It's very funny. And then he ruins the whole conceit by declaring, explicitly, that he is going to out-emote the competition, concluding like this: "I've shot enough footage to sell to the networks. Suck it, Anderson Cooper." Why the cue cards for the audience? You think they're dumb or something?
But who am I lecturing! You're the star of a sensationally successful comedy show. You're an international celebrity. Most of all, you are the Pied Piper of the magical 18-34 demographic, the age-group whose attention marketers in just about every market claim will enlarge all hungry enterprises. When a journalist wants to win relevance among the legions of paradigm-changing youths, all he has to do is say he likes your show, whether he actually likes it--or has even seen it--or not. You've become more a conduit than a comedian.
The problem is, this downward-plunging market is going to ruin you just as Penn and Teller made the comics they exploited look ridiculous.
What are you going to do when the criminals and clowns presently running the country leave the places of power? I mean, what are you going to do if an admirable man or woman takes the helm? You're more pegged to the news cycle than the professional newspeople you gratifyingly deride. (You're bound to differences among political values, too. When you tried to mock Chuck Schumer's vow to prevent the Dubai company from acquiring the ports, nobody laughed.) I love comedians who make humor out of current events, out of bad or stupid politics. But the best of them work the stuff into wit. You just point, taunt, make faces. You say something "sucks," and that's the joke. You say "sucks" a lot.
Jon, I think the reason you've settled into this gross-out expedience is that you think, or you've been told, that the young audiences you supposedly draw aren't up to more sophisticated bits. For one thing, I think you're selling short the number of people in the magical demographic who have fine senses of humor. For another, I don't think your audience is that focused on politics anyway. They just like to see people in authority, no matter whether they're good or bad, torn down. It doesn't matter whether the deconstruction is funny or not so long as it seems to humiliate the subject. So pretty soon, and especially when politics changes, you're going to have to rethink your role as the Howdy-Doody Orwell. More importantly, when the chickens come home to roost--yes, the deficit spending on the war--and people start to want comedy with true creative-destructive substance; when they start to crave comic maturity rather than resigning themselves to pandering puerility, you're going to be in trouble. Sometimes I think you don't even believe in this shtick yourself. Again and again, you'll start doing an accent or imitating someone, self-consciously stop yourself, hang your head and apologize for the failed joke. Maybe somewhere you have contempt for the magic demographic?
I want to share something genuinely funny with you. It's from an article in The New York Times about your Oscar gig. The "Mr. Cates" is Gil Cates, as you know, the long-time producer of the Oscars.
As a fringe benefit, Mr. Cates said he hoped that Mr. Stewart--whose show attracts a viewer whose average age is just over 41 [who would have thought it?] according to Nielsen Media Research--might attract younger people to the Oscars, whose typical viewer last year was 47.
Don't you appreciate that, Jon? The magic demographic that the Academy wants you to pull in is between 42 and 46! The young crowd. This marketing obsession with youth is the mindless official line; it's like a broken tape that keeps repeating itself even as the example it uses contradicts the official line. So here's the whole point of my letter. ABC wants you to "attract younger people." In fact, the network doesn't even know what "young" is. Don't do it. Don't fall for a clueless stunt that's going to turn you into a caricature, and package you as a merchandising tool--a youth-attracting product. Your gifts will dry up and die in that narrow little cubbyhole. Instead, use the show to trot out your native wit and win for yourself a mature audience that will give you a meaningful career that will last decades, and not just until the news cycle spins beyond your reach. That's alright, you don't have to thank me. Of course, you don't have to take my advice, either. But whatever you do, stop saying "dude." You're 43 for heaven's sake.
Sincerely yours, Lee Siegel
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LEE SIEGEL is TNR's television critic.