[lbo-talk] chavez, bush, the devil and jon stewart

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 9/24/06, Tayssir John Gabbour <tjg at pentaside.org> wrote:
> J. Tyler wrote:
> > And Stewart cannot for a second take refuge in the "comedian" label.
> > He's funny, yes.  But he's not a comedian.  He's a political figure
> > and satirist, and he is that by very deliberate choice.  As an
> > American, he has no business taking on Chavez, except as a media
> > pawn to advance American imperial adventures there, which I am sure
> > Stewart does not wish to be (and which is why I characterize it as a
> > mistake).  If he wants to be serious (and, make no mistake about it,
> > he does), he should focus on only one thing: the U.S. government.
>
> At his entertaining appearance on CSPAN, at a journalists' breakfast,
> Jon Stewart discusses his role on his show:
> http://www.c-span.org/Search/basic.asp?BasicQueryText=jon+stewart&SortBy=date
>
> We should keep in mind that The Daily Show is dependent on mainstream
> media for setting context... and people like Stewart and Rob Corddry are
> very explicit about this. They poke fun at people who take their show
> too seriously, as that's emphatically not the role they end the show to
> fill.

Jon Stewart is overrated.  His comedy is essentially centrist comedy,
taking anyone -- on the Left or Right -- who has any conviction and
sending a message to the audience: how can anyone take _that_
seriously?  Since the Republicans and Hugo Chavez both have
convictions of their own, though politically on the opposite sides,
they are both fair targets of the centrist comedian.  If most of his
targets are on the Right, that's only because almost anyone
politically prominent is a rightist in the USA.  The question is what
he will make fun of and how when the Republicans lose power (though it
doesn't seem like that's beginning to happen this year).  His kind of
comedy doesn't work well against the Democratic Party.

Besides, the Democrats already satirize themselves very well:

"The designated jokester from the Democratic side was Barack Obama,
the freshman senator from Illinois. 'You hear this constant refrain
from our critics that Democrats don't stand for anything,' he said.
'That's really unfair. We do stand for anything'" (Hendrik Hertzberg,
20 March 2006, <http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/060327ta_talk_hertzberg>).

 Stewart can't top that.
-- 
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>