John Stewart: When Comedians Start Asking the Tough Questions
When Bill Moyers returned to PBS two weeks ago, his first program took a careful look at how the mainstream media has fallen down on the job when it comes to asking tough questions to politicians. Given this starting point, it seemed logical for Moyers to speak next (iTunes — Feed) with John Stewart, host of The Daily Show. That’s because adversarial journalism is now found more readily on Comedy Central than on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox, etc. The interview with Stewart, which is quite substantive and worth a listen, makes reference to John McCain’s recent appearance on The Daily Show and also to Steven Colbert’s famous/infamous roast of President Bush in 2006. You can watch both below.
American television shows have been satirizing politicians for a long time. That’s not new. But what’s new with Stewart is that he’s upending the whole point of television satire. Whether you look at Jay Leno’s tame humor, or the more biting humor of Saturday Night Live, the point of the satire has always been to get a laugh. For Stewart, something else is going on. Watch the McCain interview and you see that the joke is essentially a prop, a convenient means of getting at something much more serious, a way of having a blunt, no nonsense conversation, precisely the kind of conversation that the mainstream media has been largely unwilling, if not downright afraid, to have with our leaders.
Ali G at Harvard; or How Sacha Baron Cohen Got Blessed by America’s Cultural Establishment
Oodles of print have been written about Sacha Baron Cohen’s film, “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.” And there’s perhaps not a great deal more to say about it, other than it’s remarkable how well the film has been received by America’s cultural establishment. Edgy, shock comedy that uses racial and gender stereotypes to subvert racial and gender stereotypes usually doesn’t go down so well with highbrow critics. But, in this case it did. The Washington Post called the film “a perfect combination of slapstick and satire, a Platonic ideal of high- and lowbrow that manages to appeal to our basest common denominators while brilliantly skewering racism, anti-Semitism, … [and] sexism.” (Platonic ideal? Borat?) Of the film, The New York Times said “The brilliance of ‘Borat’ is that its comedy is as pitiless as its social satire, and as brainy.” Then, we heard Terry Gross, of NPR’s Fresh Air, gush over the comic in her amusing interview with Baron Cohen. And lastly, the British comic has been nominated for an Oscar by Hollywood’s film elite.
If any further proof was needed that Baron Cohen has been embraced by the cultural vanguard, then let this video serve as final witness. In 2004, Harvard invited Baron Cohen to speak at “Class Day,” the big traditional event that takes place the day before commencement. And here you get him speaking to students and parents not as Baron Cohen, but as Ali G., all in a light-hearted way. (For more on this visit, see the article in the Harvard Gazette.)
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