Retheorizing Comedic and Political Discourse, or What Do Jon Stewart and Charlie Chaplin Have in Common?

Abstract

On November 1, 2010, progressive newsblog Huffington Post ran an opinion piece responding to previous weekend's Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, held on National Mall by comedie news pundits Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.1 Asking its title Comedians Really Lead Us to Sanity and Civility?, article expressed both gratitude and surprise that it had taken Comedy Central comedians to remind us that life can be lived devoid of nasty rhetoric that has become all too commonplace what passes for [political] discourse these days. Perhaps, writer even suggested, the two comedians could lead effort to bring politics into an atmosphere of disagreement without having to be disagreeable process.2 was hardly a lone voice: rally's staged series of comedie showdowns between Stewart (as advocate of reasonableness politics) and Colbert (in his persona as blowhard advocate of a politics of fear) had seemingly conveyed lessons for many seeking a transformation politics. Although Stewart himself went on record to claim that rally was not political in any way, most interested observers and media pundits sensed a loftier agenda: This event, while originally intended for jest, could possibly become a 'turning point' . . . for having immense impact on how political discourse is conducted future, commented one fan on rally's Facebook page, adding that 'You have created a political movement, intended or not.3 A sign held up by a rally attendee captured a similar sense of paradox: It's a sad day when our politicians are comical and I have to take our comedians politically.4The exact content of rally-including Stewart's wellreported closing monologue which he lambasted news media partisanship and hyperbole-will be addressed later this essay. For purposes of introduction, I want only to note how commonplace these conflations of comedy and politics have become recent years and how they might prompt us to rethink comedy's potential as a mode of political expression. There can be little question that last decade or so has marked something of a golden age political humor. Whether spate of news satire programs {The Daily Show [1996-present]; The Colbert Report [2005-present]), politically themed talk shows (Real Time with Bill Maher [2003-present]), or satirical documentaries (notably Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 [2004] ), our contemporary media landscape has increasingly drawn color from impulse to blend humor and political nonfiction as away of critiquing inadequacies of political and media discourse. One immediate set of questions to ask, then, would be: What are sources of this impulse, and what are its effects? Within existing scholarship, answers usually begin with heavily stage-managed, manufactured quality of contemporary political spectacle and attendant desire, through comedy, to pierce veil of talking points and media spin. turn opens onto discussions about whether news satire programs constitute meaningful political interventions or simply reinforce cynical apathy of young adults who, as is often said, get their news from The Daily Show.5 Yet for all recent academic discussion of these comedic encroachments on political debate, there remains little attempt to explore implications of these developments for a broader theory of comedy, particularly as this intersects with a theory of politics.What I hope to do this essay is to pursue these implications by shifting frame of discussion from question of media sources and effects (potential or real) to that of comedic and political discourse, and I want to do so by taking quite seriously query posed by Huffington Post: Can comedy indeed contribute to a space for political discourse? By what processes and under what conditions might comedy be expected to establish such a space? I take my lead here from recent work of philosopher Jacques Ranciere, whose definition of politics points to a parallel with comedy that this essay aims to develop. …