It’s difficult to imagine having made it through the long and hard fought 2008 campaign without so many memorable comic moments. We’re used to election news making good comedy but this year we had good comedy making news as candidates abandoned their campaign speeches to do stand-up on late-night TV. Good political satire and comedy about the election was at an all time high.
From Amy Poehler’s Hillary Clinton to Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin, SNL earned record breaking ratings. John McCain’s Letterman no-show might have hurt his campaign more had he not so deftly handled damage control in a later appearance. We had the NYTimes asking, Is Jon Stewart the Most Trusted Man in America? and the Washington Post covering The Colbert Bump. By election day Salon wondered is this the end of the satirical industrial complex?
Throughout the campaign I’ve called on Dr. Robert J. Thompson, Professor of Television and Popular Culture and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, for his insight and analysis. Thompson has called comedy “the Fifth Estate” and says it sometimes fills in the gaps left when the Fourth Estate drops the ball.
We spoke on the morning after the election. I asked first about the two Montreal DJs — the Masked Avengers — who convinved Sarah Palin she was talking to French President Nicolas Sarkozy:
RT: Comedy is like everything else. There’s good and bad. Some of it is analytical, insightful and trenchant. Other is none of those. But comedy that actually does a guerrilla attack I have some real problems with. I neither approve nor am even certain what the legal issues may be in doing that.
To some extent this was just an elaborate Candid Camera stunt like those that have been going on since the radio era; I think Candid Microphone started in 1947. So while I don’t think that was a good thing, that isn’t to say that a lot of the legitimate comedy out there isn’t incredibly vicious. I don’t have nearly as much problem with that. I think one of the tools good comics have in their toolbox is that they don’t have to go through the tip-toeing journalistic rules and ethics. Comics shoot from the hip.
JW: What did you think of Stewart and Colbert’s election night program, Indecision ’08: America’s Choice?
RT: It didn’t hold together well. I think what you have here is two people who have found the perfect format for their humor – Jon Stewart, a satirical burlesque of a newscaster; Stephen Colbert as a satirical burlesque of a cable opinion show – and those formats fit so perfectly what they do. Then what happened on election night? It took them out of their format. Suddenly they’re in the co-anchor spot but they’re really not anchoring anything.
They stepped out of format and that didn’t work, and then by the time they got on the air at 10 o’clock Eastern Time the place for satirical comedy had totally been dissolved. I mean this is the one time where it wasn’t going to play. It was like standing up and telling a joke in the middle of a church service or a funeral or some other really inappropriate place. The narrative by this time had gotten to such an extraordinary climax. By 10 o’clock it was clear that something really big was going to happen and everyone was acknowledging it from Fox News on down the line. And they come on and do comedy stuff that maybe would have been funny a couple weeks ago. To come on right when the election was about to be determined, the timing made no sense. And what do you joke about when the big ending is about to happen? You know even the fool in Macbeth leaves the stage when everybody dies in the end.
Comedy Central has done live things before, convention coverage and debate coverage, and that’s a perfect time to be doing it. Because you’ve got all these things still up in the air, people are making claims and you’ve got a fight and all the rest of it. I think the best selection in future for them is that election night itself is not the night to do this.
JW: Looking back at the political season, what are some of the comic highlights?
RT: I think overall if I had to give a trophy for the 2008 election cycle it would go to Jon Stewart. I think consistently throughout this long drawn out political season his show has really done the yeoman labor of good solid political satire. I’d put them at the top of the heap of the comedy equivalent of good journalism. The body of work I think has really been extraordinary.
Tina Fey is the most talked about and will be remembered but in the end it was really a small body of work and in retrospect it was a knock down dead great impersonation and it may have made people aware of those interviews and idiosyncrasies, but I wouldn’t put the overall sophistication of SNL this season on the level that The Daily Show has done consistently.
SNL had some really funny moments but traditionally it’s not been great political satire. It’s great political humor.
JW: What stood out about the candidates’ appearances on the various shows?
RT: John McCain has an uncanny sense of timing when he’s doing comedy. I actually think his timing is better when he’s doing comedy than in the debates. He was funny. He was interesting. You totally bought what was going on. I think he did an extraordinary job.
Sarah Palin, though, I think achieved what she had to do. McCain can go on and be funny because he doesn’t have to overcome the fact that his biggest problem is he’s too funny. That’s what Sarah Palin had to overcome; that most of what we saw of her even though it wasn’t deliberately comedic was comedic!
What I think she tried to achieve on SNL was to go on there and make it look like she could take a joke and roll with the punches and all that kind of stuff but at the same time, not actually perform in any way that would make her look comedic. She had to look, I think, more like she was kind of tolerating it. And I think she did that.
That episode broke Saturday Night Live’s ratings record all the way back to when Nancy Kerrigan was hosting. And Nancy Kerrigan was about as equally awkward and uncomfortable on that show as Sarah Palin was.
JW: What do you think of the way John McCain handled the Letterman Show fiasco?
RT: If I had to give a grade to Sarah Palin’s damage control by going on to Saturday Night Live I’d probably give it a C+ If I had to give a grade to Senator McCain’s damage control by going on Letterman, I’d give it an A. He had some real work to do there. When Letterman used that shot of McCain in the studio with Katie Couric, that was not good for John McCain’s campaign.
He came back on Letterman and, I swear, not since Hugh Grant went on Leno did someone so completely take care of things. He said he screwed up and then he started saying, “Oh can we see the map of where I was in Manhattan again?” He completely absorbed it, he completely took responsibility for it, but at the same time he was so charming that it made us think that this wasn’t really a big deal. He managed to make David Letterman look like maybe he was being a little too thin skinned about it. He got on there and finessed that in an almost breathtaking fashion.
JW: Are there any comparisons to be made between Colbert and the White House Correspondents Dinner and Sarah Palin going on SNL with Tina Fey or McCain going on Letterman?
RT: Colbert at the correspondents’ dinner was something we don’t see very often because when Colbert, Jon Stewart, David Letterman and all these other satirical comics come on and do their jokes, it’s almost as if it’s in satire territory. Then they have their guests come on and they’re often pretty deferential to their guests. Jon Stewart is usually a real pussycat, although as the months have gone on he’s changed a little bit. But there are clearly two different territories that they’re operating in. And Colbert – because he’s in character anyway – totally distances himself. If he gives a tough interview on the Colbert Report there already distance because he’s playing a fictional character.
What was different about Colbert at the White House Correspondents’ dinner was that was satire with a real acidic edge to it delivered right in the belly of the beast with the president within spitting distance. It had the feeling of a roast where nobody knew it was supposed to be. That had a sense of comedy as a form of protest rather than comedy as a means to get everyone to laugh. And that was very different from most of what we saw in the whole twenty-two months of this campaign. Palin and Tina Fey appearing in the same episode was really a pretty soft episode. The kinds of things that Tina Fey makes fun of don’t seem to be things that are embarrassing to Sarah Palin. She does a very convincing imitation of her but it seems to be very much the persona that Sarah Palin thought she was going to ride to the vice presidency.
JW: So what happens now? After the intensity of this extended political season and all the material it provided for comics, what do they do now?
RT: For comedians I think there’s a real sense today that it’s like December 26th. The presents are all open, half of them are broken, all the fairy dust of Christmas Eve and the whole lead up to the holiday are all over and there’s nothing left. I think there is really that sense of this being a December 26th of the soul if you’re a comic.
Candidates tend to disappear. The one that wins is off figuring out who to put in their team and the other ones no one is really paying attention to anymore. But it’s not as if the comedians don’t have plenty to talk about. There’s a war, a financial crisis and even though those are dark and not as funny, comedians have gotten a lot of mileage out of that before Sarah Palin came along.
The big problem is comedians will go back and start telling the George Bush jokes again. George Bush now, after the election, is the lamest of lame ducks. He’s now really headed towards the end of his administration and my guess is if we go back and start trotting out the “Gee, doesn’t he stumble over his sentences a lot” jokes, they’re going to seem more lame than ever. That cycle of humor at this point with a new candidate elected is going to really be tough to do but he’s still president and still central to some of these things.
It’s going to be really interesting to see how Daily Show and Colbert deal with it, but I’ve got a feeling they’ll slide right back into what they were doing. The only thing that would be absolute deadly for a comic is if we got an administration that was good, efficient, brought peace and justice to the world and brought us into utopia. Utopia is great for the world but death to comics.