Washington Monthly - September/October 2012 - (Page 92)

a powerhouse of cultural influence and Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and their brethren wield an immense amount of sway among voters, especially young ones.” And elsewhere: “As our news media soften considerably in their changing work environment, satirists (whether they like it or not) are filling some of the watchdog functions that journalists used to carry out.” But the notion that journalism has become so impoverished that hungry minds have turned to The Daily Show for news and moral guidance doesn’t hold up. Not only is there more and better national political journalism than ever before, spread across more platforms and easier to share, but it supplies the subject matter for The Daily Show and other shows like it, which don’t produce journalism, but riff on that produced by others. S o why do conservatives fail to turn political news into entertaining satire like liberals do? In 2007, with the Republican Party in tatters and Jon Stewart splashed across every magazine cover, Fox News Channel began broadcasting The 1/2 Hour News Hour, which was billed as “a conservative Daily Show.” It was a spectacular flop, because it put politics before humor. “It was mostly just loud and complainy with not a whole lot of basis in fact or reality,” says the Saturday Night Live writer Alex Baze. A writer for The 1/2 Hour News Hour told Dagnes that Fox News censored the best material because it was deemed “too controversial.” Surveying this landscape, Dagnes concludes that conservatism is philosophically incompatible with satire. “The nature of conservatism does not meet the conditions necessary for political satire to flourish: conservatism is harmonized and slow to criticize people in power, and it originates from a place that repudiates humor because it is absolute.” Any member of the Obama administration would heatedly disagree with the first claim; and there’s plenty of conservative humor if WASHINGTON MONTHLY ON FACEBOOK Like the Washington Monthly? facebook.com/WashingtonMonthly AND FOLLOW US ON TWITTER: @washmonthly 92 September/October 2012 you know where to find it. Conservative satire flourishes in places like the Weekly Standard, particularly in the essays and articles of Matt Labash and Andrew Ferguson, and the cover art of Mark Fredrickson and Thomas Fluharty, whose paintings travestying braindead hippies and aging radicals are dead on and piercingly funny. It’s true that late-night television is largely bereft of conservative humor— Fox News’s late, late-night (3 a.m.) Red Eye w/Greg Gutfeld being a notable exception. To me, the conservative inclination to put politics before humor goes a long way toward explaining this disparity. It’s one reason why talk radio has been such a successful format for conservative entertainers (and such a challenging one for liberals, who have failed in their attempts to match it). You can’t cultivate a national television audience for a comedy show if being funny isn’t the first order of business. Throughout the time she was researching her book, Dagnes was toiling to convince Miller to talk with her, at first by touting her academic credentials and finally by approaching him through an intermediary. He declined every advance. This wasn’t very sporting of him, but on the other hand, the prospect of his career being rigorously examined couldn’t have held much appeal. There’s something karmically fitting about the fact that Miller, whose act requires an audience with deep cultural fluency and a finely honed sense of irony, has wound up performing for the boobs who watch The O’Reilly Factor. His fall has been long and precipitous, from the comedy flagship of Saturday Night Live to the graveyard of Fox News. Miller is too sharp not to recognize this himself. To Dagnes, the explanation lies in the complicated interplay of political philosophy and cultural climate. But what killed Dennis Miller’s career wasn’t that he became a conservative. It’s that he stopped being funny. Joshua Green is Bloomberg Businessweek’s national correspondent, and a contributing editor of the Washington Monthly. http://www.facebook.com/WashingtonMonthly http://www.facebook.com/WashingtonMonthly

Washington Monthly - September/October 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Washington Monthly - September/October 2012