Washington Monthly - September/October 2012 - (Page 91)

on political books shrinking audience to his reversal in politics. In A Conservative Walks Into a Bar: The Politics of Political Humor, she sets out to discover why conservative satirists number so few and whether this is something that we, as a country, ought to be concerned about. In fact, much of the scholarship feels like it was primarily motivated by the authors’ desire to study something cool, and then retrofitted with exaggerated significance to justify the endeavor. Take the conclusion of two academics who studied Will Ferrell’s Saturday Night Live presidential debate skits in 2000: “Voters seeking to understand the substance of ideas in the debate may have found the parodies of the debate to be a useful organizing tool for their inherent complexities.” Only a Will Ferrell character would rely on a Will Ferrell debate skit to parse the complexities of modern presidential politics. An academic herself, Dagnes doesn’t avoid some of these pitfalls. As she explains in her introduction, she examined political humor to g a u ge t h e b i a s , studying the content of satirical shows, columns, and drawings. I examined the guest lists of programs and explored other data on the target of political jokes, and surveyed the long and impressive histor y of Amer ican political satire from its founding until today. I analyzed the satirists, their skill sets, political ideology, liberalism, conservatism, and the goals of the entertainment industry. W D agnes is a pleasant guide and companion, whose accessible (sometimes chirpy) prose helps the lay reader to grasp what I suspect is a punishingly dry canon of scholarship on political humor. Most of us, for example, would prefer her synopsis of the Norwegian psychologist Sven Svebak’s attempt to quantify and measure the sense of humor in 54,000 Swedes by administering his “Sense of Humor Questionnaire (SHQ )” than to read the unabridged Sven for ourselves. (Trust me, I Googled it.) Another frustrating aspect of the scholarship is that it seems awfully haphazard and contradictory. One set of scholars studying The Daily Show accused Jon Stewart of “unbridled political cynicism” and cultivating distrust in his impressionable viewers. But two other sets of scholars concluded that satirical comedy increased viewers’ political awareness. Do these hyperaware cynics even vote? And do they vote differently because of Stewart and his ilk? “The answers,” reports Dagnes, “are wildly divergent.” Some scholars have concluded that cynicism discourages participation, others that satire fosters enlightened engagement. One study determined that viewers of late-night comedy shows are more inclined to cross party lines (seeing politicians from the opposing party yukking it up with Letterman presumably casts them in a more favorable light). But Dagnes’s own earlier research concluded that such personalization “encouraged superficiality,” thus trivializing the discourse. Whole shelves groan with academic treatises on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report—stuffed with typologies, program analyses, monologue exegeses—but they don’t seem to have proven much or illuminated anything particularly interesting about the audience. hat redeems Dagnes’s book is that she also interviewed a ton of comedians and television writers, who are amply and colorfully quoted throughout. This provides a real-world grounding absent from most other studies, although much of what she’s told goes against her thesis that these shows are a vital part of the political process— in fact, the interviews undermine the whole idea of academics parsing Daily Show transcripts. As the comedian Marc Maron explains, “The one thing I do know is that 90 percent of the time if you’re going to talk about politics the audience’s eyes [are] going to glaze over and not know how to take it in because they don’t fucking think about it.” When Dagnes cites the studies about how satire affects political behavior, the comedian Lewis Black replies, “Well, It’s true that late-night television is largely bereft of conservative humor. To me, the conservative inclination to put politics before humor goes a long way toward explaining this disparity. You can’t cultivate a national television audience for a comedy show if being funny isn’t the first order of business. first, tell those academics to fuck themIn other words, she is attempting, selves.… Really, tell them it is bullshit like Sven Svebak, to quantify and mea- … satire doesn’t have that effect. If satsure something that doesn’t lend itself ire was really that important as a way to to quantification and measurement. get things done, then, you know, more Humor is subjective; an academic’s tool shit would be getting [done].” The comkit—scrutinizing joke targets, sniffing mon thread running through all these out “bias” in guest lists—doesn’t yield interviews is that professional satirists much insight about why there aren’t are almost exclusively concerned with more conservatives on late-night tele- being funny, and while many hold libvision. Her dutiful slog through the eral views, they don’t expend much eflitany of gripes from right-wing com- fort trying to impose them on others or mentators and media organizations is imagine that they’d succeed if they did. likewise unilluminating (they blame Dagnes isn’t having it. “Modern ponefarious Hollywood liberals). litical humor,” she writes, “has become Washington Monthly 91

Washington Monthly - September/October 2012

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