Hey, I guess a lot of people do. He’s pretty popular.
Esquire published a lengthy profile of the man in its October issue. It is good writing, so it doesn’t matter if I agree with it, and I’ll recommend it on that basis alone. Fans might think it’s a hatchet job from the opening pages, but it’s a rather long piece, so don’t rush to judgment about it until you’ve given the thing a chance.
As the author, Tom Jurnod notes, we like him because he speaks truth to power but I’ve always felt that it’s also because he makes us laugh by telling us things we already knew were true but which most others are not saying – except that now that he’s been saying them, other people are now allowed to. There’s a lot of this emperor-has-no-clothes kind of thing going on, a time-honored trope of the satirist’s arsenal.
The piece is called “Jon Stewart and the Burden of History.” Sounds rather portentous, doesn’t it? My only criticism of this article is that, considering it is about a comedian, there is a very little humor to be found on the page. Though there is a bit.
A lot of the prose will walk a line so thin that some might not realize it’s just barely over the top enough to be very clearly sarcasm. At other times, the snide little lift at the corner of the mouth is more obvious than it needs to be.
He is only one man, after all. It may even be said — if we may say so — that he is just a man. May we? We may, because that’s how Stewart likes it. But we all know that some men become more than men by how they respond to their times. Such a man is Jon Stewart. He has stepped up. He might have started out as a great comedian, but when he saw that the times were no laughing matter, he became also a great man. He transformed himself, and so was himself transformed. Even as the media and politicians he mocked so relentlessly lost their moral compass, he found his. He saw wrong and tried to right it; saw suffering and tried to heal it; saw war and tried to stop it; saw his old friend Anthony Weiner’s penis and tried to make jokes about it…
Sorry. It’s just that when you’re talking about Jon Stewart, you’re never just talking about Jon Stewart. You’re invoking the Jon Stewart narrative — the collective fantasy about Jon Stewart — and it leads to all sorts of inappropriate historical comparisons. You can even play the Jon Stewart Game, in which you start telling his story and see how long it takes you to compare him to someone he should feel really uncomfortable being compared to. See, he really is just a man,and a man from New Jersey at that. The township he’s from, Lawrence, is right between Princeton and Trenton — right at the intersection of smart and tough. He’s always been a ballsy little guy, with a feeling for the little guy. Before he started doing stand-up, he used to tend bar at a joint with a steel door and no windows, in the back of a liquor store on the Trenton side; you see that place, you know that here’s a guy used to living by his wits. So he moved to New York — where else is a guy like that gonna go? Now he’s a real New Yorker, which means he doesn’t take any bullshit and at the same time bullshit doesn’t bother him, depending on the circumstance. But when Congress started jacking those 9/11 first responders around, stalling on the bill that promised them benefits: That bothered him. So he found his opportunity and took his shot, started telling preposterous old biddies like Mitch McConnell to just pass the fucking thing.
And they passed it, last December. And you know what he got in return, from all the grateful firemen in New York? A birthday party for one of his kids in the firehouse in his neighborhood in New York, with a birthday cake in the shape of a fire truck. And you know what else he got? A story in The New York Times that compared him to Edward R. Murrow…
See? It never takes long, when you play the Jon Stewart Game. But hey, it’s not his fault. He saw the Edward R. Murrow thing in the Times, was smart enough to say “What the…?” He made sure to remind us that he’s a comedian, for crying out loud. He makes funny faces and fart jokes. But here’s the thing: When he protests that he’s a comedian, he’s not escaping from the collective fantasy. He’s feeding it. The collective fantasy, you see, is not just about Jon Stewart, it’s about America, especially liberal America, and its need for redeemers to rise out of its ranks. Jon Stewart’s just a comedian the way gunslingers in old westerns are really peaceable sodbusters who hate all that bloodshed and all that killin’ but finally have to strap on them six-guns and march on into town. Heck, he’d go back to telling jokes if he could, but he can’t, not with hired guns like Tucker Carlson and Jim Cramer around…
As the excerpt indicates, despite Mr Stewart’s protestations, he has done more for the world than fart jokes and funny faces – he can now be said to have influenced public policy. The mocking flavor of the passage above could just as easily be turned back upon the author, I suppose. Where were you, Mr Jurnow, and what did you have to say when Congress was still procrastinating on helping the first-responders to the WTC attacks cope with the health problems that have plagued them since that day?
The question might arise whether it is possible for Mr Stewart to claim that balance and fairness is not necessary in his case, since he’s said many times that he is just an entertainer, and if the real journalists were doing their jobs he wouldn’t have to do what he does – still, hasn’t he gone so far in one direction as to become a public figure, if not, as the NYT says in the link Jurnow indicates, an “advocacy journalist?”
I guess I would suggest that he has always been that way. In fact many comedians have a point of view to express, perhaps most. In response to criticism of this nature from pundits at Fox, his longtime nemesis, he replies,
[…] to say that comedians have to decide whether they are comedians or social commentators…uh, comedians do social commentary through comedy. That’s how its worked for thousands of years. I have not moved out of the comedian’s box into the news box. The news box is moving towards me.”
The Daily Show website calls his program the “most trusted name in fake news.” True to form, it sounds like a joke, but it isn’t. At one time polls suggested that the show was the primary source of information about events of the day for young people in their twenties – this poll from Time Magazine after the death of Walter Cronkite shows him at 44% over 3 other more mainstream newscasters – and I recall thinking that such a factoid likely reflected the grimness of the times, that people should want to sweeten their currents events diet with a giggle or two in order to swallow it – but, far more than that it was delivering a very loud and very clear “Up yours!” to the mainstream media and political leaders of all stripes. It is the jester in his motley garb who can speak truth, not the wizened visages pronouncing behind podiums, this says, and we will choose to believe the fool before accepting the words of the sages and the stooges of the wealthy and the rulers of empires.
I have more to say about this, and more about the topic in the context of Korea. I’ll shoot for getting that to you around Thursday.
Edit – It actually went up a few days later. You can read Part Two “Comedy and reality” by clicking here.
