The Daily Show on Comedy Central bills itself – with proud self-mockery – as “just your basic cable fake news show.” It is becoming increasingly recognized, particularly among media critics, as an unexpectedly powerful venue – and a journalistic force to be reckoned with. Congressional guests have remarked often that they hadn’t heard of the show before – and, now that they knew about it, were terrified to appear with Jon Stewart. But the show really isn’t a stealth vehicle for underground investigative journalism, or an entertainment-industry mouthpiece for the left; its only claim is that its purpose is comedy, which is also its only license. This is what gives The Daily Show such efficacy.
Consider the question of journalistic objectivity. To use one popular metaphor, journalists try to open a window on the world; their goal is to be the transparent glass, so that the audience looks through their stories to the events those stories describe. Journalists like to be heeded, but not necessarily looked at (politicians are somewhat similar in this respect). Like a tragedian, a journalist aspires to a clear and direct plot, with compelling emotional force and few distractions, the better to place the content in full relief.
But comedy in general is more about the frame of a window than the glass. The urge incomedy is to be in on the joke; that is, part of that external frame of reference that looks at a thing and finds it funny. Arthur Koestler once suggested that laughter comes from an explosive experience of creativity: suddenly, two otherwise unrelated fields of experience unexpectedly collide – we put the pieces together – and we laugh. Comedy as a form demands an audience's awareness of the joke, that jokes are being made. A comedian needs to be looked at in order to be heeded; the audience must be given permission to laugh, and the comedian must be given license to be funny.
Despite the importance in comedy of identifying with the subject, laughter depends in some part on distance, on stepping back from a moment in a very gripping physical sense (think about it - your body literally stops and has a seizure). “Someday we’ll all look back on this and laugh.” We speak of comedians as providing a means to getting ourselves to look at the world in the proper perspective, and of laughter as medicine.
In an interview with Del Close, one of the authors of Truth in Comedy, the playwright John Guare asked what Close thought the purpose of political satire was. Close didn’t hesitate: “Death,” he replied. The purpose of the satirical comic was to brutally and ruthlessly reveal the truth, Close maintained; “knock ‘em dead” is a goal, not just a metaphor. The truth as revealed in comedy is so toxic – indeed, to the comic perspective, everything and everyone is perfectly defective – that when confronted with it, our bodies have no choice but to respond with laughter. Laughter provides catharsis and relieves the tension that builds as a reaction to unpleasant realities. The comic, Close felt, provides a means of shocking ourselves back to health.
That moment of laughter is a measure of objectivity; in it, we viscerally separate ourselves from our experience. We see the joke; we get it. Sometimes we can even anticipate the punchline – and still the laughter can carry us away. This is because the comic announces herself; she reminds us, “I’m just being funny,” almost as a means of saying, “Hey, I’m just as much a mess as everyone else.” The frame is obvious and available to view – on the Daily Show, there is an almost celebratory shoddiness to their approach. At any rate, they never fail to exaggerate their own failures, or inflate their importance. And while denigrating themselves, they also satirize their models, the journalists. The Daily Show looks at the process of looking through a journalistic window. Journalism is critiqued; but it also must be practiced, or the jokes won’t work – the audience won’t get the joke if the story isn’t told.
I might even go so far as to suggest that “fake” news – if its purpose is satire – bears an even greater burden of truth. Audiences are always tougher on comedy, after all – and they can tell when a performer is faking it.
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