It starts with the music , one of those brass-and-percussion fanfares that news anchors like to hum on their way to work. Then the announcer trumpets: “From Comedy Central’s World News Headquarters in New York, this is ‘The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.’” And before you’ve had a chance to sort through the incongruity of Comedy Central having its own news division, let alone one with a global reach, the music has changed to a soft-rock vamp and the camera has zeroed in on Stewart, a former-frat-boy type with facial features that wouldn’t be out of place on Mount Rushmore. The hair’s a dignified blend of dark brown and gray. And what’s more important, there’s lots of it. For although we Americans are capable of devoting an entire television channel to comedy, there’s no room for a bald anchor.
Stewart isn’t a news anchor, of course. He just plays one on TV. But is it too hard to imagine that someday in the future, when Tom, Dan and Peter can no longer see the TelePrompTer, Stewart will be asked to serve as the National Entertainment State’s once-over-lightly Master of Ceremonies? He’s got the paper-shuffling, pen-twirling thing down. And he’s capable of shifting, in a nanosecond, from utter seriousness to utter fatuity. You laugh, but that may be what we’re looking for in the news anchors of tomorrow. In the past, we wanted them to be wise. (Walter Cronkite, everybody’s favorite uncle.) In the future, we may want them to be wiseasses. For the times, they are a changin’, ladies and gentlemen, and the news better change with them or it could find itself out of a job.
We’ve all seen the statistics. In 1962 (or ‘72 or ‘82 or ‘92) blah-blah percent of Americans read a daily newspaper or watched the nightly news. Today blah-blah percent do, the new blah-blah being significantly lower than the old blah-blah. And the percentages for young people—that Holy Grail of advertising known as Generation X—are even worse. As the 20-odd million gray hairs who tune in to the network news every night get grayer and grayer, nobody’s joining them in the living room. Instead, we’re tuning in to “The Daily Show.” Or we’re poring over the Onion, that weekly cartwheel of fake headlines. Billing itself as “America’s Finest News Source,” the Onion is the newspaper to end all newspapers, a wake-up call to an industry that appears to have taken an overdose of sleeping pills.
Does the proliferation of news outlets like “The Daily Show” and the Onion, that scribble a Mona Lisa mustache on the face of the Fourth Estate, signify the final triumph of infotainment? The giggle-ization of American society? The decline of Western civilization? The end of the world? Or do they, in that tongue-in-cheek, finger-in-the-ribs way of theirs, offer us a view of the world that traditional news outlets are largely blind to? Does Generation X, which supposedly can’t find Iraq on a map, know something the rest of us don’t know—that Baghdad is both a dateline and a punchline? When life turns into a media circus, isn’t a fun-house mirror the best way to see what’s going on? And aren’t news spoofs, therefore, a more accurate reflection of our time? Or are they just, you know, funny?
Stewart likes to open the show with a dollop of pure nonsense—memorably forgettable musings on, say, how risky it is to ignore that old warning about letting the bedbugs bite. (“They won’t stop,” he says with feigned resignation.) Then it’s on to Headlines, a series of riffs on the day’s top stories à la the Weekend Update segment of “Saturday Night Live.” For those who don’t remember “That Was the Week That Was,” a mid-‘60s TV series that made a mockery of current events, “Saturday Night Live” would seem to have invented the fake news broadcast. And its long line of anchors, from Chevy Chase to Dennis Miller to Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon, provides a shadow history of the news-reading game. Chevy Chase was Chevy Chase, and we weren’t—anchor as smug superstar. Miller was one of us, only with more flair and more hair, lots more hair.
And Fey/Fallon? Well, let’s just say they’re cute as heck and funny as hell—anchors as precocious eighth-graders. At least Fey seems precocious. Fallon sometimes seems preconscious, dozing off in the middle of a bit. They’re supposed to be a mismatch made in heaven. As producer Lorne Michaels said about the pairing, according to Fallon: “Tina’s going to be the brainy girl, and you’re going to be the kind of goofy guy who doesn’t do his homework and asks her for answers and stuff.” They certainly look the part, Fey with her smarty-pants glasses and Fallon with his randomly spiked hair. But they both have a tendency to crack up at their own jokes, as if they were broadcasting from somebody’s basement. Consequently, the political humor, coming from the mouths of babes, doesn’t seem all that political. Weekend Update used to take its lack of seriousness a lot more seriously.
Stewart, on the other hand, has that you’re-either-born-with-it-or-you’re-not quality called gravitas. When his face is at rest, he could actually be an anchor—he’s that boringly handsome. And his voice, although not quite up there with the dearly departed Phil Hartman’s, has just enough of that adman/madman plasticity to sell us the news as if it were a used car. He isn’t alone, of course. Like any big-time news anchor, he’s surrounded by a stable of thoroughbred correspondents, all of whom should have been put out to pasture long ago. Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Ed Helms, Mo Rocca, Nancy Walls—are these not the most hilarious people on TV right now, somehow managing to keep straight faces while their routines twist in and out of plausibility? Or do the show’s writers, led by former Onion scribe Ben Karlin, deserve a lot of the credit?
When the show’s clicking, the laughs come from everywhere, whether it’s Helms using red and blue M&Ms to show the recent shift in the Senate or Stewart ad-libbing a remark about George Bush’s “stimulus package” when a video clip of the spread-legged president conferring with someone at the White House reveals more presidential timber than many of us care to see. For all its massaging of our funny bones, “The Daily Show” can be surprisingly biting, as when an oil-industry representative (or at least an anchor playing one) says about the latest megaton tanker spill, “Fuel oil is good for fish. They like it. It’s like vitamins.” At such moments, you can’t help but wholeheartedly endorse the show’s ambitious tagline: “Now More Than Before.”
The Onion (also available on the web at www.theonion.com) may not be able to make that claim. Like so many newspapers, it often succumbs to deadline pressure these days, sending out “articles” that are printed to fit rather than fit to print. Articles have never been the paper’s strong suit. After repeating the headline (often verbatim) in the lead sentence, the writers tend to spin their wheels, as if developing a comic premise were a completely foreign idea. Ah, but those headlines! Like haiku, they’re still capable of condensing a world of insight into a few choice words. “Kevin Bacon Linked to Al-Qaeda”—how simple, how deceptively perceptive. Or how’s this for sheer pithiness: “Vote, Voter Wasted.” The dropping of “a,” “an” and “the”—or any other word that might slow down a one-liner—has been a source of constant amusement for the Onion’s writers and readers.
“The Daily Show” and the Onion could be owned by the same media conglomerate, so closely do their senses of humor mesh. And behind those senses of humor is a sense of the world as this man-bites-dog-eat-dog media fishbowl where everybody lies, cheats and steals, both to get ahead and just for the hell of it. Neither outlet is particularly partisan; they tend to be equal-opportunity offenders. But both offer a thorough critique of the way news is packaged these days, everything arranged into neat little boxes and wrapped up with shiny bows. In fact, that may be the major difference between “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and, say, “The Nightly News with Tom Brokaw.” Brokaw refuses to acknowledge the shiny bows. Stewart goes after them with the Christmas-morning glee of a 6-year-old child.
So, if you were an 18-to-34-year-old Nielsen ratings point, which show would you watch? A lot of ink has been spilled in the last 10 years trying to define Generation X, those hazy, lazy, crazy kids of the boom-and-bust ‘80s and ‘90s. And the general consensus seems to be that, when it comes to the news, they…well, they’re not terribly into the news. That’s what the pollsters tell us anyway. But maybe the pollsters are wrong. Maybe Gen Xers are interested in the news. Maybe they’re just not interested in having the news presented to them with a straight face. Maybe they prefer their news at a slant. These are kids who grew up in the media whirlwind, after all. They’re used to spin. And maybe what they want is for the news to acknowledge when spin is being spun—with a well-timed smirk, perhaps.
Jon Stewart is the Man of a Thousand Smirks, each one perfectly timed so as to squeeze every last ounce of laughter out of the studio audience. But if that was all Stewart was, a smirk machine, then “The Daily Show” wouldn’t be worth watching. He also happens to be a surprisingly well-informed guy and a fantastic interviewer. “I like to read the papers, keep up with the world,” he joked one night, but you get the impression he wasn’t joking, really. His interests range far and wide: He can trade deep thoughts with David Halberstam one night, compare favorite videogames with Ja Rule the next. And his guests are as likely to be Washington politicos as Hollywood stars. It’s an opportunity for the pols to let their hair—or, in John McCain’s case, their comb-overs—down. But even that can be instructive. (Don’t quit your day job, senator.)
Are we a nation of infotainment whores? Would the vast majority of us prefer to be well entertained rather than well informed, leaving the diehards to their C-SPAN marathons? Perhaps, but what such questions don’t take into account are the myriad ways we make sense of the world these days. We combine something we read in the newspaper with something we watched on the nightly news with something we heard on the radio with something Jay Leno said with something our neighbor said with something that was floating by in cyberspace, and tomorrow it may be a whole new mix of sources. We’re constantly bombarded with information, and the stuff that tends to stick is the shtick. Is it any wonder, then, that most presidential candidates manage to find their way onto a late-night TV talk show?
“The show is not a megaphone,” Stewart said when asked whether he prefers to go for the funny bone or the jugular. But he may be underestimating his ability to shape the hearts and minds of his audience—i.e., his role as both baby-boom and baby-bust mouthpiece. (Barely 40, he’s a tweener.) In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, it was David Letterman who led the late-night talk-show hosts back up Comedy Hill, pausing briefly to wipe Dan Rather’s eyes, then slowly turning the valve on the nitrous-oxide tank. But the most purely emotional return to the air may have been Stewart’s. Fighting back tears, he delivered a nine-minute valentine to the Big Apple that Howard Stern would rib him about for weeks afterward. “Our show has changed,” Stewart said, softly. “What it’s become, I don’t know.”
Has it changed? Not so you’d notice. The Onion, newly arrived in New York City, also stopped the presses for a few days. (Nothing puts comedy writers out of business faster than a national tragedy.) But after an appropriate period of mourning, it discovered that people wanted to laugh more than ever, not less. “U.S. Vows to Defeat Whoever It Is We’re at War With,” the major headline in the September 27 issue announced, nailing to the wall the Bush administration’s determination to kick someone’s, anyone’s, ass. By the following week, things had pretty much returned to abnormal: “Greenland Thinks It Looks Fat in Mercator Projection.” But the headline that seemed to capture the mood of the country may also have represented a bit of wishful thinking on the Onion’s part: “A Shattered Nation Longs to Care About Stupid Bullshit Again.”
The September 11 attacks threatened to end our decades-long pose of ironic detachment, which baby-busters share with baby-boomers. Suddenly, we were thunderstruck with the importance of being earnest. We didn’t want to mime quote marks with our fingers every time we said something. But it turns out that irony, which has been handed down from David Letterman to Conan O’Brien, from “Seinfeld” to “Friends,” from Euripides to Shakespeare to Swift to Twain to Mencken to Wolfe to Eggers, is bigger than Osama bin Laden, bigger than Al-Qaeda, bigger than war. Irony has often been considered a luxury item, something to indulge in during times of peace and prosperity. But maybe it’s closer to a necessity, something to reach for when the powers that be refuse to say what they mean, mean what they say.
And maybe “The Daily Show” and the Onion, like a pair of corrective lenses, allow us to see what we would otherwise miss, which is that the mainstream media are themselves distorting the truth, skewing the news. If present trends continue, there’ll come a day when none of us reads a daily newspaper or watches the nightly news. We’ll get everything off the web, or we’ll get a little bit here and a little bit there, as we’ve always done. And the news spoofs? Maybe they won’t be called the news spoofs anymore. Maybe they’ll be called the news. Maybe Jon Stewart, America’s Jokemaster General, will tell us everything we need to know about this wacky world we live in. Today, you have to keep up with the news to get all the jokes. Tomorrow, you may have to get all the jokes to keep up with the news.