November 19, 2012

Satire and Addiction

Jon Stewart is a dangerous drug.  Oh sure, you think it's fine to watch.  Once and a while.  As a kind of stress relieving, pallet cleansing, social thing.  I mean, there's no way you'd get hooked, right?  And there's definitely no way that you'd look to this guy for anything on a regular basis, right?  So you tune in.  A couple of times.  And the it sneaks up on you.

I have a confession folks:  I got hooked on The Daily Show during this election cycle. I started watching because after all of the reading online, blogging online and well, analysis, I wanted to just laugh.  But I may have learned a bit, too. 

It really started when I decided to write about bias.  I struggled to craft a thought about how the news media handles and spins the news of the day.  As a part of that conversation, I could talk about bias at Fox News.  I could give examples, and perhaps I could even do a lovely job of saying that many media outlets that feel their job is to make sure you understand the news their way, more than just deliver the news to you.  Struggle as I do, Stewart just makes it look easy. Take this beautiful riff on Fox News after the 47% video surfaced.  "Romney jazz.  It's the words you don't hear..."



I was hooked.

A month passe, and I had a nice routine.  Just one episode before bed, I'd say.  I have to blog about the second debate, and this will make it more palatable.  I knew Romney had lost, I knew that the President's aggression and passion had returned to the room.  How do you capture the moment when it became clearest that Obama had "game, set, match'd" his way to victory in the debate.  I wasn't sure.  But here was Stewart:


At 1:44: "There's your first clue."  Beautiful.

It is also worth mentioning that John Stewart is a gateway drug.  The next thing I knew, I was up later and later.  I started watching the Colbert Report. This bit appeared just a bit before Halloween.  Colbert takes on Donald Trump (language warning).



And this is when it hits me!  John Stewart and Stephen Colbert are not just saying things that are funny.  They are saying things that I wish I could say, things I wish I had said.  These men are the modern day licensed fool in the King's court.  With a certain divine knack and clarity, these guys can tell all of America just how bad it's getting and earn a smile for the trouble.  Such honesty is addictive. 

Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)