Politics and Comedy

Today, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert faced off in an epic battle between reason and fear at the National Mall in their Rally to Restore Sanity (and/or Fear).

Speculation is already brewing about the sobering turn that the rally took as Jon Stewart made his final remarks. Is he still a comedian, or a political pundit?

From a literary standpoint, most comedies and comedians were preoccupied with politics from the start, from Moliere's Tartuffe, which was a comedy of manners aimed at Christian fanaticism, to Oscar Wilde, who said, "If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you."

Or Franz Kafka's The Trial and Metamorphosis, and other absurdist comedies (Nabokov also comes to mind). The Trial, however, is a mixed bag, because while it is very funny, I can't help but think that Kafka, through The Trial, inadvertently influenced the bureaucratic systems of the totalitarian regimes that arose after his death.

Who could also forget Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Or, The Children's Crusade; a hilarious and glaringly anti-war novel centered around the bombing of Dresden?

In fact, I would say that one of the the best ways to get one's message across is to make people laugh, because if they laugh, they've understood the point.

How could I omit South Park, the most obvious example of this idea? South Park uses the often ridiculous to make very, very strong political statements. The trick is to look past the profanity and immature humor and examine the big picture. Twice they've covered the Mohammed cartoon scandals, the state of our elections (Douche & Turd), activism (Whale Whores), and gang violence (Krazy Kripples), and bigotry (Ginger Kids).

To say that comedy and politics are entirely separate is to completely miss the point, and it displays nothing but an ignorance of our long literary history.

But Jon Stewart himself has always combined sober reason with biting satire. The only recourse to much of what he presents on his show is ridicule, often, however, in service of a larger point. The fact that for about ten minutes at the end of the rally he explained how we really are in contrast to the image of ourselves that is presented back to us by the 24/7 news cycle in a sober demonstration using traffic patterns as an example (traffic patterns are also one of my favorite examples) does not diminish his role as a comedian. I would argue that Stewart is the voice America would be wise to listen to right now in stark contrast to Fox News (which was not talking at all about the rally).

Colbert, for his part, did an excellent job in showing us the adversity we have manufactured and accepted. The puppet of him seems like Goliath or the Boogeyman, the fears we have used to divide and separate ourselves from one another, and all it takes is to simply refuse it.

I have done more than my share of trying to do this, but there is still more for me to do, but I still don't like fundamentalists, and I'm still not a fan of the Tea Party.

I would really like to see, at this point, someone try to paint Jon Stewart as a fearmongering anti-American charlatan and/or a bigot.