Jon Stewart hosted “The Daily Show” on Monday night with a breakdown of the past weekend’s mayhem at the White House Correspondents’ Association annual dinner. His monologue (as well as Jimmy Kimmel’s opening a few minutes later on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”) called attention to the increasingly fraught and bitter friction we’re seeing play out between the Trump White House and individual comedians — and even comedy itself, as I’ve previously discussed.
It quickly became clear during Stewart’s opening remarks that the veteran comedian is built for this moment. Stewart, I remind you, is the most pioneering and influential exponent of what scholars call “satire news,” or “parodic news.” His comedic techniques have been exported around the globe, inspiring knockoffs of “The Daily Show” in Egypt, Taiwan, Nigeria and other places around the world.
It quickly became clear during Stewart’s opening remarks that the veteran comedian is built for this moment.
The genre that Stewart perfected has not one, not two, but three targets. The first is widely known: politicians, the superwealthy, the powerful, etc. The second is less recognized: Parodic news attacks media conglomerates and their journalism divisions. The third is rarely discussed outside of scholarly analyses: Stewart and his epigones are obsessed by the relationship between politicians and journalists.
On Monday night, Stewart went to town on all three. Freeze-framing an image of a phalanx of Secret Service agents manfully rushing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to safety, Stewart pointed out that the squad had left behind Kennedy’s wife, Cheryl Hines (“You can protect your wife,” Stewart chided Kennedy, “instead of beating her to the escape pod”). This incident, he smirked, would be a “new addition” to a Wikipedia page titled “Kennedy Family Abandoning Women to their Fate.” Later, Triumph the Comic Insult Dog — the inspired creation of comedian Robert Smigel — confessed that he was scared: “I didn’t want RFK Jr. to eat my carcass.”
All of this ribbing, of course, happened against a backdrop of a recent Trump-comedy flare-up that occurred in the run-up to Saturday’s WHCA gala. As you may recall, the press organization did not invite a comedian to its event — a decision that infuriated many.
In those same opinions, the WHCA acted to appease a thin-skinned commander in chief. In his two terms, the president has tussled with numerous comedians, from Kathy Griffin to Bill Maher to Seth Meyers to Stephen Colbert to Jimmy Fallon to Kimmel, among others. Trump has never previously attended this event as president, perhaps because he didn’t want to be rinsed by some stand-up.
But Trump did reportedly prepare material of his own; White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt gleefully and unintentionally prophesied that “it will be funny, it will be entertaining. There will be some shots fired tonight.”
In any case, the decision to not invite a comic prompted Kimmel, who performed at this event in 2012, to stage an “alternative” WHCA dinner, a la Kid Rock’s alternative Super Bowl halftime performance. During the broadcast last Thursday, Kimmel vowed to “do some of the jokes a comedian might do if our president wasn’t a trembling drama queen who’s scared of comedy.”
Kimmel’s bit was unusually lacerating, at least for a nationally televised talk show. There were raunchy barbs about Jeffrey Epstein and the president. A quip about the latter’s advanced age (“Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow”) was apparently interpreted by the Trumps as “a despicable call to violence.” On Monday, both the first lady and the president issued separate calls for ABC to fire the comedian.
But back to Stewart. The chaos of an assassination attempt aside, the WHCA dinner provided him with so much rich comic earth to frack. The yearly dinner is the physical embodiment of the often problematic relationship between the Fourth Estate and those who rule us. I mean, you can’t get a better visual expression of this odd symbiosis than watching reporters and government officials sitting at the same tables, sipping merlot, all decked out in gowns and tuxedos.
Stewart described the WHCA’s press organization’s approach as “Hey, let’s celebrate the First Amendment with an administration doing everything to destroy it!”
Stewart described the WHCA’s press organization’s approach as “Hey, let’s celebrate the First Amendment with an administration doing everything to destroy it!” He then curated a montage of journalists interviewing one another and celebrating their own heroism. Stewart trained his fire on Wolf Blitzer, pointing out that the storied CNN anchor kept drifting off message as he discussed 1) his salad appetizer, 2) his loss of a shoe and 3) a fateful bathroom visit. Blitzer, Stewart remarked, was “dangerously blurring the line between reporter and old man.”
Kimmel’s frustration with mainstream journalism was also evident. He aired a clip of CNN’s Brian Stelter underplaying the very obvious threats Trump was making to have the talk show host fired.
If the event is indeed rescheduled — and I sincerely hope it is not — then expect debates about comedy to once again pervade the news cycle. The WHCA is locked in a Chinese finger trap with comedy itself. The organization can’t shake itself free from political satire, try as it might. That’s because so many Americans believe that the right to mock, like press freedom, is central to a functioning democracy.
Stewart and Kimmel are doing what democracies need them to do, namely mock their leaders with words that are funny and, yes, often tasteless. To regulate those words, as some in the MAGA movement seem intent on doing, is to run the risk of undermining the very free speech protections they, rather cynically, claim to be protecting.
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