Late-Night Election
On what feels like a daily basis, unbelievable lines are thrown out by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton’s campaigns. From “I could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and I wouldn’t lose voters,” to more cringe-worthy lines like “basket of deplorables,” this election season has produced incredibly ridiculous political rhetoric. It’s comical—in a terrifying way.
It is hard to downplay the prominence late night comedy has had on news coverage of this election cycle. At its finest, satirical news politicizes the absurdity of a system to which the people in this country are subjected. During the 2000 election, Jon Stewart made a reputation for himself by playing on the stacking confusion of voters, political pundits, and news media outlets during the Florida electoral controversy and producing a series of segments known as “Indecision 2000.” During a live episode that aired in conjunction with the announcement of the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision, Stewart broke down a clip of Bush’s acceptance speech in which the president-elect said “I was not elected to serve one party.” Stewart responded with a deadpan delivery: “You were not elected.”
Indecision 2000 marked the beginning of Stewart’s signature nihilistic poignancy. Where other late night television comedians of the time took to poking fun at the news from a higher-ground, outsider perspective, Stewart’s passivity towards politics and policy situated him comfortably within the same hopeless frustrations as his audience.
In The Daily Show spinoff, The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert took an even more cynical approach to the news. As a satirical “feeling-over-fact” conservative media personality, Colbert not only provided commentary on the news media, but also performed the absurd legality of election politics. During the 2012 election, Colbert successfully created a political action committee (or Super PAC) called “Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow” and a 501(4) (c) shell corporation named “Colbert Super PAC SHH.” He used this shell corporation to funnel anonymous donations to the Super PAC. He later transferred the Super PAC to his business partner, renaming it “The Definitely Not Coordinating With Stephen Colbert Super PAC,” so that Colbert could legally receive financial support to run for “President of the United States of South Carolina.”
The politics of Stewart and Colbert’s entertainment hit two key components of satirical news: mocking news content and performing news production. The Colbert Report and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart were first and foremost performance critiques. These shows’ actors performed jokes that ranged anywhere from impressions of newsmakers to playbacks of news segments. The mass media cycle behind 24- hour news networks like CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC was mocked for its dramatization of news, its personality commentary that spewed extremist rhetoric, and its constant facade of “expertise” that favored prediction over fact.
2016 changed the way we joke about politics. News production this election has been even more hectic in speed and quantity; however, comedians have refrained from acting out its chaos. Satirical news segments have taken a stronger liking to making jokes about the election itself, rather than to performing its inherent absurdity. Late night comedians have expressed a range of styles, from more “cool” personalities (like John Oliver, Seth Meyers, and Colbert as the new Late Show host) to more passionate approaches (such as Samantha Bee and Trevor Noah as the new host of The Daily Show).
However varied in their tones, 2016’s late night hosts do have one thing in common: they are all comedians, not characters. Although all of the aforementioned hosts mimic desk segment or news-style shows, they do not parody media figures. Instead, late-night programs have become direct reflections of their hosts, and as a result, their jokes are now subject to being factually and morally right. This pressure to be correct has prevented late night election comedy from engaging with the candidates’ acres of grey area. Hosts take positions (almost exclusively democratic and pro-Clinton) that agree with their target demographics, and make jokes on sound bites or news topics, often ending with a definitive, advocative stance. Their segments often open with clips from rallies, interviews, or news outlets, but almost always end with a critical or forgiving response to the news of the candidate.
Last Week Tonight’s retrospective coverage of the Democratic National Convention exemplifies this election’s style of satire. John Oliver spent the majority of the segment comparing the DNC to the RNC, taking the last three minutes of the desk-portion of the segment to talk solely about Trump. The final component of the show then featured a montage of DNC speakers attempting to motivate their audience with objectively silly speeches.
Although this final montage poked fun at the way political rhetoric places the performative aspects of inspiring and relating to audiences over the actual content of speeches, it was missing one key figure: Hillary Clinton. Oliver said that “conventions are judged by the two people on the party ticket,” yet he spent only a minute commenting on Clinton’s speech, and used clips from it just once to joke that she would micromanage the government.
Hillary’s performance at the DNC was not the only thing missing from this segment; Oliver also barely touched on the trove of controversy surrounding the convention, namely then-Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s email scandal. But even the punchline of Wasserman Schultz’s joke was not about her scandal or the questionable ethics of the Democratic Party. Oliver chose to show a clip of Wasserman Schultz telling a riled group of Bernie Sanders’ supporters that their behavior was “not the Florida that we know.” Oliver interrupted the clip, saying “Disruptive, borderline unhinged, and getting ready to f— up a vote? That is literally the only Florida we know.” Oliver used Wasserman’s quote as a vehicle to mock Sanders’ supporters, allowing him to comment on the DNC email scandal without actually providing any sort of commentary on it.
It’s not that Oliver’s segment was unfunny. It’s that by failing to critique specific performances, Oliver did not produce actual satirical news; he produced comedy attempting to pass as informative.
One of the most viral election-related comedy segments this past year was Colbert’s Late Show “All Trump Debate” sketch. It was adapted from Stewart’s 2003 Daily Show sketch “Bush v. Bush,” which pit 2000’s Texas Governor Bush against 2003’s President Bush on their foreign policy stances, with Stewart acting as moderator.
In his sketch this election, Colbert moderated a Trump-on-Trump debate, pointing out contradictions in the Republican nominee’s opinions and generally outlandish remarks. Colbert’s sketch did not stick to one specific topic, and generally strayed from asking about issues on policy. It did not follow an actual mock debate format, acting instead as a compilation of inconsistencies, with Colbert delivering the punchlines. On the other hand, the comedy in Bush v. Bush was in the actual debate format. Stewart set up clips that were edited to put Bush in conversation with himself, and the jokes of the sketch were in Bush’s responses to himself. While both sketches received positive reception, Stewart’s humor was a long-form escalating performance, where the organization of Bush clips contained the core of the segment’s comedy, while Colbert’s was a compilation of one-liners, without any notable methodology.
This year, the punchline of satirical news has been replaced with moderate-to-liberal lessons.
Audiences who at least generally agree with the positions of the comedians they watch can unwind by laughing about their fears and later reading or watching similarly-minded media sources comment on how “John Oliver Shut Down Trump.” In this way, satirical news in 2016 has participated in the liberal media’s self-contained circulation of validation and security. It operates on the idea that if there is an unchallenged agreement between comedians, news outlets, and the audience, then everything will be okay.
There is little disruption to this cycle if all participants remain singular and like-minded in the content they produce. The problem is that this self-contained ideology of news-entertainment-audience does not allow for any critical disruption of individuals and the institutions that support them.
Entertainment is the most widely accessible form of commentary. The politics of funny is that it makes wide audiences engage with what they laugh at, whether that means feeling happy, angry, or disturbed. By reacting, audiences are automatically participating in dialogue with the topic and the critique that a joke presents. After the end of The Colbert Report in 2014 and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in 2015, media critics and audiences mourned what was seen as the end of a satirical news era. The gap in election comedy we feel in 2016 is not because Colbert and Stewart were irreplaceable—it’s because nobody is replacing them. In their place, there is a saturation of late night comedians playing the part of political critic informing the public in the most comical way possible.
But satirical news was never about informing the public or telling it like it is; it was about making an audience so uncomfortable, they laughed. In an information culture where news is treated as social capital, late night election comedy has become a distraction from productive engagement. In 2016, the politics of satirical news—in which we used to laugh at jokes about the people and institutions that regulate information, and in the process were forced to see that we are all disempowered in the cycle of mass media—no longer exist.