Comedians or Cultural Managers? Ex-comic says glut of jokes on politicians hurts democracy

BY STEVENSON SWANSON • CHICAGO TRIBUNE [HERE]

NEW YORK -- John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are in a rowboat out in the middle of a lake. The rowboat rolls over. Who's saved?

Making fun of politicians is as American as singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the start of a baseball game. But does the relentless ribbing have a serious underside? If the late-night talk shows make fun of every politician, night after night and election cycle after election cycle, is the butt of the joke no longer the politician, but the American democratic system?

Russell Peterson thinks so. Peterson, a University of Iowa professor who once worked as a political cartoonist and stand-up comedian, contends that the cumulative effect of nightly monologues by Jay Leno, David Letterman and Conan O'Brien is corrosive. If all politicians are corrupt, laughable, puffed-up egomaniacs, what difference does it make who gets your vote, or whether you vote at all?

"I really do think that this sort of belief, that it doesn't matter, is one of the most damaging beliefs that a democracy can harbor," said Peterson, author of the recently published "Strange Bedfellows: How Late-Night Comedy Turns Democracy into a Joke."

"I don't think comedy invented that belief, but it's one of the most important avenues through which it is expressed."

Political comedy is hardly new. Take that rowboat joke, which Peterson calls so basic that it can be easily updated and still tap into a fundamental distaste for politicians. Put any other set of candidates from previous elections in the boat -- whether it's George W. Bush and John Kerry from 2004 or Theodore Roosevelt and Alton Parker from 1904 -- and a contemporary audience would laugh at the punch line.

In the TV era, the only consistent source of late-night political comedy for a couple of decades was Johnny Carson, the longtime host of the "The Tonight Show." But he wielded his comedic sword carefully.

"He was by no means a satirical political comedian," said Robert Thompson, a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University. "He was the kind of guy at a party who makes people laugh but never crosses a line."

But since the 1980s, the late-night scene has grown far more crowded. Among the biggest names, Leno, Letterman and O'Brien are on network television, and cable offers Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Bill Maher, among others.

The competition has altered the nature of political comedy.

"You've got to shout a little louder to get attention," Thompson said. "But the culture has changed vastly, too. You can't get through Vietnam, Watergate, O.J. Simpson and Monica Lewinsky without changing."

Impact on young voters ...

The proliferation of comics has increased the potential impact of political comedy, especially in light of the popularity of Stewart's satirical news program "The Daily Show" and Colbert's mock commentary show "The Colbert Report," both on Comedy Central.

A 2004 survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 21% of people ages 18 to 29 said they regularly got their political information from late-night comedy programs, up from only 9% in 2000.

Capitalizing on his popularity among young adults, Colbert is doing his show this week from the University of Pennsylvania in advance of Tuesday's Pennsylvania primary.

The fact that more under-30 viewers are getting their information from Colbert and his comic cronies has disturbed many political commentators, but other factors make it worse, in Peterson's view.

Political comedy, at least as it's practiced on the Leno, Letterman and O'Brien shows, tends to focus relentlessly on personality flaws, such as Bush's verbal gaffes or former President Bill Clinton's skirt-chasing, instead of on questions of political policy.

"That fits into the natural realm of comedy," said Peterson, who did a turn as a stand-up comic in the early 1990s, based in Minneapolis. "And you can make jokes without really being political."

... is no laughing matter

The result of these one-liners is that the political system itself is besmirched by the impression that all politicians are equally bad.

"Democracy depends on the faith of its followers to sustain it," Peterson writes in his book. "Some of the people, some of the time, must keep on believing that our electoral choices matter."

Daniel Kurtzman, who edits the political humor section of About.com, disagreed.

"Being the target of a joke doesn't mean you're being discounted as inherently awful or inadequate," he said.