Is Late-Night Political Comedy Useless? - The New Yorker
The waning hours of Election Day, and the day that followed, were startling times for comedy. Alec Baldwin, who has played Donald Trump on “Saturday Night Live” this season, tweeted, of Trump’s win, “Italy survived Berlusconi. Then again, Berlusconi was Adlai Stevenson compared to this.” Seth Meyers, who had been smartly dinging Trump since the primaries, opened his show by saying, “Well, that was a real grab in the pussy,” and later got choked up while talking about how badly his mother had wanted to elect the first woman President. Conan O’Brien looked on the bright side: “In America, we get to pick who’s going to ruin our country.”
On Election Night, some comedians were on live TV, watching in real time as the tide abruptly turned toward Trump. On the live “Daily Show” special, the correspondents Desi Lydic, with Clinton supporters at the Javits Center, and Jordan Klepper, at Trump H.Q., were funny and nervous, and the nervousness looked genuine. Klepper said, “I gotta be honest: I kinda assumed Hillary would have locked it up by now, so I didn’t really prepare anything for this alternative, horrifying scenario.” The joke of the election results was supposed to be centered on Trump’s final, Dickensian comeuppance, but that, of course, was not so.
Stephen Colbert was watching, too, on his live Showtime special, and as the surge of Trump voters was revealing itself he stood up from behind his desk, where a glass of whiskey was sitting on ice, and adopted a quiet, preacherly tone. He immediately took a long view, speaking slowly: “How did our politics get so poisonous? I think it’s ’cause we overdosed, especially this year. We drank too much of the poison. You take a little bit of it so you can hate the other side. And it tastes kinda good. And you like how it feels. And there’s a gentle high to the condemnation, right? You know you’re right, right? You know you’re right.” He went on, finding his chair, “Politics used to be something we thought about every four years—maybe two years if you didn’t have a lot of social life. And that’s good we didn’t think about it that much, because it left room in our lives for other things, and for other people.”
Colbert spent the better part of a decade talking about politics nearly every weeknight on Comedy Central—it’s what made him famous and helped him get the job as David Letterman’s replacement at CBS. But, on this Election Night, Colbert seemed to have come almost to regret it a bit, to regret his own role as the dealer of the particular drug of ideological political comedy. “Now politics is everywhere,” he said. “And that takes up precious brain space we could be using to remember all the things we actually have in common. So, whether your side won or lost, we don’t have to do this shit for a while.”
It sounded like wisdom, a comforting challenge for Americans to look to the good in their own lives, and to find the things that unite them. And while it’s true that there is more to life than politics, this is the wrong lesson to take from Trump’s victory—at least as it relates to comedy. The comedians who have spent the past year and a half criticizing Trump, and the rhetoric that Trump unleashed and laid bare in others, had not made a mistake in doing so. They weren’t making things up or exaggerating the menace of the campaign; the material came from Trump himself. It is natural in this moment to lament the fact that the political comedy of the left failed to persuade more voters than it did. But to question its basic utility is to take the disappointment caused by these election results too far.
There is no evidence, contra Ross Douthat, that the withering criticism of Trump was what radicalized and motivated Trump’s supporters. Comedians were responding to a radicalism that was already present, and attempting to use jokes not just to comfort the converted but to warn and awaken. “The gentle high of condemnation,” as Colbert put it, had never been easier to deliver, not because comedians had somehow become meaner or further trapped in an echo chamber with their own viewers but because, this year, there was so much that needed to be condemned. In the aftermath of Trump’s victory, there is a rush from people of good faith to call for calm and continuity and unity, and to question their own role in what got us here. No one wants Trump, in his unfathomable role as President, to run the country aground come January, but the answer isn’t that we need to be nicer to him.
On Wednesday night, Samantha Bee, wearing a sparkling jacket that she had intended to wear to celebrate Clinton’s win, wasn’t conciliatory on her show, “Full Frontal.” A little hurried but resolute, she raged against white voters, especially white women, who had voted for Trump and legitimized the racism that had been central to his campaign. “Way to lean out,” she said. She talked about the genuine fear and despair felt by her diverse writing and production staff, members of which weren’t ready simply to move on. This election had been different for these people, its possibilities more encouraging, and now its outcome more troubling and dangerous. Bee told the story of one of her writers, just that morning, being shouted at on the street, “Payback for Obama time—no more socialist Muslim.”
Bee’s comedy has been funnier and nervier than most this election cycle, and now her response to the results more urgent and authentic, because she has spoken as someone, and been a voice for others, for whom the stakes have been the highest. The answer to the election would not be less politics but more. “We have to stay here and fix our mess,” she said. Not incidentally, she also told the best joke I’d heard in the past couple of days. “This was the democratic equivalent of installing an aboveground pool,” she said. “Even if we’re lucky and it doesn’t seep into our foundation, the neighbors will never look at us the same way again.”
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