The New Politics of Late Night
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In a wild election with a ripe orange target, comics are ditching balance and taking sides.
No late-night-TV comedian attacks the job with more righteous intensity than Samantha Bee. Once a week on her TBS show Full Frontal, she stands before a wall of video monitors, feet planted shoulder-width apart, neck muscles tensed, leaning forward like a panther getting ready to pounce. She talks fast, racing to pack a week’s worth of outrage into one high-voltage half hour. She has a flair for the baroque insult, calling Donald Trump, at various times, a “tangerine-tinted trash-can fire,” “sociopathic 70-year-old toddler,” “screaming carrot demon” and “America’s burst appendix.”
Bee launched her show in February after 12 years as a correspondent on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, and the fervor of her advocacy has already outstripped that of her mentor. “Jon worked really hard to try to be nonpartisan,” says Bee. “It was important to him. But for me, a fatigue sets in. You just see the same patterns repeating themselves. I don’t care that much about being nonpartisan. Now that I have my own show, I get to say what’s in my heart.”
These days her heart is fearful of a Trump presidency. “It was funnier when they were all on that stage,” she says of the Republican-primary candidates. “Now that we’ve come down to Trump, it’s less funny with every passing moment. In fact, I’ve lost all sense of what’s funny about Donald Trump. Now I feel that it’s a pressing concern.”
In his 16 years as host of Comedy Central’s nightly satirical newscast, Stewart brought political savvy, journalistic rigor and bite to the old pastime of topical satire on late-night TV. His retirement from the show in the summer of 2015–along with Stephen Colbert’s departure from The Colbert Report to take over David Letterman’s Late Show on CBS–came as a blow to a generation of viewers who relied on the two shows for insightful news analysis as much as for entertainment. But the shake-up, abetted by the craziest presidential campaign in modern memory, has had an unexpected and largely unappreciated payoff. It has triggered an extreme makeover for political satire, which is now more ubiquitous, more pointed, more passionate and often more partisan than ever before.
Alumni of The Daily Show have metastasized across the dial. Along with Bee and Colbert, they include John Oliver, who vents about current events on HBO’s Last Week Tonight, and Trevor Noah, who replaced Stewart on the flagship Daily Show last September. (Larry Wilmore, The Daily Show’s former “senior black correspondent,” took over Colbert’s old time slot on Comedy Central before a surprise cancellation last month.) More traditional network talk-show hosts, too, are showing newfound political muscle–especially NBC’s Seth Meyers and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel–joining HBO’s 14-year-old comedic political talk show Real Time with Bill Maher.
The hosts weren’t always as apolitical as they appeared. Letterman in particular, with his constant needling of politicians like Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney, allowed his left-of-center leanings to peek through toward the end of his run. Carson and Leno played it straighter, but their tolerant-centrist orientation (sympathetic to gays and other minorities, scornful of the religious right) struck some conservatives as liberal bias. Yet all three disavowed partisan agendas.
But the game has changed, thanks largely to the man at the top of the GOP ticket. With his orange skin tone, animal-pelt hairdo and overweening ego, Trump may be the greatest gift to comedians since the invention of the mother-in-law joke. Hillary Clinton gets her share of jabs (most recently for her “basket of deplorables” remark and her campaign’s slowness to reveal her health problems), but Trump has galvanized the late-night crowd, prompting a new sense of urgency, outrage, even panic.
Noah, 32, who grew up under apartheid, contends that his background gives him a different perspective on the GOP candidate. “Coming from the outside,” he says, “I’m not imbued with the eternal optimism and confidence that Americans have, you know? A lot of people go, ‘Well, that can never happen in America.’ I go, ‘It can happen here.’” Like many of his peers, Noah challenges the “false equivalency” that prompts journalists to balance critical coverage of one candidate with equally tough coverage of the opposition. “There’s a certain level of naiveté when you say Hillary Clinton is worse than Donald Trump,” Noah says. “I think that’s a very dangerous position to be in. And I think the press has gotten to a place where they are realizing that it’s about truth and not neutrality.”
Jimmy Fallon, host of the top-rated Tonight Show, still carries on the Carson tradition of evenhanded, softball one-liners, along with a Trump impression that even the Donald can laugh along with. And other late-night comics, like James Corden and Conan O’Brien, steer clear of heavy-duty political material. Though more political, Colbert has been something of a disappointment in his first year on CBS, struggling to find the proper tone since dropping his right-wing alter ego.
And Meyers has dramatically upped his game since taking over NBC’s Late Night two years ago, becoming Trump’s most consistent nightly nemesis. … Meyers says NBC is fully on board: “Not only have they gotten out of the way, but they’ve pushed the show to be what it is now.”
“I was fascinated that people said, ‘Your job now is to stop Trump,’” says Noah.
The fragmented TV audience makes it tough for any comedian to have Carson’s clout. Fallon’s top-rated Tonight Show averages 3.7 million viewers (compared with 6.5 million in Carson’s last year), and the numbers dwindle from there. Noah’s Daily Show reaches 1.3 million (down from about 2 million during Stewart’s final year–though streaming has increased by 50%). The audience is getting younger but not necessarily more diverse, especially after the death of Wilmore’s Nightly Show. Like the pundits of MSNBC or Fox News, late-night comics may be jesting to the converted.
This flowering of political satire could be a unique moment in American comedy–one that passes quickly should Trump be sent back to his reality show. It’s hard to imagine similar passion being directed at a President Hillary Clinton or a stonewalling Republican Congress. Yet these satirists may have trouble backtracking from their new partisan aggressiveness, becoming yet another contributor to the bubble that news consumers increasingly live in–their views reinforced by what they choose to watch and read.
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