AMERICAN HUMORISTS have never been especially adept at political satire, probably because their mass-media audience tends to be spectacularly ill-informed about politics. For satire to work, it must be precise, an immaculate and very specific recreation of reality that in initially subtle but increasingly outlandish ways begins to diverge from the real. When an audience knows little or nothing about the reality that is being reduced to absurdity before their eyes, how can they find the mockery amusing, or even vaguely interesting?
The powers-that-be in show business have always instinctively known that Americans care so little about politics that they will have no interest in seeing it parodied. “Satire,” the play-wright George S. Kaufman famously said, “is what closes Saturday night” — meaning that it loses money. That’s why late night comics have so eagerly latched on to the notion that politicians are either stupid or driven by sexual hunger. Stupid jokes and dirty jokes are the root of all comedy, and therefore its very lowest form — and attaching them to politicians is a way of elevating such low stuff by making it seem topical.
Yet politicians and political leaders of all stripes are dangerous — and therefore worthy of being cut down to size — not because they are lacking in conviction, smarts, or morals, but because they have the power and authority to impose their beliefs on the rest of us. The best political skits in the 26-year history of Saturday Night Live have been expressions of this truth, whether you agree with their political bent or not — as when an ostentatiously doddering Ronald Reagan was portrayed in a 1987 show as the ruthless brains behind the plan to sell arms to Iran to support the contras in Nicaragua as his staff struggled helplessly to keep up with him. Or when a sighing, contemptuous, and condescending Al Gore insisted on making two closing statements in one of the show’s spoofs of the Gore-Bush debates last year.
But these moments have been few and far between; Saturday Night Live is far happier teasing Bill Clinton for eating cheeseburgers and acting like a good ol’ boy or having George W. Bush say the Florida mess was making him “wet the bed.” SNL would never be, and has never been, so crude when making fun of things their audience really does know something about — its parodies of TV shows, for example, which are models of sophistication.
The latest example of the crime against comedy that is committed by bad satire is the much-discussed new series on Comedy Central entitled That’s My Bush! — which attempts to deconstruct simultaneously the new presidency and the TV sitcom form and fails disastrously at both.
On paper, the show sounds clever. The Bush White House comes complete with a wisecracking maid, an idiotic but bosomy secretary, and a nutty next-door neighbor who just walks through the door whenever he feels like it. George W. is hosting a state dinner to bring together pro-choice and pro-life leaders, but he has also promised Laura that the two of them would have a quiet dinner together — and so, in the manner of sitcoms immemorial, he ends up running between two different rooms, changing clothes on the way. The pro-choice leader is a butch lesbian. The pro-life leader is a 30-year-old fetus that managed to survive an abortion and is very, very grumpy.
In execution, though, That’s My Bush! is agonizingly unfunny and weirdly dated. The acting and writing are purposely awful but are greeted with gales of laughter and applause by the (actually nonexistent) studio audience, in the manner of the worst sitcoms of the 1970s. There hasn’t been a show of that sort on the air in two decades — in part because they were brought to shame by parodies on SNL. Most contemporary sitcoms may be mediocre, but they’re far more polished. The ad campaign for That’s My Bush! features George W. and Laura cavorting with umbrellas in a fountain like the cast of Friends and the president doing standup, like the opening of Seinfeld. That’s a far cleverer approach than the actual show, which seems to have emerged from a time capsule.
The political satire is equally lame. Once creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone got the idea for an angry pro-life fetus played by a puppet, they seemed to think that was enough — but it’s merely one joke padded out to unconscionable length. And while it sounds shocking and daring, it’s anything but — because to satirize the abortion debate would require more than just a rudimentary knowledge that there is such a debate.
Still, conservative audiences should take note: This is not The West Wing. Parker and Stone are not liberals taking potshots at a right-wing president. They are anarchic libertarians, more akin to Howard Stern than to West Wing producer Aaron Sorkin. On their genuinely outrageous cartoon show South Park, Parker and Stone take gleeful aim at P.C. politics, with schoolkids receiving indoctrination from the Sexual Harassment Panda and seeing their classrooms dismantled because of disability and discrimination lawsuits.
But Parker and Stone seem to know nothing about politics and nothing about Washington, which points to another cause of America’s satire gap. In almost every other country in the world, the nation’s capital is the home base of every elite profession — politics, media, business, entertainment, and clergy. Its residents are intimate with all of them as a result. In the United States, Washington hosts the political world, New York the business and media worlds, Los Angeles the entertainment world — and they are very distant from one another. The degree of ignorance about the workings of politics in Hollywood (and New York) is staggering.
Satire must be knowing, and you can’t be knowing if you’re ignorant. Which is, in the end, the defining characteristic of That’s My Bush!
Contributing editor John Podhoretz is a columnist for the New York Post.
