New York Times columnist Ross Douthat last week wrote an extremely controversial column about a topic that wouldn’t seem so controversial on the face of it: late-night comedians. The peg was Donald Trump’s recent appearance on The Tonight Show. Host Jimmy Fallon had a good-natured chat with the man and tousled Trump’s famous hairdo. Liberals were aghast. They accused Fallon of helping humanize a man they view as a dangerous, racist xenophobe.
Late-night comic Samantha Bee, formerly of The Daily Show and who’s graduated to her own show on another basic cable network, did a segment attacking Fallon. Douthat responded in his column by pointing out that Fallon is a cultural exception to an America where cultural elites are “acting as enforcers” for a radical liberal orthodoxy. Further, this cultural hegemony may actually be a problem for liberals because they have “dramatically raised expectations for just how far left our politics can move, while insulating many liberals from the harsh realities of political disagreement in a sprawling, 300-plus million person republic.”
As if to prove Douthat’s point, the column provoked a social media tsunami of hostility. Conan O’Brien sidekick Andy Richter unleashed a torrent of furious tweets calling Douthat’s column, among other things, a “tub of horses—t.” And in a conference call with New York Times reporter Dave Itzkoff, Bee responded to Douthat’s point, “It’s so good to know that we’re the problem and not racism.”
Contra Bee, the fact that late-night television is full of so-called comedians launching into political rants is a big problem for political discourse in the era of Trump. For instance, it was quickly pointed out that in 2012 Richter was making jokes, if you’d call them that, about Mitt Romney being racist. It’s the boy who cried “wolf.” Even when there are legitimate objections to Trump, it’s hard to take them seriously coming from people who slandered a good man as racist without cause in 2012.
It’s pretty indisputable that rebellion against the mocking of politically correct scolds is a significant part of Trump’s appeal. The likes of Bee and Richter and the rest of the late-night lefty -comedian industrial complex will never admit it, but the more rabid their attempts to discredit Trump, the more they help him.
And make no mistake, Bee’s job is helping a small audience of liberal elites to blur the line between self-righteousness and humor. Since Bee stopped appearing as an occasional correspondent on The Daily Show—which is struggling mightily since Jon Stewart’s departure—The Scrapbook doesn’t even know what nether region of basic cable her low—rated show appears on. Douthat’s column may have been the most attention she’s received, well, ever.
Fallon, on the other hand, is the highest-rated late-night comic, likely because he still views his job as offering some pleasant entertainment before bedtime. It’s one of many regrettable aspects of Obama’s America that liberals have even managed to upend the cultural consensus that a comedian’s job is to be funny.
