A popular tweet from comedian Owen Benjamin a few months back posted a picture of 10 late night comedy hosts, and observed their … um, celebration of diversity.
Ever person in this photo:
– same political party
– Endorsed same candidate
– same stance on every issue.
Ladies and gentlemen, “comedy” pic.twitter.com/XE9ZxlSAcK— Owen Benjamin ? (@OwenBenjamin) October 4, 2017
It goes to show that there are varieties of service, but the same political ideology.
With few exceptions, each of these people, including Samantha Bee (not pictured, probably because patriarchy) have the exact same opinions on abortion, gun rights, gay marriage, taxes, affirmative action, the size of President Trump’s (I mean Drumpf’s) hands, etc. Late-night comedy has become the place liberals go to quench their thirsty, secularist souls. Although unlike your local house of fellowship, you can join this flock in front of a TV. There’s no personal interaction, which encourages all partaking to be as smug and self-righteous as possible.
Maybe it’s just me, but there appears to be a deterioration in the quality of these late-night programs. Despite our disagreements, I used to enjoy watching Jon Stewart when he first created this format on The Daily Show. Indeed, while The Daily Show was at least partially responsible for a noteworthy uptick in national cynicism, it seemed that they made an honest attempt to at least poke fun at the Left sometimes. And of course, it’s not that hard to write jokes when George W. Bush is basically writing them for you.
But then, one show turned into two when Stephen Colbert left The Daily Show to impersonate a flag-waiving, neocon shill. And it kind of worked. Unfortunately, given that this was the only impersonation Colbert knew how to do, it wore out soon enough.
But it didn’t matter, these shows just kept multiplying and multiplying like a cancer, consuming every apolitical late-night show out there. And probably diluting the talent pool of writers for such content at the same time.
Think back to the days of Jay Leno and even David Letterman. Both seemed to lean left, but both also made an honest effort to poke fun at both sides of the aisle. This is important for society, as there are some cultural truths that should cross the political aisle. Indeed, I made this same argument with sports back during the whole “take a knee” debacle. Namely, sports should be apolitical for political reasons, because “one of [the reasons we are so divided] is that we just don’t talk to each other anymore.” Without shared cultural experiences like sports, that divide is only going to grow. If the NFL alienates conservatives, they will go elsewhere (as they did), and we will live in two ever more divergent realities.
Nevertheless, nowadays, ESPN publishes articles like “Five Poets on the New Feminism,” including one by a cop killer, and late-night comedy is made up of a bunch of interchangeable liberals screeching about how angry Donald Trump makes them for 30 to 60 minutes, five nights a week. And in the midst of their preaching about how evil we are if we voted for Trump … or Johnson … or Stein … or Romney in 2012 … or Bush, or … or have any conservative or libertarian views whatsoever, the comedy part in all this seems to have fallen by the wayside. At this point, it’s hard to tell if they are even trying to be funny.
Whenever I watch a piece by Samantha Bee, I am consistently left in a state of bewildered disbelief. Obviously, there’s nothing even remotely humorous about her rants, but it’s worse than that. I can barely even tell where the jokes are supposed to be.
Mixed into the cocktail of her hyperventilating, fast-talking is a righteous smugness that is something to behold. Her piece on the so-called Alt-Right (an ideology that seems to be relatively small, but garners an enormous amount of media attention) was less about mocking them and more about stirring up a moral panic. (Yes, stirring up moral panic is a great way to convince young people to reject an angry and rebellious ideology.)
Jimmy Kimmel, the former co-host of The Man Show (the unfunny one) is, not surprisingly, also unfunny. Chuck Schumer may be able to provide talking points for Obamacare, but he adds little in the way of comedy writing. That being said, I can at least tell which part is supposed to be funny when I watch Kimmel. That is, unless he decides to spend his show preaching to his audience about gun violence and telling Republicans they “should be praying to God to forgive them.”
After taking some heat for that, Kimmel responded that “If they’re so turned off by my opinion on health care and gun violence, then, I don’t know, I probably wouldn’t want to have a conversation with them anyway.”
Folks, please don’t mistake this humorless preacher for an entertainer.
The only one that has seemingly tried to resist this hyper-politicization of what should be, as Rich Lowry puts it in the New York Post, a “neutral zone” is Jimmy Fallon. It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that he also seems to be one of the few that is genuinely talented at comedy. Indeed, he’s also quite the musician, actually. But when he dared to have Donald Trump on his show, the other hosts fell into a conniption fit. Samantha Bee condemned Jimmy Fallon for offering a congenial interview to Trump. With a complete lack of hyperbole, she noted that many like Fallon are “not going to live under a president who thinks of them as a collection of sex toys.”
Jimmy Fallon eventually conceded under the pressure of his congregation and apologized for being too nice to Donald Trump.
Fallon had become an almost-sorta-apostate. In this Liberal Church, you can’t simply choose not to attend on Sunday morning (or the rest of the week for that matter). It makes one think about the actually funny co-host of The Man Show, the one who dragged Jimmy Kimmel along by his coattails. Nowadays, Adam Carolla has a very successful podcast, but would he even be considered for late-night television? It would make perfect business sense. After all, he’s a libertarian-leaning conservative, and there’s a niche waiting to be filled. But I sincerely doubt it. It appears that these media conglomerates see their shareholders as being second to their “mission statement.” Piety over profit!
Overall, ratings for late night comedy are dropping, which is probably a good sign. Furthermore, its viewership is old. The median age of Colbert’s audience is 59. In this new cultural landscape, television stars just aren’t what they used to be.
In all likelihood, PewDiePie has more cultural relevance today than John Oliver. Given these media company’s fundamentalist views, it shouldn’t be surprising that the market has directed people elsewhere. Let’s hope the apostasy continues and accelerates.
