Timothy Noah: The Case Against the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.
[Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.]
...You can argue, as my friend and mentor Charles Peters does, that the ridicule in Stewart's and Colbert's satire, like the ridicule in much contemporary popular comedy, carries a screw-those-uneducated-yokels message that you never found in, say, the humor of Will Rogers. Rogers once quipped: "An ignorant person is one who doesn't know what you have just found out." At the risk of spoiling a joke by explaining it, Rogers meant: Resist putting on airs. Your urge to judge another man for what he doesn't know says more about your status anxiety than about his purported ignorance. Maybe Stewart would utter a line like that, but if he did, the lesson would likely be intended not for all humanity but for one especially pompous public figure caught in his crosshairs. Stewart and Colbert don't tell their audiences not to feel superior. They're more in line with Rogers' contemporary, the essayist H.L. Mencken, who invited his audience to chortle at the booboisie.
Mencken, Rogers, Stewart, and Colbert were and are all great performers. But of the four, Rogers is the only one I might follow to a rally on the Mall, because Rogers' style is the only one that could form the basis of a movement I'd consider following. (Al Franken is a great performer too, but, tellingly, to become a U.S. senator, he had to give up entirely his slashing "Rush Limbaugh is a big fat idiot" brand of humor.)...
Read entire article at Slate
...You can argue, as my friend and mentor Charles Peters does, that the ridicule in Stewart's and Colbert's satire, like the ridicule in much contemporary popular comedy, carries a screw-those-uneducated-yokels message that you never found in, say, the humor of Will Rogers. Rogers once quipped: "An ignorant person is one who doesn't know what you have just found out." At the risk of spoiling a joke by explaining it, Rogers meant: Resist putting on airs. Your urge to judge another man for what he doesn't know says more about your status anxiety than about his purported ignorance. Maybe Stewart would utter a line like that, but if he did, the lesson would likely be intended not for all humanity but for one especially pompous public figure caught in his crosshairs. Stewart and Colbert don't tell their audiences not to feel superior. They're more in line with Rogers' contemporary, the essayist H.L. Mencken, who invited his audience to chortle at the booboisie.
Mencken, Rogers, Stewart, and Colbert were and are all great performers. But of the four, Rogers is the only one I might follow to a rally on the Mall, because Rogers' style is the only one that could form the basis of a movement I'd consider following. (Al Franken is a great performer too, but, tellingly, to become a U.S. senator, he had to give up entirely his slashing "Rush Limbaugh is a big fat idiot" brand of humor.)...