From great to funny

Political humor has conquered American television. Comedy shows are crowding out the news because they operate on the same principles, but in a bolder way.

The scenery on the stage is a snide fantasy on a jingoistic theme: eagles, stars and stripes adorn every conceivable surface. It all looks as if the contents of a conditional ultra-conservative brain were taken out and scattered on the walls. This is the Steven Kober show. The subject of his satire is a pompous patriot with a picture of Reagan in his wallet and a messianic complex the size of Texas, where he either comes from or dreams of being. He swears allegiance to the flag every morning, and of all the amendments to the Constitution, he cherishes the second most of all, guaranteeing the right to bear arms. He suspects Obama of Mohammedanism, liberals of homosexuality, homosexuals of atheism, and atheists of treason. In Russia, the journalist Mikhail Leontiev would probably be the object of his parody, but in the USA it is Fox News channel star Bill O'Reilly.

In recent years, humor has replaced - and enhanced - the news on American television. More aged viewers learn about political news from the satirical program The Daily Show, which Kober started with, than from the evening news itself. Satirists have begun not just to scoff, but to hit at the most sore points of American self-identification: patriotism, the free market, equality, the American dream. Fortunately, the information noise provides an inexhaustible source for satire: the creation of an extremely conservative Tea Party, the panic on Wall Street, new photos of Obama's dog named Bo.

Comedy "news" gradually lost its quotes, and comedians began to do the work of journalists: conduct their own investigations, build logical chains of facts. Of course, these constructions may sound absurd, but this only adds to the popularity of telesatirists and undermines the reputation of serious television. And it forms an attitude towards politics and the state as a whole - irony has finally supplanted sacred awe.

AFTER SNOWMAN

The history of modern American politics is a history of humor. The first presidential candidate to stoop to appearing on entertainment was Richard Nixon, dropping in with a line on the sketch show Laugh-In in 1968. This progressive gesture was explained by the fact that Nixon had already managed to fully experience the power of television: eight years earlier, he had lost the first television debate in US history to John F. Kennedy solely because of his unpresentable appearance. His only line in the comedy show, which consisted of the words "Give the ball!", He managed to screw up.

But this brief symbiosis of politics and humor set off a chain reaction. It has intensified in the last decade. By the 2004 elections, a tour of five or six hotspots of the frivolous late-night airwaves had become a mandatory part of every self-respecting politician's election strategy. John Edwards, the first echelon candidate, announced the start of his presidential campaign at the comedy show studio. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who ran for governor of California, did the same. The apotheosis came in 2008: comedian Tina Fay's ruthlessly accurate imitation of Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live contributed to the defeat of the Republicans.

A new era on American TV began in 2000, when George W. Bush became the 43rd President of the United States and New Jersey native John Stewart Liebowitz hosted The Daily Show on the second-rate cable channel Comedy Central.

The Daily Show has existed since 1996 as a rather toothless parody of the news. The highlight of the program was mockery of defenseless eccentrics - for example, pseudo-serious interviews with Bigfoot hunters. Stewart initially played along with this concept. But the elections changed everything. It all started with a series of special reports under the title Indecision 2000 (“Indecision-2000”). With each one, Stewart moved further away from ridiculing farmers who had seen UFOs and deeper into politics. His antipathy towards Bush became more and more evident. Over the next few months, The Daily Show mastered a new function - the voice of the opposition, dumbfounded by the injustice of what had happened.

Then there was September 11th. All major news channels swore allegiance to the White House. On CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, the American flag has settled in the corner of the screen for a long time. Any manifestation of skepticism was equated with treason. The Daily Show turned out to be not just opposition, but almost the only opposition.

HUMOR OPPOSITION

September 11 generally lined the map of American political humor for many years to come. Intellectual comedian Denis Miller, whose signature trick on HBO was sparkling monologues with frequent allusions to the classics, almost fell into fascism and overnight switched to jokes about smelly Arabs. Bill Mahr, whose show Politically Incorrect used to take a more libertarian line, has taken a sharp left. In an atmosphere of general post-traumatic hysteria, he managed to lose his transmission. ABC canceled it after Mar remarked that the official epithet "cowardly attack" did not fit 9/11 - that the attack on skyscrapers was anything but cowardly. The next day, Mar woke up a liberal.

Stewart, meanwhile, found his main theme: disgust not just for stupidity, but for the feigned simplicity of people who make fateful decisions. "It's easy to make fun of Bush by pretending he's a fool or four years old," he explained. - I don't think that Bush is four years old. I think he thinks we're four years old." His scathing attacks on the president and the main pro-government channel, Fox News, have made him the most powerful entertainment anchor. Gradually, from a critic of the government, he turned into a criticism of his own colleagues - for their unwillingness to criticize the government.

Stewart's program caused confusion in right-wing circles. The same Fox News anchors, led by Bill O'Reilly, whom he attacked daily, could not decide whether to answer him in kind (and thereby sink to the level of a "clown") or proudly ignore him. The problem was that the attacks were further supported by serious journalistic research. Mutations took place behind the scenes - under the guise of "humor" Stewart built a very effective news organization with the money of the Comedy Central channel.

THINK INSIDE

The more serious he was about the matter, the more angry they were. Райли и компания. Следующий шаг напрашивался сам по себе - прямая пародия на ОRiley. In November 2005, the half-hour program The Colbert Report premiered. Steven Kober's first monologue contained the hero's creed: “I don't trust books. They contain only soulless facts, and the facts, as you know, have liberal sympathies. No, I'm guided by my gut. Did you know that a person has more nerve endings in his gut than in his brain? No? Q.E.D. You won't read this in any book, but my gut tells me it is. Anyone can read the news. I pledge to feel the news."

In 2006, Kober was invited to speak at the White House as Master of Ceremonies for the "Correspondents' Dinner". This dinner is a long tradition, something like Valdai: prominent members of the press are entertained by the president himself. The host, as a rule, releases a couple of harmless hairpins to the government (under Clinton, let's say, his love for fatty foods, but not fat girls, would be a suitable topic), and everyone goes home satisfied. Kober seized the moment differently. Looking Bush in the face, he read out a text with surprising audacity, repeating the postulates of his very first monologue. “You and I are very much alike, sir. We are not fans of facts. For example, judging by public opinion polls, you have a 32 percent rating. But people like us know that polls are just collections of "numbers" reflecting "reality." And the reality is a well-known liberal.” Almost no one laughed. After the speech ended, Bush refused to shake hands with Kober and turned away angrily.

Kober leads the show without leaving his character for a second. “Why does Barack Obama keep pretending the country is not at war? he yells, pounding his fist on the table. “How many more people have to blow their own balls up?” In the Fox News studio at the same time, Bill O is yelling something similar. Райли, только без тени иронии. Шоу Кобера, между прочим, стоит в эфире точно тогда, когда на Fox News показывают повтор ОRiley, and his repeat the next day during the next O`Reilly Factor.

Many Republicans don't realize that Kober is joking, according to a survey last year by Ohio University pollsters. More precisely, they realize that they are watching a comedy program. But they believe that the presenter "secretly" believes in what he says. In other words, that he is a conservative pretending to be a liberal pretending to be a conservative.

LORDS OF DOOM

Such games in the spirit of postmodernists lead to very real consequences. Tina Fey tripped Sarah Palin and the Republicans in 2008. Fay is a screenwriter and creator of the TV show 30 Rock, as well as the most prominent writer of Saturday Night Live, the main forge of comedians on American TV. Politicians willingly take part in the filming of this program: the same Palin, following Obama and Hillary Clinton, paid a visit to the studio during the election race - she did not say anything witty, but the very fact of her presence was regarded as a hint of a sense of humor. Considering that SNL is still a long-lived program watched by families, even such light satire has a big impact on the audience.

In contrast to SNL, Bill Maher's Real Time with Bill Maher seems like an intellectual campaign against human stupidity. Mar, the same one who was kicked out of Politically Incorrect, continues to slap public taste on HBO's talk show. Eminent writers and thinkers (eg Salman Rushdie - a frequent visitor) come to visit Mar to discuss the latest developments. Mar sets the tone for these discussions, which are usually dominated by two topics: is man - miserable, corrupt, envious - the highest stage of evolution and, if there is a God, why the hell was evolution necessary? Bill Mahr is a militant atheist. Priests get almost more from him than government officials. And it doesn't have to be subtle humor.

Satirists treat Barack Obama with a certain degree of condescension: at first it was clear that Obama was clearing up the consequences of Bush's rule, and jokes again flew at the Republican's back. Then they began to rebuke Obama for generously distributing unfulfillable promises, but the red tape with the adoption of health care reform so tired everyone that they gave up on promises, and here new victims for popular anger turned up very opportunely - corporations like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup.

Obama doesn't give as many jokes as Bush does, and it's embarrassing to make fun of America's first black president. If it was quite normal to tease the origin and habits of the same Bush, then such witticisms about Obama are taboo. Unless black comedians like Chris Rock are licensed to make jokes about skin color.

The Republicans, understandably, are trying to attack Obama and the Democrats as best they can, but their witticisms usually come across as rather flat: Obama is portrayed as either an elitist, or a socialist, or an aboriginal with a bone in his nose. Even before Obama was elected, an attempt was made on Fox News to do a return show to Stewart and Kober - The 1/2 Hour News Hour, but the program failed miserably. The reasons are simple: it is extremely difficult to joke, focusing on conservative and family values. Still, humor presupposes, first of all, freedom of thought.

The popularity of liberal comedians breaks all records. An eagle at the San Francisco Zoo, a new species of spider, one of Virgin Atlantic's planes, a hockey team's mascot, an ice cream variety, and a wing of the International Space Station have been named after Kober. Is this army of fans capable of something more serious - such a unanimous vote for one candidate, for example? This question torments more than one politician.

The heyday of political humor coincided with the formation of the blogosphere: it turned out that satirists and Internet users are united in their desire to shame lazy and tendentious journalists - leading TV channels. The satirists have already tarnished the reputation of some TV personalities, while their own status is only getting stronger. The American magazine Newsweek recently even put Jon Stewart in second place in the list of "rulers of thoughts" of the 2000s - between Steve Jobs and the duumvirate of Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Not bad for a comedian who got his start with puppet shows in nursing homes.