Mark Twain once said, “The human race has only one effective weapon, and that is laughter.”
With the modern truncated American attention span, Twain’s maxim rings clearest in the realm of presidential politics. Politicians can no longer just be gladiators of rhetoric. Now he that aspires to the office of president must be his own court jester, wooing the American public with both intellectual wit and earthy jocularity, often at the same time, while still promoting his political agenda.
Writing a rather critical profile on Michael Moore in a recent issue of “The New Yorker,” Larissa MacFarquhar stresses the importance of humor in the upcoming presidential election. She blames the repeated Democratic failures of the 1980s on a lack of leftist political humor in that decade.
MacFarquhar describes a type of cyclical Hegelian dialectic where the party in power presents an image of national savior while the other assumes the common man’s warrior role. Generally, a party can stay in power if it can hold on to the perception that it is fighting for the common man while still presenting a serious “God Bless America” face to the party.
MacFarquhar writes, “…a political creed needs both the earthliness of comedy and the air of ideology in order to survive.”
Consider Huey Long. Though “Share the Wealth” was never implemented, Long’s other political successes in Louisiana never would have blossomed without his ideological attacks on the wealthy or without such comical coup d’etats as the stealing from the barbecue and highpopalorum/lowpopahirum antics.
If anyone has been able to achieve the correct concoction of rhetoric and humor for political purposes, it is Huey Long. As one biographer put it, Huey Long was the messiah of the masses. Voters loved him because they could relate to him and his rhetoric convinced them of the sincerity of his common man ideologies. Few other men have come close to Long’s ability to interlace humor into rhetoric aptly.
Over the years, the public has become increasingly less interested in America’s most intimate bed partners — the news media and government. Meanwhile, the entertainment media has become more important in informing Americans what is going on in their world and their government.
A recent Pew poll found that 20 percent of 18 to 30 year olds get their news from comedy TV, which is probably a conservative figure.
Regardless, Americans more than ever before don’t like or trust the news media. Therefore, to promote democracy and perhaps save the institution (an informed public is essential for democracy to work), the entertainment media must somehow transform itself into the watchdog model’s new fierce mastiff.
The potential political power of comedians and humorists is the strongest. MacFuquhar cites Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin who pointed out the importance of laughter in evoking change. The problem is, obviously, instead of barking out and attacking the democratic system’s scum like a Doberman, they happily yap like Yorkies when a politician wears two different shoes or mispronounces a word (or a dictionary in the case of Bush).
MacFuquhar turns to Molly Ivins, Jon Stewart, David Cross, Janeane Garofalo and Michael Moore to fill the humor abyss of the idiosyncratic, p.c. obsessed, tofu eating, Volvo driving Democratic Party of the 1980s.
Moore’s brand of entertainment journalism fills the watchdog entertainment media model almost perfectly.
A more ethical and trained version could fill the chasm of information the news media once filled.
His brand of entertainment journalism, if talented young journalists/comedians (sense of humor is a huge sign of intelligence) attracted to the field because of the sheer fun of comedy and the middle class income of journalism perfect the genre, America could replace its faltering watchdog model, plucking a Doberman pup off the teat of America’s bitching bitch party press of the country’s founding, the press that Jefferson would rather have had than government itself.
American democracy would be a little more secure, and Americans would be a little freer if entertainment media could hold the country’s attention span long enough to inform about real issues.