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Jon Stewart’s Lasting Damage to Comedy
There’s an interesting Bloomberg story about the rise in stand-up comedy specials. Apparently both major networks and streaming services are scrambling for new content. Not only are these specials cheap to produce, making them incredibly profitable, but one agent says there’s not enough quality comedians to fulfill the rising demand.
As networks, cable companies, and streaming video platforms try to support a raft of expensive scripted shows, they’re looking to stand-up comedy for that magical, money-making creature Silicon Valley calls a unicorn. Its audience is growing, and the economics of the genre are ridiculously good.
Think of it this way. Scripted drama, with teams of writers, trailers full of makeup people, and squads of union camera crews clustered around elaborate sets, is like a massive factory cranking out a complicated product. Stand-up is the slick social app cooked up over Negronis in a co-working space. In a word, it’s cheap. And there is no telling how big its market may be.
…Judi Brown-Marmel, a partner in the agency LEG who helped sell the [Jeff] Dunham special to NBC, estimates that the volume of stand-up on broadcast networks, cable channels, and digital platforms has tripled in the past five years. And the market still isn’t saturated.
“Let’s put it this way. There’s a bigger appetite right now than there are people to pull off the performances,” she said.
I had no idea such a shortage was possible. Personally, I blame Jon Stewart.
In all the hype that built up around Stewart over the last decade, people tend to forget that he wasn’t intended to provide the New York Times with a subject for fawning profiles. Prior to “The Daily Show,” he was considered a candidate for standard late night fare like “Late Night” (NBC) and “The Late, Late Show” (CBS). When “The Larry Sanders Show” needed a plausible replacement in the fictional world, they cast Jon Stewart as himself.
It was only after a few years of “The Daily Show” that Stewart morphed into the aspiring lefty wonk.
Now Stewart has spawned a generation of comedians-but-not-comedians: Seth Meyers, John Oliver, Trevor Noah, the guy who follows Trevor Noah, and Stephen Colbert 2.0. These hosts are diving head first into the “I’m a smart commentator and still a comedian” routine, sitting at a desk and peppering policy rants with punchlines. As for guests, Obama’s cabinet members are making appearances so often that Don Rickles would be envious.
And, yes there are a few other hosts out there. Jimmy Fallon has somehow found a heretofore untapped market for celebrity lip-syncing contests (and is also a less blatant Obama sycophant). Conan O’Brien is unfortunately past his prime. And aside from politics, they all feel like hour-long advertisements for the very Hollywood culture that they should be lampooning from a safe distance.
Plus, these shows actually aren’t that successful. It’s almost a given that unless there is a bounce from a host change, they will decline year-over-year.
So I’m not surprised audiences are looking for something else. If I want to hear about net neutrality, I’ll turn on C-SPAN or a Ricochet podcast. If I want comedy, I’ll turn to Brian Regan or Jim Gaffigan.
Published in Entertainment
Fallon has lasting appeal where the others you mentioned are just filling a role. He doesn’t take himself too seriously but is professional enough to know that the show is about the guest, not the host. I never understood the appeal of Stewart but he had his day and I can’t argue with his success.
I used to really be a fan of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. I feel like somewhere along the road (around the Crossfire incident in 2004 maybe) they stopped thinking their material was funny, and started thinking it was important.
As much as I began to despise Stewart as time went on, one viewing of his replacement shows that he really did have talent. Even if he was constantly beating the same drum, he still outshone his contemporaries.
Part of Stewart’s luck was historical timing; he took the job in 1999 and basically became The Opposition during the George W. Bush years.
In Slate, Brian Unger tells a tale of being in on the beginning of the pre-Stewart Daily Show, 1996-’99. There are a few small surprises: A. Whitney Brown was one of the original writers; Stephen Colbert was on the show before Stewart was; originally the video clips of actual goofs and bloopers of local TV news were manually recorded on VHS tape. The internet was not a source of video, of course, and was much feebler than today’s at simple info hunting. Unger’s subtle, persistent point is that The Daily Show existed before Stewart, who over time would change the concept, but keep the fake news concept.
Unger resents the stock assumption in most articles that the show was nothing until Jon came along. His little anecdotes and praise of relatively anonymous crew members would be pointless if not to build a wall of evidence that it wasn’t all Jon Stewart.
But Unger has long since learned that it’s not sensible to breathe one word of outright resentment, having gotten used to the idea that only limitless praise of Stewart will be accepted. It’s the old Liberty Valence caper, and you’d better be on the bandwagon. He points out that until Bush and Iraq gave Stewart a mission and a base of rabid supporters, Jon essentially just did what his predecessor, Craig Kilborn did: parody the self-importance of television network anchors in a way that was, at first, much closer to “Not Necessarily the News” than to what it would become, something like Bill Maher. Over time it ceased to be a truth-versus-hype battle on the show, and it became simply left versus right.
Unger is correct: Growing distaste for Bush was the fuel of Stewart’s rise, as the age of Clinton gave Rush Limbaugh plenty of comedy material. It’s little remembered how relatively even-handed he once was; Bush and Cheney gave him plenty of material to work with. Then, for the past six or so years, Stewart was offered the chance of supporting, with his jokes and his audience’s laughs, the president who was the progressive dream of a lifetime, and it must be said that ol’ Stu Leibowitz went soft. He’d do an occasional critique, but effectively Jon’s job was done, other than ridiculing Obama’s opposition. He enjoyed the power that pontification brought him, but if he said something wrong or occasionally landed in a minor jam over the truth, he’d shrug and claim he was just a humble comedian making a living.
Well said, Gary (and thanks for that bit of television history). Incidentally, a lot of those Daily Show writers were on the short-lived Dana Carvey show as well — so just like Stewart, they used to be “comedy-first” entertainers.
I think the old Jon Stewart and Conan were the last late night shows I tuned into regularly because I thought the hosts would do something creative (unless 10 episodes of Sports Show with Norm MacDonald also count). I thought I was turning into a curmudgeon by not liking anything on past 11 except reruns on the Food Network. Then I saw the ratings and realized I wasn’t the only one.
I’m excited that Comedy Central chose Brian Regan for its first live special. In the 80s and 90s, comedians like Shandling, Seinfeld, Larry Miller, etc were the big names that appealed to broad audiences. Maybe the networks see some money in those types of comedians again.
Here, I disagree. Conan is doing his very best work since The Simpsons. That he’s stuck on TBS is not a reflection of the quality of the work.
Now you’ve given me reason to check him out again. :) I hope you’re right!
It’s true that I like TV history, Egg Man. Can I sell you on a 1931 Philco?
At the very least, subscribe to his YouTube channel. You get all the highlights that way, and he still gets some revenue out of it.
The segments where he torments producer Jordan Schlansky are particular favourites.
This seems to be as good a place as any to vent about Noah. He just spent a good deal of time mining the “how can you be pro-life and pro-gun” trope. It was trite and moronic, so he may find an audience. I’m already done.
The very idea that someone thinks that is contradictory shows what a shallow thinker they are.
I remember the early Stewart Daily Show well. I miss Colbert’s “The Week in God” segment; Mo Rocca’s earnest, deadpan, and hilarious interviews of people too un-self-aware to know they were funny; Rachel Harris’ somehow-overly-sexy-but-very-put-together schtick; Steve Carrell just being generally hapless… good times.
Two years later, tops, it was just a bitterly self-satisfied, utterly predictable left-wing circle jerk.
Spirit – I agree; Jimmy Fallon is very entertaining and talented and does not take himself seriously.
I mostly agree with the other comments regarding the other talk show hosts, except I think Conan is a mixed bag. His leftist bias is strong during his monologue when he does political humor, and sometimes I turn the program off at that point. But if I get beyond that, then I agree that Conan is doing some of his best stuff lately.
You saw the same effect with Letterman in his later years. So many of the “applause” lines in his monologue weren’t jokes. They were just snarky statements made to reinforce the audience’s preconceptions. They audience didn’t laugh so much as applaud to show their approval. It became very smug and unctuous. Comedy in general has suffered in recent years on TV. Too many shows try to make a point instead of just being funny.
The biggest recent hit to late night was the retirement of Craig Ferguson.
I sure do miss that dang robot…
Stewart taught me that the left prefers to mock the right rather than seriously consider their ideas.
Alinsky Rule #5 = “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also, it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.”
I could not agree more….
I’m going to see Brian Regan on Friday night. If he’s coming to your town, buy tickets. He’s the best.
I was out of the country during the rise of Stewart. Missed out until 2006. By then, I could not figure out why the guy was so worshipped. He could be funny, but how can people enslave themselves to the same genre of sarcasm and “I get it, therefore I am smart” club, night after night after night. My older children who were in their late teens thought he was cool and then about 2008, it was more like “Oh, him. Mmmm.” He was not that interesting to them. That was my first clue. Guess he had to wait around to get Obama re-elected and then defend his worse second term.
Also, SNL lost interest to my older children as well. And my younger children never got interested in SNL that much or Stewart. He was for older people. SNL was something they would watch as filler. Must be awful to be out of fashion with the 18 year olds.
Where does Stewart go from here? His movie sabbatical was a bust. He is no Jerry Seinfeld. And that cynical, know it all stuff is just old now – it does not quite appeal to the latest crop of older teenagers.
As you can tell, listening to my teenagers and my students (college) are my primary reference point for TV.
For those of us who have to rise early, late night is not that accessible. So Fallon, Colbert, etc are often missed. Great to hear your observations. Conan is funny. I cannot imagine Colbert will last. But, I have to ask my teens and students to know….
Oh one last tip, a student told me to watch Silicon Valley on Amazon. Its a situation comedy that captures a group of nerds trying to make a big break through in high tech. I have some acquaintance with this and the comedy (two seasons now), was pretty funny. Different. Ironic. Funny. Some of the tech celebrities are in the series. Anyway, it is what the hip youngsters think is cool.
I liked Stewart at the very beginning, because what I thought he was about was skewering those in power. It happened to be George Bush for a while, and that was who should get skewered.
But then, in the election of 2004 I sat down with my sons to watch his show, having just discussed with them whether Stewart was being fair to the candidates by joking at the expense of both equally. There were jokes about both Bush and Kerry, but the Bush jokes took the form of “Bush is so stupid that he said or did…..” The Kerry jokes took the form of “Kerry is so smart that it’s frightening.” The jokes were actually moderately funny, but the bias was so strong and obvious that I was shocked. I stopped watching the show.
In later years I would occasionally tune in and I became nauseated by Stewart’s shtick of relating something that a Republican had said and then mugging for the camera. If you go back and research his show I’ll bet that 90% of his “comedy” took that form.
Humor can be separated into two categories: destructive and constructive. In the destructive type, you start with an outside situation (a news item, a video etc.) and you break it apart to find the humor. In the constructive type, you start with a blank sheet of paper and you create something funny.
We can argue on which comedian delivers which. Stewart’s humor was destructive, as in taking things apart, exposing inconsistencies, mocking dearly-held notions, making people look stupid etc. But he had very little to offer on the constructive side that was funny. Whenever he was constructive, he was serious all of a sudden.
I would categorize the following this way
Destructive: Stewart, Colbert (though less than Stewart), Saturday Night Live
Constructive: Seinfeld, Carson, Conan, Leno, the Onion
Letterman, George Carlin and Louis CK could be on either side.
I have a soft spot for Ferguson for having my mother-in-law on.
Yes, really:
Wow, holidays must be fun for you. She’s funny.
Nice! I remember that episode. Ferguson had a great run until he got bored with it.
Stewart’s main problem was that he wanted to be a pundit but didn’t want to admit he was a pundit. He was always conveniently “just a comedian” whenever he was caught committing an act of bias so bad even most other progressive journalists would raise an eyebrow. But we’re expected to let him get away with things like deceptively editing interviews because it’s “comedy.”
Like Michael Moore.
Don’t overlook the impact of Political Correctness here. It is tough to do a stand-up comedy routine without offending various groups of people. I think many comedians have to throw away a lot of material because of the PC police.
The ones who won’t throw it away are probably the funniest ones.
Stewart spent so much time mugging I’m beginning to think it was written into his script.