A good year for Jon
Posted : October 23, 2004 at 10:10 am [America/Los_Angeles]
Jon Stewart, fake journalist and proud of it, keeps insisting he’s just a comedian.
Night after night, “The Daily Show” host lampoons President Bush as a tongue-tied bumbler, Donald Rumsfeld as a mad ranter who resembles “Pete the crazy guy outside my apartment,” the war in Iraq as a giant “Mess O’ Potamia” and the reporters who cover the presidential race as self-important clods.
Such sharp-edged skewering has turned the Comedy Central funnyman into a cultural phenomenon who, despite his protestations, seems to be having some undefined, irony-drenched influence on how the campaign is perceived. He’s been on the cover of Newsweek and now graces the cover of Rolling Stone. His “America (The Book)” is the nation’s top seller. He has analyzed the media as Ted Koppel’s guest, dissected the party conventions as Tom Brokaw’s expert and ripped into his hosts on “Crossfire” for presiding over “theater” and “partisan hackery.”
….But with a program that more than doubles the audience of “Hardball” with 1.2 million viewers — many of them in the hard-to-reach younger generation — Stewart’s comedic spitballs are leaving their mark. Half of 18- to 29-year-olds say they regularly or sometimes learn things from late-night comedy shows, a Pew Research Center survey found..
…“When I listen to Jon, he really is profoundly concerned and angry about real issues,” Koppel says. “He is to television news what a really great editorial cartoonist is to a newspaper.” But, Koppel says, “a satirist gets to poke and prod and make fun of other people, and when you say, ‘What about you, dummy?,’ he says, ‘I’m just a satirist.’ “
…Stewart’s humor is clearly fueled by anger. He’s the guy at home “yelling at the TV,” he says. Karlin say staffers come to morning meetings ticked off about various outrages and spend the day honing their insults into lighter material.
Here’s the best part of the article:
…He will be profiled tomorrow (10/24/2004) on “60 Minutes.”
Coolio.
- Anand
Category: United (or not) State of American Politics 2004