In A World Where the Daily Show is Only Excellent

Warning: I get pretty full of shit on this one

For the last eight years, the Daily Show has been my religion. As the cable news networks, the administration, and professional pundits did their best to cast truth as the close relative of bias, Jon Stewart was there nightly to remind his viewers that reality is still objective.  No matter how fast the political world spun around him, Jon Stewart always managed to pull the break, and keep us laughing while we fell dizzy, till the world stilled again. Four nights a week, it has been a place for Americans living under the Bush administration to go and wash the crap off ourselves.

It is not surprising that under this climate the Daily Show has been so popular. Laughter has long been the natural ally of truth. All but the most dense people can tell a real laugh from a forced one, and for this reason good jokes are either true or reflect truth. This is why the Daily Show has been so successful and the main reason that Fox’s attempt at an imitation failed so completely. But for the last eight years, laughter has also been an act of defiance. It has been a subversive cry that we are not happy with the way the administration has distorted reality, nor with the way the press has sat silently by as facts are subsumed by ideology. The Daily Show was the best, most natural, source of this defiant laughter. But I speak in the past tense.

Our democratic system has completed its function. We have elected a new leadership. A leadership, which seems to be if not everything everyone could hope, then at least less corrupt than the last. Less adept at distortion. Less awful. In short, business seems to be going back to usual. The still present Bush administration is finally receding into the past.

Perhaps under the Obama administration the Daily Show will not be as great a beacon of defiant laughter as it once was. Perhaps without the comedic fodder of one of the worst administrations in American history, the jokes will lose most of their ardor. But I think not. I think that kernel of excellence will remain. I doubt Jon Stewart will lower his standards or lose his eye for talent. The media is still driven by sensationalism, Barack Obama is still a politician, and George Bush has left us with a world full of things to mock for at least another generation. I don’t worry too long at the fate of my favorite television program.

Last night I watched the Daily Show. John Oliver did a bit with some puppies and a few well placed puns. I laughed, and simultaneously felt good about the world. Which is something I have not done in quite some time, but hope to do much more in the future.