Last week, Publishers Weekly threw more than a few politically minded bibliophiles for a loop by naming not our 42nd president’s protracted, excruciatingly detailed autobiography, My Life, book of the year (perhaps they’re reserving for it the honor of “Book of the Decade”?) but rather The Daily Show with Jon Stewart’s first literary offering, America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy in Action.
So, out of the approximately 175,000 books published this year, this was the work chosen by the self-described “leading publication” in the industry as the most deserving of the public’s consideration and currency. What, one wonders, were the criteria?
If political analysis was the magazine’s primary qualification, why not The 9/11 Commission Report? It sold pretty well too, and people over the age of 35 have actually heard of it. If subversive, intellectual wit was a consideration, why didn’t Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim receive the magazine’s nod? (No one does subversive, intellectual wit like David Sedaris.) Or was frequent use of the “F-word” perhaps the deciding factor? If that was the case, what about Tom Wolfe’s newest, I Am Charlotte Simmons? Even if Wolfe had only released the first chapter, it should have been a shoe-in.
If, however, the foremost requirement for winning the title of “Year’s Best Book” was sporadically amusing but more often merely caustic observations on the nature of American government, I guess we can only assume that the publishers of The Onion didn’t get a book out this year, so the top honor had to go, by process of elimination, to the much-discussed but less-watched band of merry mockers at Comedy Central.
The running gag in Stewart & Co.’s effort is that it fronts as a textbook–a crude, sardonic, cynical textbook. To be fair, some of the lessons are genuinely hilarious–usually when they have no partisan points to score. For example, a chapter on the Founding Fathers “documents” a proposed height requirement for becoming president that was later dropped: “The debate over this proposal consisted mostly of Thomas Jefferson holding a stick over James Madison’s head and shouting, ‘You must be this tall to be president!’”
The drier aspects of the fake news show’s humor occasionally hit the mark as well. A segment on the court system describes small-claims court as the place “where the pathetic sue the desperate over the mundane.” But these laughs are hardly what earned America (The Book) PW’s highest distinction. No, that honor was granted on the basis of the book’s “serious critique of the two-party system” and its reception as a “mock textbook with a serious political core.”
That’s an awful lot of serious for a comedy book. Perhaps that’s because the book is serious about one thing: making it clear what a knuckle-dragging Philistine you are if you reflect on America the Beautiful with any sort of warm sentiment.
Conservatives tend to have a knee-jerk suspicion that the mouthpieces of liberalism despise the founding principles of this nation; America (The Book) doesn’t help the Left’s case. No aspect of our patriotic pride is too sacred to be sacrificed on the altar of irony. Shredding our Puritan beginnings while getting in a little same-sex-marriage propaganda on the side, the authors write, “Almost four hundred years after the foundation of the [Plymouth Colony], the state of Massachusetts became the first to guarantee the constitutionality of gay marriage. This act was construed as a bold move forward in the cause of equality, but in reality was just a hilarious ‘F*** you’ to the Pilgrims.”
In some sections The Daily Show writers don’t even bother trying to couch the liberal party-line in comedy; rather they state it outright in the voice of a historical figure. Witness Thomas Jefferson commenting in the foreword, “You moderns have a tendency to worship at the altar of the Fathers…but it’s bothersome when you blame your inflexibility and extremism on us…our purpose was to create a living document.” Not really funny, but it gets its propaganda across.
That’s not say America doesn’t take a handful of well-aimed shots at the Left, as in the explanation that judicial litmus tests are called “litmus tests” because “abortion tests” sounds creepy. But the majority of the caricatures are at the Right’s expense.
Why? Because, frankly, we’re easy targets. It’s not hard to inflate common-sense ideology into hyperbolic hilarity. But applying this same type of exaggerated humor to the Left proves a bit more difficult.
As Rush Limbaugh frequently points out, it is difficult to satirize a political group that consistently lives up to, and frequently surpasses, any exaggeration of their behavior. Example: A conservative host discussing the utter disingenuousness of literary awards might say, “Next thing you know, the New York Times will be nominating some political comedy book for the Pulitzer in history…” Oops, too late, already happened. See how hard it is to parody the self-parodying?
Another reason conservatives make better targets is that we don’t put up much of a rhetorical fight. If a conservative writing team ever penned a joke about a Democratic black leader like the one made by Stewart’s team about Clarence Thomas (a mocking classroom activity in the book instructs children, “Using felt and yarn, make a hand puppet of Clarence Thomas. Ta-da! You’re Antonin Scalia!”), there would be p.r. hell to pay. Republicans, however, are not a whiny bunch by disposition. They can usually be counted on to take a joke, even if it is in incredibly bad taste.
Still the final joke may be on Stewart and crew. As Publisher’s Weekly rightly points out, all these critical accolades may finally force Stewart to step back from his protesting-too-much posturing that he’s merely trying to make America laugh, not influence our political viewpoints. After all, there’s a fine line between shaming political pundits and appearing on enough political debate shows that you become a pundit yourself. At some point, no matter how loudly they cry “Comedy,” The Daily Show and its offshoots will have become a part of the system they lampoon. To come up with material, they’ll have no choice but to begin subtly indicting themselves. Hmmm, fake cable news show resorts to self-cannibalization to win the ratings game? That’s kinda funny.
–Megan Basham is a freelance writer in Phoenix, Arizona, and a current Phillips Foundation fellow.